Have to agree with the author completely on this one. The world can easily do without HR. They are paper shufflers and spin doctors of the worst kind.

The author only sees a part of the picture.

There is absolutely no doubt that the people he describes exist, and that he has described them accurately in almost every respect.

However, there is a far more interesting tale behind it all, a rich and action-packed story of line management laziness, incompetence and fear.

HR, in any well-run organization (and I notice Mr King uses exclusively academic environments for his examples; 'nuff said) is the part of the business that supports management in its dealings with staff. It doesn't - it mustn't - replace any of their functions in dealing with that manager's team. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happens where there are incompetent managers running the business

Regrettably, we produce a highly inferior brand of manager in this country, one that is particularly under-educated in the art of managing people. Managers who will, at every opportunity, abdicate responsibility for dealing with the staff that work for them.

(Except of course where it involves shouting at people to work harder, which they do incessantly, believing that it is what management is supposed to do. Kick heads, pose and posture, take credit for success and pass on blame for anything that goes wrong. You've met them, I'm sure)

So these so-called line managers have over the years handed over all the difficult stuff, like hiring and (particularly) firing, training and developing etc., to the HR people. Who, not being responsible for the people involved, take a simplistic, administrative, procedure-driven and impersonal approach to the cattle that they are told to deal with.

Is it a disaster? You bet.

Who is to blame? Not HR. They are given the hospital pass by incompetent management, and settle into the rut of playing everything by a book of rules which was devised by control-freaks, for people who have no interest in outcome, only process.

In my experience, having a competent HR team supporting a responsible management team is a dream run.

But every word Mr King wrote about recruitment agencies - and many that he was too polite to include - is true.

Ah, try any "Public Service" outfit in the country....their Human Resources do nothing to add to the "service" and they manage to manipulate both the workers and the bosses.
A true story told me by a Minister in a government was that of a problem which arose and the family involved was told by a PS that nothing could be done because "it was not the policy". Family said it was in that party's policy. No, no still could not be done it was not departmental policy. Family eventually went to the Minister's electorate office and an assistant recognised it was the policy of that party and advised the Minister. Minister hauled in a senior member of the department (the HR level) and asked what was going on.
Was told it was "not policy". This went on for some months but the Minister persisted. The Public Servants in the department were working on the policy documents of the previous government. That is what they wanted the policy to be and what the HR level was working on applying. The Minister had to end up using a Ministerial Directive to apply the policy of the Minister's party....

One of the problems with HR for any employer is that the employment rules are so blasted complicated. HR are hired in larger businesses to be the expert on the rules (policies etc). Not that I agree with workchoices exactly, but if we made employment (and related taxation) rules a lot more simple, there would be a lot less need to the HR function.

I was a HR manager ending working for a State Education Dept. I was on the operational side of HR, always. The people who process, pay, record, advise and all the rest from recruitment to retirment.

That Education Department looked at HR as a place to dump teachers who couldn't teach. Why? Quals. Yes, but nothing to do with the work.

So yes I do agree that HR as it is known today is BS. That same State where I was the HR Manager refused to acknowledge the legislation in some circumstances which gave the lie to "working by the book". They don't. They work as told to. Anyone who doesn't "go along" gets the flick.

HR practice today falls down in one main area. That is people think you can study it at Uni and then do it. Wrong. Just like any "profession" you have to learn the work as well as the theory. They don't bother as Senior Management just don't get it.

If you care to look at any work stream you will find exactly the same thing. Ideal circumstances described and legislated for. But not actually practiced, only preached.

HR is simple stuff. It's customer service with allegiance to those you deal with, your staff and the organisation. It depends on how you decide which of those is first as to how your service is rated by all. If you choose organisation first then the service will be poor simply because you have already lost focus on why you are there. Which is to ensure people get what they are entitled to when it is due. No more no less.

Learning the mountain of legislation that goes with it takes years and changes every day. This is where the Uni appointees fail. They just don't know the work or how to deal with people as people.

That "people are our most valuable asset" rant really tells you all you need to know about theory doesn't it? You are assessed as being an asset, not a person. That's why it works the opposite way to the words.

