‘Sack the HR department!’
Why HR can be the source of disengagement,
and how to avoid – or fix.
FEBRUARY 2014
‘Sack the HR department!’
Why HR can be the source of disengagement,
and how to avoid – or fix.
Introduction
HR professionals have long believed that good people practices benefit the
bottom line. Research into employee engagement has now conclusively shown
this to be the case. Although HR professionals have welcomed this validation of
their role and many work actively to raise employee engagement in their organisations, the survey feedback analysed in research by Great Place to Work®
shows that HR departments in some organisations are not respected by staff
and are probably a cause of some employees’ disengagement. First published
in November 2013, this article highlights the problem and suggests ways that
HR departments may address it. This edition explores in more detail how HR
is perceived by the rest of the organisation and probes further a range of causes.
Background
Best Workplaces Programme
The UK’s Best Workplaces
Programme measures and identifies
the most high trust, high engagement
workplaces. Organisations who are
recognised (or ‘listed’) as Best
Workplaces include some of the UK’s
most forward-thinking employers
such as Microsoft, McDonald’s, SC
Johnson, Danone, Twinings and
Capital One.
Trust and Engagement
Great Place to Work® helps
employers raise levels of trust in the
workplace, thereby increasing
employee engagement. Higher
engagement leads to higher
individual performance and therefore
improved business performance as
has been reported in the
government’s 2009 ‘MacLeod’
report1 and the subsequent 2012
‘The Evidence’ report.2
Great Place to Work® conducts
research, one strand of which
involves mining its uniquely large
database of employee survey data
to identify best practice patterns of
people management and the
changing patterns of employees’
priorities and concerns.
2
©
For decades HR professionals have recognised the importance of following
best people management practices in order to increase individual and organisational productivity, performance and profit. In the last 25 years research has
been providing increasingly conclusive evidence to support HR’s view and the
Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has played a big part in
publicising research across the HR community. One of the most compelling
aspects of recent research has been the growing accumulation of evidence
about the effect that employee engagement has upon individual and
organisational performance. This is captured in the 2009 MacLeod report1
and even more succinctly and powerfully in ‘The Evidence’2 published in
November 2012. This demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that
higher employee engagement leads to higher individual and business
performance and therefore a stronger bottom line.
HR departments in some organisations are not
respected by staff and are probably a cause of some
employees’ disengagement.
HR key to improving engagement
HR has, potentially, a huge role to play in improving employee engagement.
HR professionals can, because of their behavioural science expertise, advise
1
MacLeod, D., and Clarke, N. 2009. Engaging for success: enhancing performance through employee engagement.
London: Department for Business Innovation and Skills. Crown copyright.
2
Rayton, B., Dodge, T., D’Analeze, G., Engage for Success, The Evidence. University of Bath School of Management. 2012.
2014 Great Place to Work® Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.
‘Sack the HR department!’
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Why HR can be the source of disengagement, and how to avoid – or fix.
managers on the kind of interventions most likely to secure worthwhile
improvements in employee engagement. Furthermore, they can bring their
professional expertise to bear to counter the tendency that some managers
have of reacting to disappointing survey results by launching a spin initiative
and an improvement programme confined to quick hits to try to convince staff
that they have heard what staff say.
Many HR departments have reorganised themselves
more strategically, positioning themselves as partners
to the businesses they support.
HR departments ought to have high credibility in seeking to improve employee
engagement to raise business performance. After all, over the last 15 years
or so HR departments have inflicted on themselves the pain of changing
fundamentally how they work; many have introduced new delivery models
to increase their influence on their organisation’s strategies, improve delivery
and cut costs. These new ways of working stem from the concept of
business partnering3 which was first discussed in 1997. The Business
Partnering model recognised that to be effective HR professionals needed to
integrate themselves more thoroughly into business processes and align their
day-to-day work with business outcomes.
In the business partnering model, there are four different types of HR function:
• Corporate HR professionals
Corporate HR professionals define corporate-wide initiatives and represent
the company to external stakeholders.
‘Sack the HR department
and replace them.’
• Embedded HR professionals
Embedded HR professionals work as HR generalists within organisation
units (business, function or geographic). They collaborate with line leaders
to ensure that their organisations deliver value to stakeholders by defining
and delivering competitive strategies.
• HR specialists
HR specialists work in centres of expertise where they provide technical
insights on HR issues such as staffing, leadership development, rewards,
communication, organisation development, benefits and so on.
• Service centres
HR professionals who work in service centres add value by building or
managing technology-based e-HR systems that enable employees to
manage their relationship with the firm. This includes processing benefit
claims and payrolls. These HR professionals may work inside or outside the
3
3
©
Ulrich, Dave, Human Resource Champions 1997
2014 Great Place to Work® Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.
‘Sack the HR department!’
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Why HR can be the source of disengagement, and how to avoid – or fix.
company. They deliver value to all stakeholders by reducing the cost of
processing employee information.
Some HR professionals have found the business
partner way of working challenging.
‘We can’t go to HR for
help because they kiss
and tell.’
