Personnel Today
  • Home
    • All PT content
    • Advertise
  • Email sign-up
  • Topics
    • HR Practice
    • Employee relations
    • Equality, diversity and inclusion
    • Learning & training
    • Pay & benefits
    • Wellbeing
    • Recruitment & retention
    • HR strategy
    • HR Tech
    • The HR profession
    • Global
    • All HR topics
  • Legal
    • Case law
    • Commentary
    • Flexible working
    • Legal timetable
    • Maternity & paternity
    • Shared parental leave
    • Redundancy
    • TUPE
    • Disciplinary and grievances
    • Employer’s guides
  • AWARDS
    • Personnel Today Awards
    • The RAD Awards
  • Jobs
    • Find a job
    • Jobs by email
    • Careers advice
    • Post a job
  • XpertHR
    • Learn more
    • Products
    • Pricing
    • Free trial
    • Subscribe
    • XpertHR USA
  • Webinars
  • OHW+

Personnel Today

Register
Log in
Personnel Today
  • Home
    • All PT content
    • Advertise
  • Email sign-up
  • Topics
    • HR Practice
    • Employee relations
    • Equality, diversity and inclusion
    • Learning & training
    • Pay & benefits
    • Wellbeing
    • Recruitment & retention
    • HR strategy
    • HR Tech
    • The HR profession
    • Global
    • All HR topics
  • Legal
    • Case law
    • Commentary
    • Flexible working
    • Legal timetable
    • Maternity & paternity
    • Shared parental leave
    • Redundancy
    • TUPE
    • Disciplinary and grievances
    • Employer’s guides
  • AWARDS
    • Personnel Today Awards
    • The RAD Awards
  • Jobs
    • Find a job
    • Jobs by email
    • Careers advice
    • Post a job
  • XpertHR
    • Learn more
    • Products
    • Pricing
    • Free trial
    • Subscribe
    • XpertHR USA
  • Webinars
  • OHW+

Personnel Today

Let’s put the human factor back into HR

by Personnel Today 30 Oct 2001
by Personnel Today 30 Oct 2001

In
these times of economic change HR finds itself in the spotlight. But rather
than turn to gimmicks to prove its worth, it needs to focus on people

As
the HR mantra "to be even more exclusively business-driven" bec-omes
louder and louder the profession should be braced for more self-flagellation.

Personnel
Today’s panel discussion of senior HR professionals, ("Tool Order",
24 July) showed this most clearly. But as Financial Times journalist Richard
Donkin points out in his new book Blood, Sweat and Tears, the external
criticism and constant self-doubt in the HR community is nothing new.  

Fifty
years ago in the first "modern" management textbook The Practice of
Management, Peter Drucker slated the personnel profession for being torn
between its administrative and HR activities.

He
mocked its "constant worry as to its inability to prove it is making a
contribution to the enterprise". This led the function to a preoccupation
with the "search for ‘gimmicks’ to impress their management
associates" – the same tool-addiction and lack of business focus referred
to in the Personnel Today debate.

Donkin’s
pessimistic conclusion is that HR has always been about "sweating the most
valuable assets of the company". He traces a disturbing line of management
thinking all the way from the sweatshops of inhumane industrialists in the
industrial revolution, through FW Taylor’s narrow-minded scientific management
and its deliberate agenda of smashing the power of skilled labour, right the
way up to business process re-engineering and our current obsession with
shareholder and economic value-added and HR’s "bottom-line
contribution".

Employees
looking for respite from the enslaving effects of the new knowledge and
information-driven work revolution (including e-mail overload and voicemail
asphyxiation) can only look to themselves for salvation.

I
see examples in my work every week of HR departments seeking the magic-bullet
solution from consultants and being unwilling to pay to uncover the problems
they face; of companies turning down business-aligned and innovative reward
schemes because "nobody else uses them".

I
also regularly meet line managers who ludicrously over-estimate the role of
money in motivation at work and who oppose work-life balance or job redesign or
training programmes because they can’t see beyond that month’s profit and loss
account.

It
is precisely at these times of major economic and industrial change that the
need for specialists who focus on the human dimension, who understand human
behaviour and motivation becomes most vital.

