What are Human Resources?

Thought for the day:

I have always thought that only a Human Resources department could come up with the phrase ‘human resource’. Let’s make machines out of people! It’s the way human resource department insists on things like ‘competency matrices’ that gets to me. And then they wonder why they end up recruiting the merely competent rather than the potentially great. The frame of reference is so narrow. For example, look at any recruitment ad now and you see an identikit formula for recruitment – good team player, ability to work under pressure etc. ‘Good team player’ is such a wide and meaningless phrase and even if we could agree what this meant would we want everyone in the team to share these characteristics? Surely teams are meant to have a wide diversity of souls, brains, emotions, and perspectives.

In the words of the great management guru Tom Peters – ‘I have met many human beings before but I have never met a human resource’. And I bet he hopes he never will…

I hear people can now get degrees in Human Resource Management. I just do not see where human resources add value to any business and that must be the criteria for the existence of any department. The best definition I ever heard of organisational effectiveness was a raison d’etre that seeks to ‘cut out systems and procedures that don’t add value in the eyes of the customer’. I need a lot of convincing that HR adds any value at all. They have even swallowed up training departments and this has been disastrous for training in organisations in the UK. The genesis of HR was the old payroll department. Isn’t it about time they reverted to that?