The 5% HR Manager   (Mon Nov 19 2007)

Most of the HR Managers I know aren't.

Aren't HR Managers.

Not by my definition anyway.

I've always found it useful to distinguish between personnel administration and HR. Personnel Administration is about keeping the employee files up to date. Who's joined, who's left, who's absent, who's on vacation, who's changed job, who's had a pay-rise, and so forth. It's pretty important stuff. Without all this you can't run a payroll. And you won't be giving your management the statistics they want to see.

But there's another kind of concern, which in terms of the business's long-term health and wealth is perhaps even more important. And that's developing the quality of the workforce. Hiring the right people, developing their skills, promoting and retaining talent, creating an environment and an ethos that promotes personal growth, self-expression, and commitment. 'Our people are our most important asset?' Only if they're this kind of people - otherwise they're just your most expensive asset.

In my taxonomy, this is the realm of HR.

WHO KNOWS WHERE THE TIME GOES?

In my experience - I'd be interested to hear yours - about 95% of the HR department's time is spent on personal administration. Yes, we arrange training programs, but even then, our involvement is mainly administrative - finding the training providers, setting up the courses, keeping a weather-eye on the budget. I'm not saying this isn't important, but from an HR perspective surely we ought to be playing a more pro-active role in determining individual training needs and measuring the difference the training has made to individual and group performance. You do this? Good. I don't see it in too many other businesses.

Ah, I forgot, annual appraisal. We spend a lot of time on that. That's HR, isn't it? Well yes, it would be if we based appraisals on the specific requirements and targets of the job, if appraisal scores were fact- not opinion-based, if we used appraisals to help employees shape their personal development and training plans. But in the businesses I know, the primary use of appraisal is to determine the annual bonus. And I'd call that administration.

MAYBE HERE

So why don't we spend more time on HR?

It's partly because our personnel administration chores just don't leave us with enough time in the day. And that's often because as systems evolve over time, they become more and more complex. Sometimes we just need to rethink the system and start again.

Here's a small example. In the Mid-East, most private sector workers are expats. It's quite common for expats to work for a couple of years and then take an extended holiday. And what employers tend to do is pay them their salary in advance. So every time someone takes a vacation, I see the HR team going through the files working out how many days have been earned, how many taken, what's the value of the vacation days, what's the value of the days earned, how much they should advance ... It's a painful, time-consuming process.

I ask:

Think about your own personnel administration procedures. Can you think of any which are unnecessarily time-consuming or redundant? I'd love to hear examples of the procedures you hate.

ACCELERATION

This is what my new website and database, ACCELERATE, is all about. Finding ways to simplify and speed up existing personnel admin procedures, so that we have time to focus on HR as well.

Ahh, you've caught me cheating. The database is called 'Accelerate HR'. Why HR if it's actually focusing on personal admin? Well, for exactly the same reason that your job-title is HR Manager, not Personnel Admin Manager. HR is sexy, Admin is drab. 'Accelerate Personnel Administration' would have been just too slow and boring .....and nobody would ever find us in a Google search. So, if you don't mind too much, I'll just carry on cheating.

THE HR BALANCE SHEET

There's another reason why we don't spend more time on HR. Management doesn't ask us for HR reports, only for personnel admin reports. They want headcount and leavers, and cost center analysis... And they want these because that's what we do. But suppose we could do something different. Just imagine a different set of reports. One that shows profitability as a ratio of employment costs, with the curve steadily rising. Another that evaluates contribution, realistically measuring the impact that each department or even each employee is making to the wealth of the business - not just the financial wealth, but the impact on stakeholders, customers, process improvement. (Balanced Scorecard anyone?) Or another that measures the impact of training on the bottom-line. How would your management respond? Would they sit up and take notice?

The problem is that we really haven't developed a proper HR tool-set yet - or at least we haven't agreed on it. It's easy to measure how many people joined and left, how many vacancies we have in a department, how many days of absence there have been. It's much more difficult to measure employee contribution - I'm not just talking about productivity and efficiency - which are admin measurements. And how would you go about measuring the success of a training programme? (Please don't say the number of attendance certificates awarded.)

So here are some questions for you. Should we separate out Personnel Administration from HR altogether? Would we focus on HR better if we appointed an Achievement Manager within the HR department? And if we wanted to develop an HR tool that had the same importance and relevance to the business as Finance's balance sheet, what would we measure and how? That should keep you busy for this evening ...

Filed under: HR