Is Human Resources experiencing an identity crisis? As corporate America explores its values, HR departments are increasingly called upon to deploy legal and business strategy, while also maintaining a position as employee advocates. Can they do both? Harvard's Nancy Koehn joined Jim Braude and Margery Eagan to talk about why they should.
There is a distinctive "Dilbert-like aura that surrounds HR departments," Nancy Koehn says. She goes on to unpack the primary challenges facing HR teams. Like most things, it has to do with perception.
"HR is a kind of paper-pushing parasite on the corporate body politic," she says. Many employees question HR's functional and financial efficiency. There is also a widely held belief that Human Resources exists to carry out the worst values of capitalism. The concept behind HR implied that "people are like machines and could be run very efficiently like machines," Koehn says. There is a perception that HR is is tasked with clocking, monitoring, and exploiting labor, rather than empowering and engaging it.
But Human Resources departments also lie at the intersection of gender and workplace politics. "Overwhelmingly, these departments are staffed by and run by women," Koehn says. The majority of Human resources personnel are women, and the majority of their labor is considered "softer" and more right-brained. Our perception of HR, Koehn notes, cannot be divorced from a workplace culture of externalized and internalized misogyny.
HR has a PR problem. The media, the the intelligentsia, even the everyday "the chattering classes," as Koehn calls them, always "default to negative thoughts about human resources." People assume "they have no real purpose. They're not strategy people, their not doing left side more male activities. But that framing couldn't be more wrong. "To do good in the world, get a better HR department," Koehn says.
In fact, "all of the things that people-departments do, including the amorphous cultural influence, has a direct connection to how we experience our jobs," Koehn notes. Corporate culture has overwhelming embraced the concept that employees are their strongest assets. Companies like Facebook and Whole Foods have structured their business strategy around fostering and empowering employees. Human resources is, can, and should be a big part of that, according to Koehn.
"You train animals, but you develop people," she says. Rather than framing trainings as "legal prophylactics," companies can push to train employees in areas to expand areas of expertise, and expose workers to new ways of thinking. "The primary source of competitive advantage is the labor force," Koehn explains. "Successful businesses start with the idea that the bottom-line flows from the concept that the people are the core asset to the company. And if that is the case, than human resources should be the power department. "
So what is holding us back? It's a combination of bad policy and bad PR, Koehn says. And she intends to do something about that.
>>To hear our full conversation with Nancy Koehn, click the audio link above.
