Having been quite exposed to issues of employee unionisation as well as working on employee engagement projects have made me begin to wonder about the position of human resources department in every organization.  What is the differences between Personnel Department, Human Resource Department or the more comtemporarily named Human Capital Division or Talent Management Department?

There are indeed some articles and many journals written about HRD which defines it as nothing more than a name change - “old wine in new bottles”.  While that may be true for HR in many organizations, the first question we need to ask ourselves as HR professionals is “who do we represent?”

During the good old days where most business organizations revolves around plantation, manufacturing, construction and maybe retail; most of the jobs created are rather highly labout intensive.  Thus, the scientific management applies where the longer the hour an employee work the more he/she can produce.  This also explains how “work hours”, “clocking-in and out”, “annual leave” all became a measure of employee commitment and productivity which is still very much practiced today (something that I never agreed to).

Also, the work of Personnel Department is about maximizing output of employee by putting in place the right process and procedure.  Other responsibilities of this department include payroll, compensation and benefits (came later), leave tracking, recruitment and much of the highly administrative functions.  The more “evil” functions are such as disciplinary actions and retrenchments.  All these are task in which the department work in favour of the management.

While much have changed over the decades especially with the introduction of knowledge workers (working long hours no longer mean more productivity since much of the work is no longer labout intensive), the administrative functions of the Human Resource Department has not changed much (yes, you can argue that computers have taken over some of the work but isn’t data entry administrative too?)  This has caused the department to continue operating the way it used to be for decades although times have changed.  Also, since most HR professionals are exposed to the entry level HR jobs in the administrative arena, the “whip” have always been seen as the righ tool to use; and the management is seen as the “boss”.

The issue faced by such structure today is that employees are becoming more knowledgeable, therefore more vocal and more rebellious.  Employees are becoming more aware of their rights and is no longer afraid of the “whip”.  It is the “carrot” that gets them motivated and truly engaged.  While constantly pushing them hard does produce short term results, the employee no longer strive for the survival of an organization.

Since employees are becoming more demanding and feeling unrepresented (with the HR still maintaining the mindset of representing the management), it then triggers the thought of union formation within organizations.  The truth behind the formation of unions is that employees would like a representation that could speak on behalf of them to the management - something which could have easily been done by the human resource department if not tightly controlled by the management.

Thus, to go straight into the answer, I believe that HR should remain a strategic partner of the management by providing sound advise and executing policies; not mere implementors to carry out management directives.  The HR head should position himself as the representative of the people and fight for employees’ rights in any policies tabled in management meetings.  While most business division leaders will focus on maximizing profits, the HR leader will need to focus on maximizing motivation by being a “sensible union leader” of the employees (the voices of all employees).  This will eliminate the need for any formation of unions.

Final answer - 30% representing management; 70% representing employees

** If you’re not a HR professional and a sales person or consultant instead, try to map this to the dilemma of representing your client or your organization.  It brings the same results.

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Tags: carrot and whip, employee loyalty, engagement, hr, talent management, union

This entry was posted by Clayton J.C Tan on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Human Resources, Leadership & Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.