The concept of business partnering as the way forward led to many HR professionals having to adapt to meet the challenges of operating as a business partner.
Whilst many HR departments have embraced the challenge of the business
partner model with great success, others are inevitably finding it more difficult;
in any change it is suggested that around 20% will be unsuccessful and research
shows4 that some HR functions are finding it a challenge. As well as business
partnering, HR functions went through other, less strategic changes, e.g. line
managers taking on more elements of the HR function such as recruitment,
onboarding, appraisals, etc. The downside was that often these activities
became more functional and less strategic and this is likely to be behind some
of the dissatisfaction expressed by employees. Line managers are not always
equipped with the tools and training to do those HR tasks effectively so the fact
that they are often poorly delivered is not necessarily the fault of the manager –
they may not even be aware that they were expected to do those tasks.
Likewise, it could be argued that it is the responsibility of HR to ensure that line
managers are aware of any HR elements of their role which is their responsibility
to deliver, and that they are able to do so effectively.
Many line managers are expected to take on HR tasks
such as recruitment and appraisals, but may not
always be equipped to do this effectively.
One of the adverse consequences of the changes in HR is that employees – and
HR employees themselves – are often confused about HR’s role in their
business. How important is the welfare function to 21st century HR? What is
HR’s role in maximising the productivity of the organisation’s human resources?
All these experiences may be reflected in the somewhat negative comments
from employees in our surveys.
What staff think about HR
Unfortunately HR departments are not always as successful in enhancing the
employee experience as they intend. Like public sector procurement depart-
4
4
©
Caldwell, R, Are HR Business Partner Competency Models Effective?, HRM Journal 2010
2014 Great Place to Work® Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.
‘Sack the HR department!’
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Why HR can be the source of disengagement, and how to avoid – or fix.
ments, HR departments in both the public and private sector attract a considerable amount of criticism from staff. If HR departments are seen in a negative
light by other staff, if they are out of touch, or if engagement in HR is low, the
HR department may contribute to disengagement elsewhere in the organisation. This will make it especially difficult for them to lead an organisation-wide
employee engagement improvement project.
Although it is not surprising that employee engagement surveys contain some
criticisms of HR in the light of HR’s central role in employee engagement, the
extent of the criticism is perhaps surprising. There are three types of evidence:
(1) The first comes from the comments that survey participants in the
Great Place to Work® employee survey write at the end of their survey.
Below are a few examples from our database5 of comments that employees
have written about their HR departments:
• ‘Sack the HR department and replace them.’
• ‘Bring HR back in-house so we can have a decent standard of service again.’
• ‘We can’t go to HR for help because they kiss and tell.’
• ‘Our HR make things up as they go along. We need a department of HR
professionals.’
‘Our HR make things
up as they go along.
We need a department
of HR professionals.’
• ‘Why can’t we have an HR information system that is useful to staff instead
of serving just the interests of managers?’
• ‘When you look at who gets promoted, you marvel at the extent of
favouritism and rule breaking that goes on. Why don’t HR stand up to
managers who want to break the rules?’
• ‘HR don’t follow their own rules about recruitment and promotion.’
Comments like these are not uncommon and they crop up in most surveys.
They show that HR policies, procedures and practices can be real irritants for
some staff which may damage employee engagement and potentially harm
business performance.
There is often a gap between how effective HR
departments think they are being and how this is
perceived by the rest of the staff.
5
5
©
Great Place to Work® has a large international database of qualitative and quantitative employee engagement data. The
database also contains complementary information provided by employers about their people management practices. So it is
possible to see how different people management practices affect employee engagement and read what staff say about them.
2014 Great Place to Work® Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.
‘Sack the HR department!’
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Why HR can be the source of disengagement, and how to avoid – or fix.
(2) The second source of evidence about the extent of criticism of HR
has emerged from post-survey focus groups. These sometimes show that
whereas people in HR departments feel that they are making a valuable and
strategic contribution to the business, people in the rest of the organisation are
highly critical of HR and rate their contribution as neither valuable nor strategic.
‘Why can’t we have an
HR information system
that is useful to staff
instead of serving just
the interests of
managers?’
From these two sources, we have evidence that employees in some organisations are critical of their HR functions. To understand this better we looked
to see if there is evidence that HR professionals have different opinions from
other employees.
(3) Evidence also emerges through comparing survey results for HR
departments with those of other departments. Opinions of staff in HR
departments often differ noticeably from those of other departments.
For example, in one organisation with a large HR department, HR staff agreed
with 20% more survey statements than staff in other departments. This large
disparity in perceptions was present across all parts of the survey. The people in
HR were out of touch. In such a case it is hard to see how HR, the department
that exists solely because of other people in the organisation, can perform their
work effectively when HR perceive the organisation so differently from other staff.
We have also worked with organisations where HR is one of the lowest scoring
departments. This might reflect the frustration HR professionals feel over the
disparity between the best practice they read about in other organisations and
the practices operating in their own organisation. Low HR survey results may
also come from the stress some HR staff in shared services roles suffer through
the criticism and all too frequent offensive treatment they receive over the
telephone. In either situation, the fact that HR is a low scoring department means
it is in no position to lead an organisation-wide employee engagement initiative.
