A hundred years or more after its inception, it’s fair to say that HR has finally reached a crossroads.
And thanks to the uncertain development of the profession to date, it’s now unsure of which way to turn.
In many companies, the HR function has evolved over recent years to offer more of a business-support function. In such cases, businesses have moved relatively smoothly through the evolutionary stages of human resource management and their HR function is, typically, represented at board level.
In this instance, HR fulfils a strategic partnering role, focusing, for example, on activities such as job structuring or cost reduction initiatives.
But other organisations have retained an HR model that is firmly rooted in the past. These businesses continue to take a mechanical approach to the traditional issues of hiring, firing and managing payroll in an old-fashioned administration-focused way.
In so doing, however, they not only ignore changes in how workforces are deployed whether at home, on the road or even abroad, they also spectacularly fail to meet employee expectations around engagement or even to acknowledge the value to the company of its own people.
Delegating tactical activities
In today’s fast-moving business environment, it has quite simply become impractical and far too costly for HR to undertake its traditional role of tactical human resource management, while simultaneously dealing with new strategic concerns.
If the current economic downturn is added to the mix – a situation that has seen HR become associated more with redundancies, pay freezes and the negative aspects of people management – it’s no surprise that the function is badly in need of solutions to help it cope with the disparate demands placed upon it.
So what’s the answer?
In those companies where HR has been recognised as acting as a senior partner to the business, many day-to-day tasks will have been devolved to line management. It is line managers, so the thinking goes, who have direct knowledge of, and daily interaction with, their staff. So who better to take charge of recruitment, selection and performance management?
As a result, they are increasingly required to take up administrative HR tasks, freeing up time and space for HR professionals to start undertaking a more specialist role.
Beleaguered
But this realignment of HR responsibilities is creating problems of its own – not least because line managers often simply lack the time to deal adequately with activities such as complicated performance appraisals.
Promoted to management level because of their job-specific expertise, they may not necessarily have all of the people-management skills and experience they need either. It’s a formula that increasingly sees HR being pulled back into dealing with just those disciplinary and grievance issues that it thought it had managed to delegate.
Not surprisingly, the situation can lead to the relationship between line management and HR becoming strained. Ill-equipped to deal with the administrative weight of the day-to-day HR tasks assigned to them, line managers understandably feel beleaguered.
HR, meanwhile, is struggling to evolve in order to take on the more strategic role demanded of it by the business or to meet the changing demands of today’s workforce.
But the case for a thorough re-evaluation of HR’s role was highlighted by the findings of a recent YouGov survey, which was commissioned by Croner.
Training and knowledge transfer
The study found that 63% of senior HR managers working in companies with 100 or more employees had devolved day-to-day HR tasks such as managing disciplinary and grievance procedures to line managers. But three out of five were no more than ‘fairly confident’ that these managers were capable of dealing with such issues. About half were also worried about maintaining control of such tasks once they had been handed over.
This uncertainty appears to be driven by a recognition that HR has to deliver more value to the business, with 48% of respondents feeling themselves subject to increasing pressure in this regard. Other imperatives include cutting overheads without reducing quality of service and freeing up capacity to make this possible by delegating routine and time-consuming employment relations issues to line managers.
The findings imply that there is a clear choice – organisations must either equip line managers with the skills and know-how they need by providing them with training and knowledge transfer opportunities or risk having staff feeling isolated, lacking in direction and becoming demotivated. Another danger is that managers themselves may both wilt under the burden of expectations placed upon them and their inability to meet them.
This means that helping line management to develop the skills and confidence they need to positive engage their teams is crucial – as is providing administratively-focused HR teams with sufficient resources to give them the time and space to broaden their horizons.
Taking advantage of the universal availability of the web and users’ increasing familiarity with undertaking online activities such as banking and shopping can help here.
Online case management
For some time, self-service software has been available to enable employees to perform an increasing variety of HR-related tasks such as booking annual leave or making changes to their personnel files directly from their desktops.
Such systems have encouraged HR professionals to treat employees as customers by offering them levels of convenience traditionally associated with more consumer-oriented experiences. They have also satisfied staff expectations around the need for more immediate interaction with their employer – while at the same time freeing up valuable time for themselves to undertake more strategic activities.
But the next step along the path is online HR case management systems. These offerings can support line managers in assuming necessary employment relations responsibilities while continuing to do the day job by enabling both them and HR professionals to track employment-related issues from start to finish and providing a complete audit trail.
Case management records include at-a-glance records of advice given, recommended next steps and all associated documents. Such systems also include easy-to-use reporting tools.
This means that, not only can they help to address some of the challenges faced by line managers, they can also free up HR teams to focus on tackling today’s complex staff relations issues more effectively for the benefit of all concerned.
Richard Smith is head of product development at Wolters Kluwer’s talent management consultancy, Croner.