This article fails to take into account one very fundemental challenge to Human Resources and it's practitioners - the rest of the organisations management structure.

Human Resources, by it's nature, is all about trying to make sure that the working environment is as conducive to happy and productive as possible. Where it gets tripped up is by employee managers who can't manage, budgets which are unable to allow for productivity measures to be put in place, etc.

The biggest hurdle, tho, is executive management buy in. If the organisations executive aren't fully behind the concepts being suggested, then Human Resources may as well not even be there.

Take a look at Google (http://www.workforce.com/section/09/feature/23/41/03/index.html) where HR is taken seriously from the top down, and company morale is at an amazing level, there are plenty of perks and the place is run pretty well.

If there were more managers like this, who allowed HR to do it's job, HR would probably be viewed in a significantly more positive light.

Good article BN. Pericles is right in so far as I mainly use academic settings as that's where I worked for 10 years, although I have worked for political parties and in advertising. I should spread my examples around a bit more.

I don't believe people enter a career in HR to be pawns of management making riduculous policies, which in many cases, common sense dictates that they be ignored. So what happened between the HR degree and the practice?

I'm not having a shot at Work Choice (are we still aloud to use that word?) but I do have major problems with the stifling HR bureaucracy that has infected both the public and private sectors. I'm all for flexibility and the ability for businesses to act quickly when they see an opportunity.

HR tends to defend itself by saying that they're there to ensure quality. I suggest they're there to try justify their jobs - and they're failing to do that.

I purposely left out the name(s) of the on-line recruitment agencies but I hope people can read between the lines and seek out the truth for themselves.

Malcolm King aka Cheryl

HR _should_ be a value add function, and correctly implemented policies and procedures should have a positive impact on the business, although I grant you that there is often an additional layer of bureaucracy that is generated as a result. Thankfully, modern human resources technology (the field that I work in) can relieve _some_ of the impact of this.

The value provided by HR should be self evident - if the staff are:
* remunerated (reasonably) well
* are rewarded for performance
* training is available, timely, well directed and valuable
* recruitment can be undertaken in a reasonable way
* grievances are handled in an appropriate way

then it should be obvious that HR is performing well and adding value.

But all of that hinges on my previous comment - management buy-in. If that doesn't occur, then all the HR training, policies and procedures and efforts will come to naught. And of course, it requires good policies to be put forward by HR, and let's be honest, humans being humans means that policies won't always be 5 star rated.

The other thing to keep in mind is some of the legislation that companies have to work under. Work Cover, COMCARE and other "safety" organisations, for instance, place enormous administration requirements on businesses, which ultimately then reside within the personnel area. It's a function that most HR practitioners would rather do without. The point being that HR doesn't necessarily create all the administration - some times it's forced upon us...

The NSW told its workforce *you know your job better than we ever will*
True but a monkey would have.
Yes minister is a true story based on government HR.
Failure to do your job gets you a higher position in such as the RTA.

Good article, Malcolm – the HR industry, like a lot of consultants, is like a fungus growing on a damp log. Why do they grow? Because they can. Do they value-add anything? No. Are they there for the development of staff? No. Are they there to act as a buffer between management and staff. Most definitely.

Where I work, HR has been used by management as a buffer between themselves and staff making reasonable and intelligent complaints. Of course, all you get from HR is obfuscation when it comes to addressing the real problem. In fact, management are just as guilty. Come to think of it, so are many unions.

Why has it taken so long for people to wake up to HR? I think its high time for a culture change in Australian workplaces. Come on you Gen-Ys!

There is one underlying cause of all these problems of too much bureaucracy,rules and regulation and that is our legal disease that has us all comatose with fear of litigation.It has now got so bad that it is destroying our productivity and quality of life.

We just tie ourselves in knots with meaningless word games.Decades ago we built the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Snowy scheme with far less money and technology than now.Just look at the coal ships lined up in both NSW and Qld;because of Govt incompetence we cannot forfill out contracts because the infrastructure is not there.Now these losses are in the $ billions.

