Explaining to my grandma what HR do

Me: So, grandma...

Grandma: I got it, you hire people and pay people, isn't it?

Me: no...I mean it could be true...but...

Grandma: easy cake then, son.

Me: It gets more complicated, let me try to make a better picture...

...Imagine a group of people that are working together. They have different but also common motivations to be working together. We commonly call that a company or an organization, right? right.

Ok, now imagine that between those humans there are some explicit rules and some other tacit rules.

Those explicit rules are basically processes made to formally organize people to act, behave or perform in a certain way in these companies. And those tacit rules, most of the times invisible, are named "organizational culture", which basically is how they behave, think and believe and makes them different from other companies. Just like countries, tribes, etc.

So that's my job grandma, work over the processes and organizational culture of these organizations. Most of the time I'm not in charge of changing rules, I'm constantly working on understanding the rules, fixing some wording over those rules and most of the time updating those rules, so these humans can keep organizing and reorganizing to grow their business. The business would be the reason why they keep existing, how the earn money basically.

Working over processes is easier sometimes, because great humans have built different methodologies and knowledge about how to create, for example, a compensation model, which basically how much I pay people and what other things I give people that are not money. So, on processes you have multiple existing solutions to proceed and succeed.

But my job gets harder when we realize that processes and organizational culture are constantly dancing. In fact they do, if one of them moves a step back, the other one moves to the front. As a quick example, if we agree to every time we are going to celebrate a birthday in the family we need to request my parents through a letter made in english with the signing of each person that is going to attend to the birthday, even though we all live here. Birthdays turns boring to be planned and we would simply...avoid celebrating the birthday or we end doing that in a different place.

So, what happens is that we formalize a process to be accurate on the celebration, but people are going to accept or reject bureaucracy. Which could end with a member of the family happy, if he/she likes this kind of structure, that could be my parents because they can control the expenses, but whoever is not happy, could leave the instance.

What I'm trying to explain to you Grandma...my job is to be in that intersection but in different topics. Attracting people to this organized group, motivating people that are currently inside it, and also generating through different incentives and actions that the group evolves and we accomplish growth as I explained before.

So, my job will vary how explicit rules and tacit rules are weighted by the founder/management team, and how flexible we want to remain to treat people. Nevertheless, using high amount of formal processes or let the people share high amount of tacit rules is not good or bad. It all depends on how much the management team, a.k.a the leaders, believes in what is the power of each kind of rule, and also and mostly on what you're producing as a company.

Grandma: So, you pay people and hire people and try to hold them up by using your silly rules.

Me: uh...let's say that's a good resume.

All my articles are made in one shot. Sorry if you find any wording mistake.

That's all folks

Joaco.