I was brought into my current business as head of HR two years ago. I am HR director in all but name and am the most senior HR professional in the business. Senior leaders say I’m doing a great job, but when I ask to be made HR director I’m told there is ‘no need’ for such a role. Should I feel aggrieved?
No, you shouldn’t feel aggrieved. If you’re doing what the organisation needs you to do, it shouldn’t matter what you’re called. We get a little obsessed with job titles nowadays, and a particular grey area has developed around the HR director/head of HR relationship. It’s what you do that matters most. I’m helping recruit an HR director at the moment and am interviewing a number of heads of HR. If your CV is well-written, explains what you’ve done and what you stand for, recruiters should look beyond the job title.
At the same time, HR director has become an overused title. Are you sure you really are fulfilling that role in ‘all but name’ right now? When an HR director has a conversation with the CEO, it’s about strategy and business outcomes.
The emphasis is on the bigger picture, not the specific HR department. An HR director should be looking outside of HR to solve challenges and develop the organisation using HR approaches – not just deliver HR services and programmes. We don’t appoint a finance director, for example, who’s just an accomplished accountant. They need to contribute.
Ask the CEO what their understanding of the HR director role is. Talk about business need, not job title: what gap do they see at board level that could be filled by a new face? Can you see where you would make a real business impact?
People underestimate how tough it is to be an HR director. If you have ambition, I applaud you for exercising it. But if status is what’s really driving this, there may be an easier way: I’ve known people who’ve asked for their business card to be ‘upgraded’ without changing their internal job title. It might not satisfy all your needs, but it could be a useful compromise.
Employees feel they’re working for free
We operate in the waste management industry and our employees are paid an annual salary. They are then asked to do 26 ‘cover days’, which cover their colleagues when they are on annual leave. They get paid for these days within their annual salary, however they feel they’re working for free as they have already been paid in advance. Is this normal, and is there another way?
This arrangement is extremely normal, both for your industry and for any business that needs a high degree of flexibility in its workforce. What’s unusual is that your employees feel they’re working for free. Somewhere down the line things haven’t been communicated to them clearly enough.
Is it obvious in contracts how much of annual salary is accounted for by cover days and how much by regular hours? If not, you should be more explicit, and should explain it in recruitment and induction processes. The disquiet should ease, but if you’re worried by what you’re hearing in the meantime, you could support your managers to undertake a more immediate communication.
Your other option is to remove the 26 days from contracts and pay it as mandatory overtime, so long as you stay within the Working Time Directive and the relevant holiday pay regulations. But that would involve a major consultation exercise and may well cause more disquiet in the long run.
Or you could rethink the whole nature of your workforce planning. Perhaps you don’t need the same sort of flexibility you once did and could normalise most employees’ hours, supplementing them with casual workers at peak periods? It’s an opportunity to change, perhaps, but the solution may be more straightforward than that.