For all our wealth/technology we cannot achieve what past generations did under real poverty.

G'day all,

Admiral Grace Hopper, the lady who took the US navy into the computer age (and who created the term "a bug in my computer" when an errant moth flew into the computer room) once said:-

"you don't manage people. You manage things. You lead people"

Therein lies my opposition to the term "Human Resources" for all too often I have seen HR people treating staff as "things" and not as people and in fact, it comprises a large part of one of my addresses at Conferencves and seminars.

I have to agree with Country Gal on this one. Having had worked at a place that had a Frankensteins monster of individual contracts, relic group bargaining and with near 100% of floor workers as temporary casuals from a multiplicity of agencies I wouldnt wish the HR Officers position on anybody. No wonder they looked like frazzled cats pulled out of the well. Too much confusion over roles and responsibilities, envy over the inequality of co-workers pay and conditions led to inefficiency , skill decline, conflict played out daily. Daily internal politics were dominant over business.Daily it was the HR officers job to 'sort it out'. The chaos on the floor led to a high turn over of management, even customer complaints were on the rise. I am not a union man but evidently the company was efficient and properous when it was unionised and everybody was under a few umbrellas. I wonder if they are still in business?

Many years ago mining companies preferred to deal with unions, about one per worksite, rather than a myriad of small unions, because the payroll was simplified by paying a 3000 person strong workforce under one to five awards rather than having all employees on individual contracts. Fewer individual contracts would require fewer HR managers. At another higher education facility in Melbourne the HR department used to be very busy at the end of the financial year calculating the top management bonuses as how to distribute the gap between actual wages and wages allocated in the federal budget.

There are many finance industry workplaces in Melbourne that seem to prefer to hire backpackers on casual conditions. I am thinking big super fund managers and Computershare. These backpacker often don't understand English well enough to man the telephone help desks to which they are assigned.

Personally I would like to see an end to the high rates of casualised labour because its not fair to the workers hired under those practices and its grossly unfair to the customers/clients/contributors having to deal with such entrenched, systemic ineptitude.

HR in Australia?- to save a good-civilized-etc face of sometimes locally hiring bosses by automatically rejecting non-Christians, non-Anglos to pave a way for biologically appropriate overseas mates and relatives too often.

I must agree with the author. “The simple fact is the majority of the burgeoning HR industry in Australia is extraneous to the common good and welfare of both organisations and individuals. “

I have held the view since I first entered the workforce, that an HR department, regardless of the size of the organisation really needed one person only and they were there to advise line managers on the matters of employment law.

This was most profoundly illustrated some years ago when supplying consultative services to one of the major Australian Banking Groups.
I had to travel up and down the east coast states interviewing line managers. Each state was experiencing very high levels of staff turnover. One of my questions ended up being “Why is staff turnover so high”? It often too asking this question several times (the line managers not recognising the staffing management responsibility), then many line managers would start with comments which deferred the problem to HR.

What had happened over a number of years was the HR function had become so strident and assertive that it had usurped the Line managers role in the process of staff selection and control and undermined the line managers responsibility to the point these line managers no longer saw staffing their function as their responsibility. This is of course an organisational nonsense.

HR functions supply internal services to captive users. They are there to support line managers, not to direct them. The same is true of IT functions.

IT is another support process which provides an internal service to captive users. It too should not be elevated to the point where it dictates policy and strategy. Several of the state government departments I have worked with in recent years have IT functions which display a strident and dictatorial attitude and negative input to their users, similar to the HR role in the Bank.

Oh Michael K – why do you bother?

Excellent article Malcolm. I don't think I've dealt that much with HR, but that may be because I haven't realised I was speaking to HR- I thought they were management.

They are at best ineffective- I always seem to come out of harassment seminars feeling exceptionally horny...

You have definitely been too easy on HR recruitment firms. There are far too many of them. There are often multiple firms advertising the same job. They regularly go belly-up, so when you try to find their address in the phone book, about a third of the time they are not there, because they have recently changed their trading name. Other posters have pointed out that different workers regularly earn different wages for performing the same jobs. This pales into comparison when you find out just how much the Recruitment Agency is earning from your work.

