The Comeback of HR

by Irving H. Buchen | Human Resource Executive Online

There are increasingly more signs of HR taking on additional responsibilities in advocacy and leadership. This territorial expansion signals the new emphasis on hiring HR professionals who are multi-talented and capable of growing. As one CEO I know whispered about HR, "The only other position I know that engages in cutting-edge work of the future is mine."

HR appears to be making a comeback. After many years of reduced budgets, internal downsizing, shifts of tasks to other divisions, and the outsourcing of many of its functions, there are increasingly more signs of an HR comeback. But it is not a return to the same old, same old.

Rather, it involves new directions of advocacy and roles of leadership focused on finding new grounds for performance. Increasingly, HR is being valued for its expertise on workforce futures.

What are the factors driving the return of HR to centrality? And equally as important, what do these forces, in turn, tell us about overall changes in 21st century corporate vision and workforce structures? Although not definitive, the five examined below are collectively sufficient in range and substance to outline the new landscape of HR professionals:

1. Add-Ons

The difference of HR from its earlier versions may be rapidly summed up by some of its own new names -- HRM or Human Resource Management.

Indeed, it can be argued that the name should be expanded to include Leadership or HRLM; and its new add-on partner technology and metrics or HRT. Then, too, because of its increasing role outsourcing, it has acquired a new specialization and even the creation of a professional society -- HRO.

Finally, as the initial European notion of Intellectual Capital found a home here, HR itself was frequently altered to IC or the compromise of HIC. If one puts all the above inputs together, what emerges is HICLMOST or Human Intellectual Capital Leadership and Management Outsourcing Technology.

Awkward, of course, but such an overloaded acronym is no mere alphabet soup. It reflects the general add-on nature of the workforce and, above all, the embracing of hybrids as the new way of stretching or extending organizational identity and performance.

In other words, the change in titles is not cosmetic but reflects comparable workforce territorial expansion. It signals the new emphasis on hiring professionals who are multi-talented and capable of growing.

2. Hard and Soft

The increasing focus on talent shortages -- as well as the steady decline of company loyalty, which hampers the retention of such expertise -- has reinvested the traditional HR role in both areas with greater urgency.

HR has had not only to acquire the aggressive hard hustle of an executive-search firm but also combined it with the softer caressing retention of mentoring and coaching. In the process, recruiting and retention have become one -- a continuum.

The net result is that HR not only has become increasingly the key resource for maintaining and retaining the competitive edge of personnel, but also their performance track record has become in turn the measure of a company's own comparative advantage. But all is not well.

The value of attending HR conferences is to listen to the hopes and worries of the profession. One of the worries HR leaders have vocalized at conferences is the issue of company loyalty. That evidently has become a hard sell and remains one of the most difficult challenges of all, especially if restoring internal credibility becomes an HR priority. As one HR vice president worried: "It is like going up a down escalator. Who is going to believe us [about company loyalty] after so many firings and outsourcing? Given a choice, I would not touch that assignment with a 10-foot pole!"

3. Cross-Overs

Although the empire of training was taken over or parceled out to corporate universities, and to chief learning officers and their respective LMSes, HR has re-entered and recovered its access to training through a number of cross-over areas.

First, HR has argued that talent retention is linked to talent development. And this double gain -- for employee and company -- requires the advocacy of HR and the integration of its agenda with that of LMSes.

Second, as team training and performance have become the norm, another bridge of integration has been forged. The training and nurturing of teams has been made part of the larger HR commitment to the care and feeding of work cultures because teams embody the ultimate cross-over.

No industry recognizes this more than the auto industry. Indeed, HR at Ford Motor Co. has taken the lead in designating teams as the ultimate cross-over goal and environment, and the pursuit of negotiating shared partnerships as its top priority.

Another cross-over area involves the induction of new hires. PR has been replaced by HR because onboarding is now a joint venture between the national and the global, between company mission and company vision and, above all, between talent acquisition and retention.

In short, HR has largely built its recovery on its newly acquired expertise of cross-overs.

4. Goal-Role Dynamics

As stretch goals dominated and the timetable of evaluations became compressed, HR had to address two inadequacies. First, workers were regularly exceeding their job descriptions. Second, downsizing and outsourcing, and greater pressure for productivity, were tampering with the traditional relationships and descriptors between job goals and job roles.

Initially, no one really cared. COOs and plant managers only cared about the results -- not how or why they came about. CFOs valued the bottom line of increased productivity and CEOs were happy with the quarterly reports they had to give their boards.

But HR was called in because job descriptions are the staples of HR and their fragmentation or buckling could not be ignored. The response at Blue Cross Jacksonville for example, was to alter the frequency and quality of evaluations.

Evaluations were scheduled more frequently and structured more collaboratively. Sessions were often monthly or on an as-needed bases. Supervisors were trained to be coaches and employees were empowered to be partners.

