HR Business Partner or Partner in Crime?
????♀? Szilvia Olah
Fractional Talent Management Senior Executive | Employee Experience Design | Organisational Psychologist | Two Published Books
Just mention the term "HR Business Partner" coined by Dave Ulrich to my friend - an HR Director - and she loses it. She immediately launches into a rant along the lines of "Reinventing HR as an HR Business Partner? What the hell was HR doing before if not partnering with the business?" She is super funny!
She is right, though, and this raises another question. Why does only HR have the privilege of having the Business Partner title? Aren't the rest of the divisions partner with the business? Of course, they are, but only HR has a small man syndrome that causes the desperation of justifying its existence that other departments don't have to.
For example, one would never question the importance or relevance of Housekeeping, Front Office, or Engineering in the hotel industry. Why? Because their absence, even for a short period, would result in the collapse of daily operations or end in guests' complaints.
But that is ok. The roles are very different, but it doesn't mean that HR has to assign particular importance to itself with the "Business Partner" title, or it is negligible. On the contrary, HR's importance becomes strikingly clear when things go wrong. People within the organisation are treated poorly or unfairly when talent is misplaced and efficiencies in people management are lacking. To circumvent that, HR must constantly work together with other business units, which is the definition of an HR Business Partner. So no, there shouldn't be a "let's reinvent HR" narrative. This has been pretty much the job for decades!
However, there are two types of HR partners;
1,?HR Business Partner:?Through its actions and influence, HR maximise talent potential to a high degree and ensures that people management practices are conducive to high performance, morale, motivation, and well-being and are compliant with legal requirements.
2,?Partner in Crime: Ignores all that and turns a blind eye to or participates in illegal, unethical, morally ill or bullying-like practices.
HR continuously moves between being an HR Business Partner or a Partner in Crime.
Why do I say that? Because of all the HR stories hitting the headlines and based on my experience, it is clear that sometimes we all (not just HR), turn a blind eye to lack of integrity, managerial misconduct, and other corporate mischiefs, making us an accomplice. These crimes range from morally wrong to straight-up illegal, and we all participate by doing it or being bystanders watching them happen. Let's look at a few.
Long working hours, overtime, accumulated day-offs, and holidays are often problems in countries where the power between employees and employers is off balance. I have spoken to employees who haven't had a day off for 18 days, have not taken annual leave for two years, or continuously work 12-15 hours a day with one day off per week. Once, I learned that Housekeepers were scheduled to clean 45 rooms daily (economy hotel). I took that up straight with the GM and reported it to the regional HR VP. How could one think it is physically possible or the right thing to do????
Funnily enough, the GM and HR were unaware of this practice, to which I only have one question: HR, where are you when your people are mistreated? Were they genuinely unaware or an accomplice? Who knows.
There are also cases when we witness HR's conscious participation in crime by holding employee passports, delaying salaries, not budgeting for compliance training, not addressing leaders who are poorly managing teams, causing dissatisfaction & high turnover rate, engaging in sexual relationships with their staff, or signing unjustifiable salary increases for the leader while rejecting budget for employee development of 350 people that is a fraction of that salary increase.
During redundancies, when employees are unfairly & unethically selected based on their pay grade rather than their performance. This is a highly short-sighted, self-serving approach that doesn't consider the long-term impact on the business, proving that those people have their interests at heart and not the company's. That is a crime against the brand and the visionary founders of the place!
The ways companies lay off people are also worth paying attention to. 2020 - 2023 gave us an abundance of examples. Bird company fired 406 employees using a recorded message delivered via Zoom. Employees couldn't ask questions (recorded message), and those who were late for the Zoom meeting or couldn't attend learned about their loss of living from their colleagues. HR was not present. Nobody was, only those being let go. Is there a more cowardly and degrading way of doing it? I am sure corporations are creative enough to come up with something; we need to sit tight and wait for the news.
The list goes on. It is not about bad HR or good HR. It is about what kind of activities we are willing to partner in. As I said earlier, we all close a blind eye to things for many reasons. Most of the time, we choose not to say anything because we self-protect. We fear the consequences of "What could happen if I say something?". Well, maybe we should be more afraid of the "What could happen if I don't say anything?".
So HR, don't just demand the "Business Partner" title. Act like one; otherwise, you are just an HR partner in crime. Being an HR Business Partner may not be as complicated as Dave Ulrich presents it. Maybe it is not all about the strategy of this and the strategy of that. Nothing about top-down or bottom-up approaches or the application of academic HR theories. Maybe being an HR Business Partner is all about ensuring employees' rights and fair treatment because that will directly impact any business. At least, that would be a great place to start.
If you need help with designing modern people management practices, let us know:
Clark Kent’s phone booth for when you need new perspectives and to connect with yourself.
1 年I enjoy reading this. It’s relevant critic and a call for more courage. You should write a book.
Angel Investor with multiple investments across the globe.Previously Advisor and Consultant to Startups, Multinationals and Public Organisations
1 年The same answer is that *all* other functions can have almost *all* staff (including managers) dissociate themselves from the fiddly bits of *actually needing to work with people, and make people work with/for them) For all the vaunted improvements in "management science", managers now need the functional equivalent if an MBA, but the key issue of managing and leading staff is treated as a PhD subject matter. Need a staff to stop stinking of cigarette smoke because his co-workers have issues? Its not a simple sit-down. no. First it needs to be determined if the person in question has recourse to any of a million anti-discrimination laws, rules and policies. Then see of there is a union to complicate matters. then backcheck to see if the removal of said individual will change some diversity objective. Then we have to consider the matrix interaction between the supervisor and staff along the dimensions of gender/gender preference/gender tolerance/race/socioeconomic background/religion/power distance to corporate internal affairs/physical distance to the water cooler/actual work assigned that may or may not be impacted. A multi-factor minimax *and* maximin solution on the 6D hyperbola 'saddle' optimal solution has to be generated.