This
is as true in the current industrial revolution as it was in the first. Rising
rates of workplace injuries and deaths, tribunal claims and stress-related
compensation payments are all evidence of the pressures our businesses are
under. Yet now, as London Business School’s Lynda Gratton has pointed out, is
precisely the time for organisations to recognise the unique features of human
capital – that we have feelings and we seek meaning in our work and in our
lives.

Fifty
years earlier even than Drucker, Edward Cadbury, one of the founding fathers of
personnel management in the UK, observed that, "employee welfare and
company productivity are different sides of the same coin". If HR is to
prove Donkin wrong, it needs to be creating more work environments where, as he
puts it, people can "work at what they love doing and what is important to
do" – and in the process create the financial returns their employers lust
after.  

We
need to avoid any more "dark satanic mills" being built in the guise
of call and tele-centres, and recession-induced management styles.

So
pay attention to your business needs and your managers’ desires, but do not be
afraid to remind them of Cadbury, and of the human in human resources.

By
Duncan Brown is principal of Towers Perrin and chairman of the CIPD
Compensation Forum

Personnel Today
Personnel Today

Personnel Today articles are written by an expert team of award-winning journalists who have been covering HR and L&D for many years. Some of our content is attributed to "Personnel Today" for a number of reasons, including: when numerous authors are associated with writing or editing a piece; or when the author is unknown (particularly for older articles).

previous post
Lack of training holds UK firms back
next post
Sept 11 sparks culture change

You may also like

Barrister wins gender critical belief discrimination claim

27 Jul 2022

‘Patchy’ mental health services failing ethnic minority communities

11 Jul 2022

Global study highlights hypertension treatment failings

8 Jul 2022

NICE sets out new guideline on managing depression

8 Jul 2022

Half of employees struggle to switch off on...

8 Jul 2022

Five steps for organisations across the globe to...

8 Jun 2022

The Search for Talent: Six Major Employer Pitfalls

24 May 2022

Grants scheme set up to support women’s health...

16 May 2022

How music can help to ease anxiety at...

9 May 2022

OH will be key to navigating ‘second pandemic’...

14 Apr 2022
  • 6 reasons why work-based learning is better than traditional training PROMOTED | A recent Fortune/Deloitte survey found that 71% of CEOs are anticipating that this year’s biggest business disrupter...Read more
  • Strengthening Scotland’s public services through virtual recruiting PROMOTED | This website is Scotland's go-to place for job seekers looking to apply for roles in public services...Read more
  • What’s next for L&D? Enter Alchemist… PROMOTED | It’s time to turn off the tedious and get ready for interactive and immersive learning experiences...Read more
  • Simple mistakes are blighting the onboarding experience PROMOTED | The onboarding of new hires is a company’s best chance...Read more
  • Preventing Burnout: How can HR help key workers get the right help? PROMOTED | Workplace wellbeing may seem a distant memory...Read more

Personnel Today Jobs
 

Search Jobs

PERSONNEL TODAY

About us
Contact us
Browse all HR topics
Email newsletters
Content feeds
Cookies policy
Privacy policy
Terms and conditions

JOBS

Personnel Today Jobs
Post a job
Why advertise with us?

EVENTS & PRODUCTS

The Personnel Today Awards
The RAD Awards
Employee Benefits
Forum for Expatriate Management
OHW+
Whatmedia

ADVERTISING & PR

Advertising opportunities
Features list 2022

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Linkedin


© 2011 - 2022 DVV Media International Ltd

Personnel Today
  • Home
    • All PT content
    • Advertise
  • Email sign-up
  • Topics
    • HR Practice
    • Employee relations
    • Equality, diversity and inclusion
    • Learning & training
    • Pay & benefits
    • Wellbeing
    • Recruitment & retention
    • HR strategy
    • HR Tech
    • The HR profession
    • Global
    • All HR topics
  • Legal
    • Case law
    • Commentary
    • Flexible working
    • Legal timetable
    • Maternity & paternity
    • Shared parental leave
    • Redundancy
    • TUPE
    • Disciplinary and grievances
    • Employer’s guides
  • AWARDS
    • Personnel Today Awards
    • The RAD Awards
  • Jobs
    • Find a job
    • Jobs by email
    • Careers advice
    • Post a job
  • XpertHR
    • Learn more
    • Products
    • Pricing
    • Free trial
    • Subscribe
    • XpertHR USA
  • Webinars
  • OHW+