The HR Conundrum

Time and time again I have come across complaints that HR is being too insensitive to employee needs, they live in a world of their own with an element of rudeness or they try to exert their control where possible and push back their work. After seeing and experiencing both sides of the table, being an employee and HR professional, I believe I can offer the reasons for such feedback and remedies. So here is my take on this conundrum.

Main Reasons:

1. Lack of Customer Servicing mindset and training: HR professionals at the beginning of the take up trainings to improve their technical know-how of their domain just like any other department, however, no one told them that HR professional should work on the soft side of HR i.e. communication and relationship building, to service its customer.
2. Nature of Job and Priorities: HR jobs involve a lot of administrative work so by default HR professionals have to put a lot of time in front of the computer and processing information. On too of it they have tight deadlines which leaves little room for customer servicing and often they are in a hurry to meet the deadlines. From performance perspective, their work is monitored with respect to adherence to deadlines only where feedback from the customers is not taken into account. Lack of proper tools and systems also adversely affect their ability to respond to the queries on timely basis especially if they are busy in finalizing an important task or project e.g. processing payroll, preparing a monthly report etc.
3. Need for Taking Control: As HR professionals our job is to ensure consistency in decision making through developing and enforcing policies and frameworks. Hence, we come across as rigid and control freaks. This is the requirement of the role so nothing is wrong in it, however, when we take it too far then we start creating problems for everyone. We must admit that no system is 100% perfect so we should always make room and flexibility for discretion and negotiation based on its merit. We complain about our lack of trust on Line Management but we fail to train and empower them hence we never come out of the Control syndrome.

Solutions:

1. Make customer servicing skills necessary from how to answer telephone calls to how how to manage angry customers.
2. HR Managers should start monitoring feedback from the employees and make it part of KPIs to gauge performance of their teams. HR surveys could also be used to start focusing on most critical areas of improvement. We must also analyze the volume and source of traffic via emails and telephone calls to see how can the inquiries be reduced or answered within an appropriate time. Solutions like AI powered chat bots, use of intranet to disseminate information, self service functions of HRMS, dedicated help-desk etc. can be adopted to reduce volume and improve service levels.
3. Outreach Program: HR should try to reach out to its employees and involve them in designing new initiatives or launching new employee benefits. Employee Engagement Surveys also serve as a feedback tool ascertain feedback from employees but that's a passive approach.
4. Building Trust and Transparency: HR Leadership should work on creating a culture of transparency and work towards a joint working relationship based on trust by imparting knowledge, skills development and empowerment of line management. Line Managers should be treated as an extension of HR or the HR Agents rather than clients.