I feel like HR departments have great potential to serve the business interests but are currently veiled as a rudimentary compliance function. By applying uniform recruitment principles isn’t there a risk that they fill a business with lemmings. Here are several of my experiences with these restrictive departments.
My first ever post-articled job was working as a financial contractor for a large multinational. The terms of the contract were pretty simple. It was a monthly contract (probably because the company was uncertain of the roles longevity) that was renewed on a rolling basis. I had to prepare time sheets and days that I was on leave meant I would not get paid for those off-times. It was frustrating and I read the Basic Conditions of Employment act specifically around contract work and came across several legal precedents where a contractor who works in my manner, with continual contract renewal is deemed to be an employee and has rights as such. Armed with this information I enquired via the HR channels if this might apply here and the response was laden with disgust and anger at my seeming ungratefulness for working there. I was taken aback at the stark juxtaposed reply to such a simple query. Does this HR not want to comply with legislation targeted at fair HR practices? I left the matter at that and did not escalate it in fear of reprisals. A complicit lemming was created.
The next incident I had with HR was related to my annual KPI assessment. I had worked for the organization for about 1 year and 5 months and my manager had asked me to provide extensive evidence supporting my evaluation of how I should be rated. The enormity of the task was unbelievable. I had to prepare a file that contained every report/excel spread sheet/white paper I had ever worked on. If I had done any cross-departmental work, even if it was delivery of documents I had to ask the receiving departments’ manager to write a review of my tasks’ performance. It took 3 weeks to put this mammoth file together and thereafter was entitled to begin my KPI assessment with my direct manager. We discussed how I fared in performance of my duties and what my strengths and areas for development could be and where I fell short of my deliverables, etc. In the 3 hour long meeting I supported my claim to be rated slightly above average. The manager dismissed this and said according to the assessment policy I had been employed for only 8 months of the performance cycle and thus will be allocated a score of zero.
Sidebar: Perhaps you might have indicated this to me prior to me irritating cross-departmental managers with their reviews of my dress code and document delivery times.
So off to HR I leapt, hoping for further clarity on this. My case being that I had worked for over a year and the fact that it overlapped performance start and end dates should not be a determinant in my rating. At the very worst, they could pro-rata my rating. Their argument was that the policy is set in stone and I should not ruffle a few feathers to unduly beneficiate myself. A pushover lemming is born.
By now, I gave a wide berth to all manners of HR and attempted to do whatever is necessary to avoid confronting these reprobates. I kept my nose clean and worked hard and the following year achieved a stellar rating with the manager I was working for. So stellar, in fact, that it was noticed by HR. They didn’t so much as say it, but they implied that God himself could not have achieved this rating and thus they believe the rating needs downward mediation despite evidence to the contrary. A Second-hand lemming is made.
In my final days at a company I was asked to recruit my replacement and HR would be party to this decision. We selected appropriate candidates and began the interview process. One candidate was adept at the tasks to be delivered and spoke comfortably with ease at his understanding of the required and how he has done these tasks before and his proficiency in the systems we use. He seemed like a great fit, demonstrating his on-the-ground capabilities, and came off as very humble and unboastful. Another had excellent academics but knew nothing of the systems, processes, tasks and related deliverables. In our private discussions we deliberated on these two candidates. The one demonstrated capability and the other capacity. I rooted for capability. They hired capacity citing humility and modesty were not good traits in back-office candidates. Disheartened I left.
I once went for a job interview. They were looking for a Chartered Accountant who could perform a series of routine and repetitive daily/monthly tasks. I dread roles such as these with a cold fervour, but went to the interview nonetheless. They asked if I could perform something called a journal entry. Now for the lay person, a journal entry is an entry into the accounting records to capture a transaction. There are two sides to this called a debit and a credit. It is the basis upon which accounting was birthed and is a relatively simple task to execute but is mundanely boring. The HR representative supplemented words such as “Disruptor” and “Innovator” to this task is such a cursory manner I honestly believe she had vaguely read about these concepts in a magazine and was using it to gauge my suitability. I replied that journals are a staple accounting input and disruption to this process is, well sort of, limited. You could condense, amalgamate, or consider their relevancy but circumnavigating them might constitute a breach of internal controls. I was declined the post as I disrupted their “disruptor” role.
I sometimes wonder about these organizations and what damage HR inflict from within. My experiences have left me feeling that HR sides with their bastardised version of the organization. They have a narrow focus on what human capital a business really needs. Their independence is compromised as they have long working relationships with requesting managers and capitulate to them. A manager’s biases toward hiring like-minded and similar lemmings flows through to HR who then screen individuals on this basis to satisfy that short-term request. Eventually departments get filled with complicit uniform individuals who cannot deal with unpredictable variability. Innovation cannot succeed where there is no diversification of talent (even though HR would have ensured diversification of race, gender and colour). When everyone looks west, a threat from the east can easily be missed. The robustness of that department is restrictively limited and it will laboriously eke feeble outputs to the business. I feel as though HR miss great opportunities to fundamentally shift the business but are somehow compelled to act in a curbed extent. In the extreme, a whole company can be composed of lemmings and then left to wonder…..with so many people why haven’t we succeeded yet?