Why do we need HR?
If you are a freelancer then obviously I would say you don’t need HR, but the moment you start adding people to your company then the need of HR slowly arise. So what it actually shows is once you start growing, you need HR in your organization. This may be an answer to our question. And we can see multi million organizations with hundreds of people in HR department and this actually proves the above statement. But one thing that puzzles is, on the other side we have people like Ricardo Semler who doesn’t believe in HR and says he doesn’t need HR department. Semlers’ organizations have more than thousand employees and they are running successfully as well. He even questions the existence of Head Quarters, because he believes the moment you say HQ, it creates a bossy impression. This gives us an interesting outlook to see what HR should actually do.
Over a decade I have been a customer (or victim !!) to many HR organizations and if you ask me the customer satisfaction level, I would say it is very low. And I have seen many evolutions where Human Resources have changed to Talent Management and then to People Management and so on. Unfortunately I would say only the name have changed, but the attitude of most of the people remained the same. Once you are in HR department you will get a feeling that you are in a hard-core government organization where you don’t have any opportunity to speak, but just accept the service based on the officer’s mood. This is the same scenario almost everywhere as per my friends circle ! Obviously there are exceptional cases and I do respect those who provide an excellent service.
In many case what I have seen is that, HR is shrunk to just an administration department. I believe this is because of the short-term vision many companies have and due to this the functions of HR is limited to Sourcing, Performance, Retention and Exit. The whole outlook can be changed if we start thinking from a long-term perspective where HR can handle Succession Planning, Continuous Improvement, Leadership Development, Talent Scale-up and so on. One of the famous model in this line is Dave Ulrich Model where it explains HR should have mainly four quadrants – Administration, Business Partner, Change Agent and Employee Champion. And these four quadrants will relate to the people, process, strategic focus and operations of an organization. This is where HR can be pivotal and lead and organization to success.
I believe for many people it will be hard to digest Ricardo Semler’s concept of no HR, but please be aware that a bad HR is more dangerous that no HR.