HR Should Only Have 3 Jobs

While I try to always preface it with the happy caveats of there being blessed exceptions, it’s no secret that I find much of the HR function in big corporations a shambles these days.

Open any HR magazine and you’ll find they still dance like nobody’s watching.

In 2002. 

These are some of the actual verbatim titles and concepts I saw in one last week: “Line managers progression”, “Compensation techniques”, “Why your people mistrust technology” “Staff training - on the job or off the job?”. And that is what is supposedly being debated and analyzed aside from how the day-to-day revolves almost exclusively around semi-legal and admin tasks that rudimentary software can and will perform better very soon in their stead. 

Nary a word on the major themes that are reshaping everything we know in the workplace. The new ways of work, the customer expectations, the speed and promise of technology, AI, or the ways the employees perceive all this. Not a lick of mention of what to do to re-program humanity back into the workplace. 

In lieu of beating the dead horses of the useless topics above, this should be the urgent 3-step To-Do of HR everywhere with ambitions to last:

• Obtain true permission (aka “buy-in”) for “being human at work” from the business based on demonstrating value;
• Communicate that permission to employees to where it is heard and, more importantly, and infinitely harder to achieve, to where it is believed and trusted;
• Help people work on individual practices from listening to gratitude and to increasing kindness, empathy, and compassion (three separate facets) 

All those magazines should do is explore what are the best ways to work on the latter? Is it by introducing meditation nooks? By rewarding a demonstrable gratitude practice? By creating a “Pay it forward” program? By helping people build healthier mind practices and habits? By reinforcing the importance of personal responsibility? By showing how good leadership is connected to being intensely human?

One of the things we have in our Leaders’ Dashboard is a monthly challenge and of the new ones we’ve introduced, one is aimed at increasing kindness and empathy - a metta-like practice snapshot - challenging leaders to find team-appropriate ways to ask their guys to try a pre-meeting mantra focused on their team-mates “Just like me, they too want to have a positive experience, be heard, respected, connected with and happy” before each ceremonial meeting. 

The exact wording, the number of times it is mentioned, any attempt to reinforce it to see it become a habit, all at the team lead’s latitude. The goal being mainly to turn the wheels and raise the awareness level of the benefits in the leader first and foremost. 

Considering we work mainly with techies we know suggestions that sound like “hippie mumbo-jumbo” is easy to be dismissed, so we augment it with the science stats that demonstrate without a shadow of a doubt why trying this “loving-kindness meditation” technique does all kinds of wonders to the body and the mind. 

Next on our blue-sky design backlog - how to best introduce gratitude I keep speaking about by combining some of the challenges out there such as this one from Kevin Monroe and accountability in the team setting. 

I say this in our workshops: if you look at Psychology Today and read anything about “Happiness” the related tags are “Habit Formation” and “Gratitude” - let that sink in, as that alone speaks volumes and cuts through the noise. None of this is fluffy, it’s all science that pays off and brings results. 

Whose job is it though? All of ours. As I was saying above, focusing on empowering the individual with tools and yet demanding that they use it and take full personal responsibility for creating and exercising their own practice is imperative but ultimately the permission and the tools do have to come from the enterprise, and whether that is HR or elsewhere, that’s an open topic for what should be more fervent and more honest of debate. 

I’m about to speak to HR at a few events and I’m apprehensive because I’ve hardly had a kind word to say about the function of late, but then again, I have to remember that the audience at events like the Employee Experience and Humans First is the “woke” side of HR who really and truly want to make a change. Nonetheless, to me it’s of little relevance if it’s HR, the CTO or the team leaders themselves working on giving people permission to be human, it just has to happen. 

As you can see here, I don’t even think Psychological Safety should be HR’s number one priority instead of this re-introducing humanity and honing empathy push. 

This is because the direct effects on the performance of the team are far easier to demonstrate for Psychological Safety and the connection to hardcore productivity KPIs in particular in Agile, is crystal clear, so this is a far more hands-on, less esoterical to-do and one that should be on the plate of any people-leader who wants to accomplish anything transformational, not left to a separate department, much less one which is self-destructively knee-deep into antiquated jargon, legal and admin issues. 

Here's to a near future where "HR" either stands for "Humanity Reinforcement" once they manage the only 3 jobs they have or doesn't exist at all.