A Daily Telegraph article damning HR has caused an online firestorm. Don’t let it get you down, advises Robert Jeffery
Pack your things in a box and shuffle off for the exit interview (which you’ll have to conduct yourself, of course). HR has “officially” been killed off by the pay furore at the BBC, according to a widely circulated Daily Telegraph article. Which means, whether you’ve heard of Beeb HR boss Lucy Adams or not, that your role is now redundant. As the newspaper helpfully points out, at least those interviewing skills will come in handy for a career change.
Social media has been predictably ablaze with responses – some contemplative, many vitriolic but few supportive. I’m not a fan of online derision of journalistic craft: in few other careers do you invite members of the public to nitpick over your failings in highly sarcastic terms as you try to get on with a job that carries more than the average stress load. But as the article makes blithe assumptions about how the function works, it’s understandable that HR professionals (and HR journalists) will return the favour.
There is more than a whiff of deadline-chasing in a feature that meanders from deriding HR (it’s “hated by everybody”) and barbing at the BBC, to name-checking the supposed “compensation culture” (an old Telegraph favourite, misused here as a proxy for remuneration) and linking HR to female participation in the workforce – as though the whole of womanhood is let down when the function fails.
All this without the inclusion of a single fact. So here are a few that might have been helpful: the links between employee engagement and ROI demonstrated by Ernst & Young, Nita Clarke and others; the correlation between HR participation on boards and company share price; or the big data work being carried our by HR departments (and detailed in this month’s People Management) that has a very real effect on operational efficiency.
The premise is that HR is something that can be uninvented, like Spangles bars or Hillman Imps. In fact, it’s embedded in the corporate make-up of pretty much every company you care to name – including the Telegraph Group, which has invested heavily in a new range of employee benefits, and whose HR director has spoken in the trade press of the importance of engagement to the business. Some tricky water cooler moments lie ahead at Telegraph HQ…
If there’s a scintilla of truth in the whole thing it’s that HR has engaged in too much “navel-gazing”. And the worst outcome of this fuss would be to provoke another round. We cannot know from the publicly available facts where responsibility for the murky though over-analysed events at the BBC truly lay, but it is unlikely to have been solely in Adams’ lap, even if it were fair to use an individual as a proxy for an entire profession. It’s not HR’s job alone to be the moral handbrake when organisational culture is off-kilter, just as nobody has suggested abolishing the role of finance director because HMV ran out of cash. So why not give the Telegraph the one response it doesn’t crave, by carrying on the good work and considering a subscription to the Times instead?