HR: More grey and crunchy than pink and fluffy
Posted on November 30, 2017 by Karen Hennessy-Coles, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.
Something for those who have ever worked in a HR department or those who are considering it as a career.
I was at a career fair a couple of weeks ago, when one of the attendees I was chatting to said that she’d like to work in HR. ‘Ahh really I replied, HR is my profession, been part of that world for 20 years! What do you want to do in HR’.
She looked a bit blank and said ‘oh I don’t know, but I’d like to help people’. I smiled politely and explained that HR wasn’t necessarily about helping people. In fact there were some very ‘crunchy’ bits to HR. She looked quite taken a back by this and understandably asked what I meant by ‘crunchy’.
So I explained that much of the operational work which HR can be involved in (as a generalist) can be tough and unpopular. For many roles you actually need to be pretty resilient to work in HR. Recruitment and Learning & Development are probably the areas which are viewed as being the ‘most helpful’. However even here you are informing people that they haven’t been successful at interview or that the training they want isn’t being authorised. Yes, I know this should be a managers role but lets be realistic about it!
I worked at one company, which employed 13,000 where the most unpopular employee by far was the HR Director. I would go as far as to say he was positively hated by a large percentage of the workforce. He didn’t do anything awful, but he was the face of the poor pay awards, the higher expectations and the budget cuts, even though these would have been board decisions.
Having worked with a number of HR professionals who wanted to be helpful, it can quite frankly cause havoc. It’s quite difficult to be ‘truly helpful’ to both a manager and an underperforming employee. In my experience HR needs to be seen to be fair and as we know fairness to one person quite often means unfairness to another.
So let me go back to the ‘crunchy’ areas of HR, the areas which are probably seen as being pretty ‘unhelpful’, often by employees and sometime managers too. The investigations, the dismissals, the uncomfortable conversations, the restructures, the lack of pay progression. I recall in one job being called ‘hatchet woman’ by a manager with a great sense of humour, because I was the HRBP leading the transition programmes.
Those in HR know that HR professionals take the rap because managers (mainly those who aren’t likely to become effective leaders) can’t front the message they need to give themselves. Managers who would have greater respect and higher productivity from their teams if they ‘showed up’. But this is probably for a different post!
Following the career fair conversation I read a blog post which gave tips on how to start a career in HR. Many of the tips were useful, but there was that comment about HR being a suitable fit if you liked ‘helping people’. I gave my views constructively.
Don’t get me wrong HR professionals do ‘help’ people, we help employs although it may not always be viewed this way. We certainly help managers (although again it’s not always viewed this way!). However I believe that HR are there to help the company. We help the company to achieve it’s strategic objectives through it’s people.
For me a successful HR professional is someone who is passionate about business. Who can understand the business and the business objectives, someone who can work with the business leaders to enable them to deliver the strategy through their people.
However, as with everything it’s all about perception and maybe what I deem to be crunchy someone else will deem to be helpful. Although as I type this I’m not convinced!
