Never thought I would find myself agreeing with Bill Ralston – or at least hardly ever, but his column in this week’s Listener, where he says that ‘most of what Human Resources departments do is ludicrous” caught my eye.
Ralston says that
HR people are the new corporate shamans, weaving their spells to improve business outputs to the detriment of any real humantity
He describes some HR tools – psychometric testing for new employees, the setting of KPIs, the annual employee engagement survey, and most insultingly of all – the “exit interview” – even where a worker has been sacked.
I don’t want to denigrate HR people. It’s important to have competent and capable Employment Relations practitioners among firms and unions.
But the worst mistake HR people make is thinking that they are the voice for their employees. They’re not and that’s where I think this whole fad has gone horribly wrong.
Someone I met recently observed that he had just attended a conference with 1200 employment lawyers and HR specialists. This intrigued me.
When I first started working as a rookie union organiser in the late 1980′s, disputes were negotiated between hands-on lay people. It would have been hard to find 120 employment law specialists and HR people, let alone the thousands that are out there today.
Ironically, the National Government’s Employment Contracts Act (ECA), which lasted a decade in the 1990′s, was designed to bring so-called freedom and individual choice to the workplace contributed to this. It spawned a whole new growth industry.
It promoted individualism over collectivism and a “contractual relationship”; it was regulation-lite with words like “freedom” and “choice” prominent in the ideological language of the time (sound familiar?). What regulation there was shifted from collective to individual workplace relationships and a deliberate undermining of unions as representatives of working people.
I was in the thick of that change, so am reasonably well qualifed to say that this contributed to individual employees resorting to employment institutions and law as the only source of protection left to them, often through bargaining agents, lawyers or no-win-no fee advocates. That was the only power they had.
The abolition of national awards under the ECA exposed the weakness of employment entitlements, and as more workers were removed from collective bargaining, the demand grew stronger for minimum conditions to be legislated for by the State. This, along with other change, has significantly contributed to the change in the employment relations landscape that we have today.
The minimum wage, for example, has assumed much more importance. It now affects hundreds of thousands of workers, because the terms and conditions that used to be set by negotiation between employers and their unions in their industry collapsed early in the 1990′s.
So “freedom” and “choice” led to the State being the “union” for many workers.
Labour made changes with its Employment Relations Act. It seemed radical at the time. But we know today that it isn’t delivering on its objectives.
If we are serious about productivity increases, health and safety improvements, skill development and international competitiveness, we must find a way to get over low pay, long hours and employers (including HR) as the owners of all the answers. Surely we want to harness the ideas and capabilities of those who perform the work as well?
Toe in the water and interested in your views.
Good post, agreed!
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It never ceases to amaze me that some people think power for workers = low productivity. I’ve never worked overseas, so have no experience of other countries’ approaches. I’ve had few line managers in NZ who have truly supported and developed staff. And I’m sure I’m not alone in having many times wondered just what on earth senior management thought they were doing when they decided X or Y or Z. Laissez-faire management is preferable to active mis-management, but when you have a cooperative work culture, where workers are part of the decision-making and valued in a monetary and cultural sense, that’s awesome.
I finally watched Made in Dagenham last night. I was really struck by the Ford senior manager who was flown over to the UK (can’t remember his name, Toby from West Wing) and his incredibly stupid approach to management which was basically to try to crush the spirit of workers. He really did think they were lesser beings. Sadly I think his modern equivalents feel the same. As if they are where they are, earning big money and wearing flash clothes, because they are better human beings.
Hi Darien, good post, important coversation to be having.
HR shouldn’t be seen as all bad – a good HR practioner should be encouraging a strong culture of professional development – not just for the business, but for the good of the individual employee and their career development and for the improvement of productivity and education in NZ.
Unfortunately, much of HR in NZ practice appears to be a mix of the ‘personnel’ (the traditional administrative duties of HR) and an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff approach that deals with legal battles after they have occurred (so a reactive not proactive approach).
It never ceases to amaze me at how many business owners and managers talk about unions as if they are somehow aiming to destroy the business. A better approach is for the unions to be working with the business and vice versa to be achieving good outcomes for business and workers. A good example of this is health and safety, where overseas research shows that worker participation in health and safety can lead to lower rates of accidents and incidents.
Also, unions can deliver better outcomes for women. Research from the states shows that women don’t negotiate, and women that DO negotiate may be less likely to be hired in the first place (compared with men who are MORE likely to be hired if they negotiate aggressively). Women are better at negotiating on behalf of others whereas men are better at negotiating for themselves. When you combine this with the pay equity problems existing in traditional work areas for women you can see the importance of strong unions for women workers – many of whom are sole bread winners for their families.
In my view, there is something missing from our current set-up; the traditional tripartite approach where government worked with unions and industry to set fair rates and conditions. And there’s no reason why modern agreements can’t also have flexibility for workers and businesses included within them.
In short, it should be about business, unions (workers) and government working together for the good of all, not against each other.
