The Answer Is 42 - What Was the Question?
The current HR role in business has been elevated since the days when Douglas Adams suggested those employed in such jobs lacked value and, in his Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy, gathered them together and shipped them to an isolated planet. The Personnel Officer was often extracted from the typing pool, promoted on the basis that she was the longest employed, blue-rinse member. It was her role to make sure all the employees were doing their jobs, receiving their entitlements and somehow, with no more qualification than her experience as a mother, to resolve office disputes.
As times changed, employees gained improved conditions as the unions and feminists fought for such innovations as maternity and parental leave, unfair dismissal laws and employer paid superannuation.
“We’ll all be financially ruined!” Cried the business owners and CEOs. But they weren’t. In fact, it wasn’t long before they came to realise that money could actually be saved by holding onto an employee on whom the business had already invested thousands in training dollars and who, if the employee resigned to find a happier situation or to have a family, would take away valuable corporate knowledge.
Suddenly, the management of HR became more important as businesses competed to recruit and retain the best people. The employer introduced health and safety, equity and family friendly policies to ensure that the staff was happy and content. They reacted to requests without needing a stopwork meeting followed by a union delegate knocking on the door with a list of demands. The physically challenged were catered for and wheelchair ramps built; prayer mats were bought and withdrawal rooms set aside so that advocates of diverse religions could meet their commitments and employee incentives and rewards were created. But “Don’t Panic”, the employer is doing all this because these innovations are the best way to keep the best people.
By this stage, the blue-haired lady has torn out most her hair in the wake of this rapidly changing world and retired to make way for university qualified professional HR personnel. As time progressed, the HR service role increased in complexity as academics conducted studies and devised HR models. Soon there were specialists to cope with the raft of HR functions: recruitment, training, development and retention so that, today, the role of HR service providers is tied to complex and changing theory and legislation requiring extensive and specialist knowledge.
However, many HR professionals lack the skill sets required; therefore, the role is being appropriately outsourced to HR consultant companies that employ a team of specialists that engage in developing strategies through HR business partnering. Where one person once fit the HR role, it now takes a team of experts to provide hr services in a business world that has conceptually changed and increased in complexity. And so we bid a final farewell to the lone Personnel Officer, who is so last century, wherever she may be. “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”
