How Do You See Me?

I got a call from one of my colleagues one day, telling me they wanted to speak to me about something urgent. From the sound of it, it felt like something had gone horribly wrong and I thought it best to speak with the person right away. In a matter of minutes this person was down at my desk and we decided over a cup of coffee on what was trouble brewing. Immediately the person spoke about resignation. Actually the words were more like, "I guess you have already heard... I have put in my papers last week..."

While the conversation did continue on about matters related to resignation like work handover, last working day and dues settlement, I don't want to talk about those process matters here. What I do want to highlight here are a couple of other things the person said. The person mentioned that one was bored with the drudgery of daily work and that one was feeling this way for 6 months prior to this conversation. What amazed me was that I thought in my little head that I was a pretty good work friend of this person and that the person would share with me one's problems!

It is a known fact that many organizations do not have HR professionals and a majority of those who do are involved in operational and process-centric tasks. It is ironic but true that HR managers across organizations receive among the poorest client engagement scores from their clients (employees) as compared to business teams from the same organizations. While this may just be the nature of our never-ending journey in the function: that increased HR engagement scores result in increased Client engagement scores; it is also a reflection of the nature of our relationship with the business.

How do they see us? I remember while I was part of the business we viewed HR as this disdained entity that would not do anything more than peddle organizational processes and push organizational mandates while engaging only senior leadership in the unit to better business performance. We engineers on the other hand looked for a coach, a guide, a facilitator who could converse with us on our issues and work towards creative solutions for our talent challenges.

Sounds like a lot but if we think about it from Ulrich's model of HR professionals we play the roles of Admin Partner, Change Agent, Strategic Partner and Employee Champion if we aren't doing this what are we really doing as HR. And all of this is based on the foundations of any strong relationship: trust, communication and camaraderie.

It didn't take a lot for us to stop relying on HR for the support we needed and look internally for that support. Ironically, Human Resource Managers fell short of being decent People Managers while business managers filled that gap to their best capacities.

My own tryst with my colleague as an HR manager served as a wake-up call to be a more people's HR manager and not just a process HR practitioner.