I was recently involved in a restructure and regrettably one of the union organisers was so entrenched in getting the best outcome for a few members rather than striving to protect the services that were being destroyed. Our HR are basically ‘tits on a bull’ – unable to maintain confidentiality, unable to follow process and leaving a lot to be desired.
With regard to Julie’s comment; there was a lot of work done in the 80′s on participative decision making – where employees were actually asked to be involved in production processes. The research showed two things
1) Staff who were involved held managers and the company in higher regards.
2) Whilst productivity didn’t necessarily increase, the build quality of products and job satisfaction improved.
It never ceases to amaze me at how many business owners and managers talk about unions as if they are somehow aiming to destroy the business.
Really?
It never ceases to amaze me at how many union reps and executives talk about employers as if they are somehow aiming to destroy the workers.
Julie – you realize that that character in Made in Dagenham was a fictionalization of the real events, right?
You sure you should be taking your policy cues from the movies? Maybe instead you should be focussing on what your relationship is like with your employer; I certainly know that mine is nothing like your Hollywood inspired caricature.
Hey Reid, there will always be some on both ‘sides’ with entrenched views that the other is fundamentally bad. But in my experience I’ve met far more anti-union business people than I’ve met anti-business unionists.
The point I was making was removing the ‘taking sides’ and actually working together for the good of all. What’s good for workers doesn’t have to be bad for business and vice versa
A strong Union movement was destroyed by people like the Cooks and Stewards, Seamen, Boilermakers, Wharf Workers, who had put themselves offside with the general poulation by their actions always being designed to inconvenience others. Reasonable Unions together with reasonable employers create a harmony which was never going to be achieved under the old Trade Union regime.
@ reid, you need to get out more.
@ The Baron, just because the character Rita O’Grady is a composite, a common device in story telling, does not mean the contemporary narrative of the film is not accurate. Take the old Wall Street movie, for instance. There are plenty of shallow, hollow, folks who actually became Gordon Gecko in their own minds. Some are still around today, still causing havoc.
Thanks for the clarification Rachel. The point I was making is that one’s perception obviously depends on the circles you move in, for I have never ever met a single anti-worker business person, apart from a few bullies, but that’s different, that’s not policy design in order to facilitate anti-workerism. I’ve met plenty of anti-union business people, but that’s not the same thing as being anti-worker. If you make a mistake and conflate the two, that’s an indication your view is distorted and not objective. I’m not saying that’s what you do, I’m only saying if one did do that, it would indicate a non-objective perspective.
You see the same thing in the attitude particularly of young police officers. Because nearly everyone they meet is a crim, some of them seem to think that everyone is.
Don’t worry Baron, I’m not basing my policy cues on a character in a movie, but instead on my experience as a worker (since I was 13, with a break for illness in the 2000s), a union organiser (last seven years), and a manager (for 18 months). I’ve done a leadership/management course and some reading too around those roles. I’m not an expert, but I do have some expertise and relevant experience. Sadly I have seen too many real life managers with attitudes like those espoused by the Ford manager in the movie.
Ultimately work is a cooperative activity. But too often it is managed in a way that does not encourage cooperation, between workers, between management and workers, etc. Imho the quality of management in NZ is quite poor. How many times do employees have to wear the consequences of bad management? Whitcoulls is one recent example that comes to mind – it is the retail workers on the literal shop floor who have lost terms and conditions and who may lose their jobs, not the management, despite the fact that it is the latter who made mistakes, not the former.
It has always facinated me that the unionists simutaneously oppose and advance the mechanistic metaphor in work. They bleat about disparity and conditions and all the while are seeking to impose defined breaks, grades, seperation and demarkation.
While they bemoan the effects of Taylorism (namely the removal of the artisan class and deskilling of work), they advance it (by seeking limitations and presecribing the nature of work).
And I should have added HR-drones into that mix as well, for their inherent fucntionist paradigm serves to cripple organisation creativity, limit diversity, and treat people as cogs.
Most every HR ‘inititive is either going to impose a managerialist paradigm and disempower employees, or try and undo the effects of their previous ‘inititive’ which just did that.
How many times have you seen a HR-initiative that annoyed people or drove them away from casual networking and attacked comradere, to which HR then followed upwith some lame ‘team-building’ excercise?
The only time we ever saw the HR team was when someone was getting , as we called it “Gassed” We referred to them as Mr & Mrs Death…
And that was at a large multinational co. you just had to feel the love…
In Australia the new minimum wage is $19.40, I believe.
It’s fine to be individual in your thinking but important to have a like-minded group to back you up when you need it. Sadly, with unions so weakened deliberately by NAct, the freedom of the individual is now gone; the individual is powerless against the union of the rightwing.
When Ralston writes an opinion piece about how useless and vacuous opinion pieces are, and are no substitution for actual journalism, I might applaud him.
I sometimes wonder if HR is just the invention of Boards and CEO’s to take the brunt of anger when they decide to cut wage and salary earners?
Jum, the Australian minimum wage was raised to $15.51 – which amounts to an extra $19.40 per week.
I don’t know if Australia is necessarily a great one to emulate when it comes to employment relations. Australians seem to very much have a “work to rule” mentality – New Zealanders have a more co-operative approach.