One may be in need of an easy job, perhaps a couple of days work a week, in the inner city, to help pay the rent while you finish your degree. So you apply online, (yes, through Seek) for a stacking job in an inner city warehouse. It has been advertised on the very day you have applied for it. The next day you get called up by the Recruitment Agency, and you think "beauty, I'm in." They ask if you can travel to an outlying suburb of the city to their "head office," and you tell them, "just this once," because you don't have a car. They tell you there should be a bus from the station. There is never, I repeat never, a bus from the station. So you walk 50 minutes through gale force wind to the "head office," which you miss the first two times you walk past it. Once you find it, you are told to wait for 15 minutes and are given some forms to fill out, where you give exactly the same information which you emailed in your resume and cover letter the day before.

cont..

You are also given a summary of the Privacy Act, forms for a Superannuation Fund Manager you have never heard of, and a pamphlet on OHS and harassment. You then file in with half a dozen other people to a small room where you are shown a couple of videos on OHS and harassment, and are given the standard line that if you accept a job, you must turn up, because not only are you giving the company a bad name, you are depriving someone else of an opportunity to work. At this point, everybody in the room studies their shoelaces.

Finally you get to speak to someone one-on-one, where you are told that the stacking job you applied for- a couple of days a week in an inner city warehouse- has been filled, but there is a job available doing some cleaning in a commercial bakery in another outlying suburb four days a week. You explain that you don't have a car and need time to study. You are told that "it's only for two weeks, and we might be able to help you out with something more suitable after that." You really need the money, so you acquiesce. The next day, it takes three hours to get to the Bakery. When you get there you are given a brush and are told to clean the toilets. You walk out after 15 minutes, leaving a snapped broom behind. Then you realise you can get away with this, because you are in a massive, impersonal system, where reputation and loyalty means nothing. Who cares if you will never get work with that agency again? There are hundreds of others in this city alone, and the agency will probably go belly up by the end of the year anyway.

The system is creating a workforce of mercenaries.

Douglas Adams had a great idea- jettison the useless third of the planet's population into space, to crash into some distant planet. I nominate the extortion cartel that is the Recruitment Agency industry.

Oh Michael K – why do you bother?
Posted by Col Rouge

Why do I bother? What do you think why?

Col, you and I are in violent agreement on this, with one small difference in view. You propose that...

>>HR function had become so strident and assertive that it had usurped the Line managers role in the process of staff selection and control and undermined the line managers responsibility to the point these line managers no longer saw staffing their function as their responsibility. This is of course an organisational nonsense.

HR functions supply internal services to captive users. They are there to support line managers, not to direct them. The same is true of IT functions.<<

I would rewrite this as...

"HR function had become so powerful because Line managers became increasingly lazy in dealing with their staff, and reluctant to address them face to face, so HR was forced to take a more active role in the process of staff selection and control and relieved the line managers of so much responsibility that these line managers no longer saw staffing their function as their responsibility. This is of course an organizational nonsense.

HR functions supply internal services to captive users. They are there to support line managers, not to direct them. The same is true of IT functions"

The result - and the stupidity of it - is identical, but in my experience they have over time stepped into a vacuum created by feckless line managers, rather than fought for their power.

Pericles "in my experience they have over time stepped into a vacuum created by feckless line managers, rather than fought for their power. "

LOL - I think we might end up arguing "chicken and egg" in that context.

Some would suggest me, as an accountant, is merely another example.

I would defend my professional position with the idea that too many business functions fall with in the ambit of accounting not to see it as a separate and specific line function.

Strident line managers, however, would suggest the only reason accountants are needed is because, as far as the game of business is concerned, they (the accountants) invented a scoring system which was so complex that they need to interpret it continuously for the real "players".

Either way, nice to agree.

>>Either way, nice to agree<<

Absolutely. And I know the value of an accountant who sees himself as part of the business, and not apart from it.

But let's not start on IT. We'll be here all night.