Is HR Part Of The Team?

Welcome to Discuss HR, the HR blog written by Human Resources UK. 

I hoped you enjoyed last week’s guest blogger series, we shall be having another in August.  In the meantime we’re back to normal and we welcome back Wendy Mason who follows her previous post with a very interesting question about HR. (Ed Scrivener)

Is HR Part Of The Team?

As a civil servant, independent consultant and coach, I’ve worked with a number of large corporate organizations.  These have been right across the spectrum; from departments at the centre of Whitehall, to large voluntary organizations and on to private sector organizations that had the strongest commitment to making a profit for their shareholders.  And in all those organizations, at one point or another, I worked with, or otherwise encountered, their HR departments.

Now, some of those HR departments (in both private and public sectors) were outstandingly good at what they did. And some were not. 

But, what I would say about all of them is that somehow they stood a little apart.  The culture within the HR department was somehow different to that outside in the rest of the organization. Sometimes this difference was quite striking.  It was not always obvious that those in the HR department were actually working to the same agenda as those outside. At the same time, though, I was hearing HR managers complain bitterly about their lack of influence over operational managers.

Now, although my career has included stints working within HR, most of it has been outside. And a good part of my work has taken me into operational management.  I believe I was always a manager who cared about the well-being of their people.  I cared, as well, about working within the requirements of the law in terms both of employment law and Health and Safety.  But there were times when I had to make some very tough decisions.

I managed a large group of operational staff in a government department through a number of rounds of cuts and I led the same group through an early, and to some extent experimental, experience of “market testing”.  Throughout that time and in part because I had worked in HR, I wanted to engage with my HR colleagues. I needed their advice and support. But, in all honesty, I didn’t find the experience rewarding.  Somehow, the agenda of the HR team didn’t seem to be the same one that I had to work to.

I mention this now because, as a coach, I have clients in the public sector who have to go through some of the same challenges that I faced. And guess what? They are reporting some of the same issues that I encountered when they look for help and support from their HR departments.

Now I don’t know what the HR departments’ view of this would be.  Nor what the solution is to getting better communication between HR managers and operational managers. But I do know that if we are to ride the waves of current economic challenges with minimum casualties, we need to improve the quality of the debate and the discussion.

Read about Wendy and our other authors here

*****

Discuss HR is the HR blog written by members of Human Resources UK, the 10,000 member strong LinkedIn group dedicated to the HR professionals in the UK.  Discuss HR is published twice weekly and looks to take an insightful, informative and sometimes irreverent view on the world of HR – all with the purpose of generating a discussion.

*****

If you would like to be a guest writer for Discuss HR, you can find more information here.  Our next guest writer week is the week commencing 26^th August.

Any source