But important though such adjustments at Blue Cross were, they did not address what increasingly became an across-the-board major workforce mystery. Although there were fewer employees and fewer with the needed skill sets, the work got done, productivity targets were met and even, exceeded, and the bottom line posted gains.

What was going on? By all rights, the gains should have been losses.

In another example, a plant manager at Case Construction Equipment, based in Tomahawk, Wisc., discussed with the union pay raises tied to higher productivity levels. He claimed that higher productivity would preserve the American middle-class worker and increase wages.

But he was not interested in explaining what was going on, only in tapping it for his ends and assuming its automatic continuance. He was not alone. Hardly anyone was trying to explain what was defying logic. Why should they? It was like a gift from heaven.

HR was initially no different except for the fact that its precious job descriptions were a mess. At the outset, the focus was familiar: aligning goals and roles. But the problem was now a mismatch between those two across the board.

HR found that some goals were particularly mischievous and were dubbed morphing goals because they regularly exceeded prescribed roles; so much so that in order to do what it took to get the job done, workers and managers had to assume next-level roles.

And that happened across the board. And if the CEO wanted to know what was going on and whether it would continue, he could turn to his VP of HR who increasingly had the answers.

5. Bottoms Up: The New Organizational Chart

Perhaps, nothing dramatizes the new centrality of HR than the prospect of the organizational chart being turned on its head. Gradually, various forms of employee empowerment implemented by HR to increase productivity and to align work goals with company goals began to be cumulative:

a) Work knowledge has been supplemented by self-knowledge.

b) Managerial and leadership roles of those at the top were made available and distributed across the board.

c) The need for alignment led to employees crafting their own vision and mission statements.

d) The demands for interoperability led to the mutualizing of job satisfaction.

HR became an advocate of future needs being addressed directly by employees. They would identify not only the future versions of their current jobs, but also what training would be needed to get them from here to there, etc.

At the same time, HR leaders urged strategic planners to fold into the master plan the issue of the future organizational chart especially given the new dynamic between goals and roles.

The top had essentially remained intact and the same. The middle has been thinned out and given greater horizontal extent. It is still very busy supervising and coaching more employees, playing catch-up, planning ahead, urging innovation -- in short, not just running but leading the company.

But the busiest sector is the rank-and-file who are sharing with managers the same need for multi-task survival and growth of the company. Thus, managers have become leaders and employees have become managers. In other words, the organizational chart has changed both horizontally and vertically.

Not only has the middle of the pyramid been bulked out so that it now has more of a horizontal extent and shape, but more radically the bottom has moved up to emerge as a new top. The new hierarchy features rank-and-file first, followed by an extended set of middle-level managers and, finally, CEO and senior staff last.

As goals have changed, so have roles. Rank-and-file have not only to do, but to manage their work. Managers, in turn, have to not only supervise, but also to lead. To accomplish stretch goals, each group does whatever it takes to get the job done. In this case, that requires each group to move up in the feeding chain and assume the roles of the next level.

The HR version of the organizational chart thus may serve to mirror the reality of not only what really is now, but also what is to come. HR is presiding over the unique fusion of mission and vision.

In summary, then, two conclusions are clear. One relates to advocacy, the other to leadership.

Relegated to the sidelines for many years, HR not only has regained, but also expanded its position by being ahead of the game. It has led the charge of the hybrids transforming themselves just as HR itself has added on acronyms.

In the process, it has helped to develop and apply metrics of accountability and alignment. The current challenge of talent shortages and talent retention is ready made for HR, which now employs new software not only to track, but also manage the entire candidate process.

It has been tireless and focused in arguing for new cross-overs for training including sharing its traditional preserve of the orientation of new hires. It has been at the forefront of identifying, describing and addressing the new dynamics between goal and role change. Finally, it has led the charge to create a more operationally and honest version of the organizational chart to guide both current and projected versions of the reality of change and aspiration.

Now, it has to employ the above as a reality check internally to revise all job descriptions, including those of HR itself. In the process, room has to be provided for add-ons and cross-overs, and because all is being geared to the future, job descriptions should now be called job expectations.

But, alas, there is one important area beyond the reach of the new HR: current graduate academic programs preparing future HR professionals. Indeed, the curriculum of most graduate HR programs teaches the older rather than the newer version organizational chart and, if anything, needs to be drama radically redesigned. Who will do that? I hope current HR leaders and advocates.

[About the Author: Irving H. Buchen, PhD., is a member of the doctoral business faculty at Capella University. An active HR researcher and consultant, he is author of Partnership HR and the soon to be published The Hybrid Leader. He has served as a management consultant, trainer, and executive coach here and abroad for numerous corporations. He secured his doctorate from Johns Hopkins and has been a professor and an academic administrator at Cal State, University of Wisconsin and Penn State.]