It is difficult for HR professionals to take the lead in
engagement if they are perceived by employees as out
of touch.
Difference in views: HR and other staff
Differences between the views of HR and the rest of the organisation are not
always as easy to identify as in the cases above where the Trust Index for HR
is considerably higher or lower than that of other staff. Sometimes the differences are only apparent when the survey results of HR and other staff are
compared section by section or even survey statement by survey statement.
HR specialists should analyse their results in this way as it can reveal fascinating insights.
In a sizeable minority of organisations the views of HR specialists are quite
similar to those of other staff except in a particular area of the survey. A recent
6
©
2014 Great Place to Work® Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.
‘Sack the HR department!’
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Why HR can be the source of disengagement, and how to avoid – or fix.
study using survey data archived in our database compared the survey results
of HR against other staff in a sample of organisations with HR departments
employing 10 or more staff. In approximately half of the organisations, the
survey responses of the HR department were similar to those of other staff
across most of the survey but were different in a key survey area – pride. The
concept of pride covers pride in one’s work, one’s team and in the organisation. It is measured by a series of statements such as:
• ‘I feel I make a difference here’
• ‘My work has special meaning; this is not just a job’
• ‘I want to work here for a long time’
• ‘I am proud to tell others I work here’
‘Bring HR back
in-house so we can
have a decent standard
of service again.’
Where HR staff respond differently to other staff to these key statements, they
need to understand why. As this is not a universal HR experience, the causes
are probably contextual and linked to a mix of organisational, cultural and
interpersonal factors – therefore each HR group should undertake its own
analysis. To gauge the extent to which HR responses are similar or different
from those of other staff, it is useful to calculate the correlation coefficient6
between HR’s responses and those of other staff. A value of between 0.75
and 0.9 is normal and indicates similarity. In the cases referred to above
relating to pride, the correlation coefficient was around 0.5.
Our research identified some particularly large differences in the survey
responses of HR and other staff. In one very large organisation, the following
remarkable pattern appeared:
Table 1: differences in key survey areas between HR and other staff
Survey Dimension
Correlation coefficient, r
Credibility
r = 0.69
Respect
r = 0.69
Fairness
r = 0.89
Pride
r = 0.79
Camaraderie
r = 0.15
Note: anything between 0.75 and 0.9 is considered normal
6
7
©
A correlation coefficient (often written as ‘r’) measures the similarity between two (or more) sets of data. The value of r always
lies between 1 and -1. Two sets of data that are very similar (or highly correlated) will yield a value of r close to 1. If there is not
much of a relationship between the two sets of data, r will be close to 0. If the two sets of data vary inversely (when one is
high, the other is low, and vice versa – e.g. the outside temperature and sales of gloves) the value of r is close to -1.
2014 Great Place to Work® Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.
‘Sack the HR department!’
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Why HR can be the source of disengagement, and how to avoid – or fix.
As the table shows, HR staff responded to the survey in a similar way to other
staff across most of the survey but not in the area of Camaraderie. Here there was
virtually no similarity between HR responses and the responses of other staff.
Camaraderie is about work relationships and is measured by statements such as:
• ‘People care about each other here’
• ‘This is a friendly place to work’
• ‘When you join the organisation, you are made to feel welcome’
• ‘You can count on people to co-operate.’
‘You look at who
gets promoted, you
marvel at the extent
of favouritism and
rule breaking that
goes on. Why don’t
HR stand up to
managers who want
to break the rules?’
Without knowing more about the organisation concerned it is puzzling to know
why HR’s experience is so different from that of other people. The statements
included in the Camaraderie area relate to organisational culture. The
department concerned probably needs to study why this difference exists.
There is certainly no obvious case for creating a culture for HR that is different
from other parts of the organisation.
HR responses are often different to those of other staff
in key areas of employee surveys.
The HR paradox
But should the views of HR be similar to other parts of the organisation? This
is a big question. You could reasonably expect HR specialists to respond to
an employee survey – which covers matters that are of central importance to
HR – differently from non-HR specialists, just as finance department staff
would respond to a survey about budgeting differently from staff in other
departments. However, you could argue that if HR views differ too much from
those of other staff, then they are not identifying closely enough with other
members of the organisation. On the other hand, if they are too similar, HR
may lack the vision and motivation to drive change and improvement.
There is an interesting historical angle here too. Historically the roots of the
modern HR function lie in the welfare functions established in large industrial
organisations a century ago. Originally the role of HR was to promote the welfare
of employees but for a long time welfare, subsequently renamed ‘personnel’,
lacked influence in the boardroom because welfare/personnel staff were not
trusted by senior management because of their close links with workers. So
personnel staff were unable to achieve the improvements in welfare they wanted
and needed. In order to gain the influence they needed to bring about organisational change, personnel managers embraced the notion of professionalisation
championed by their professional body, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and
Development (CIPD) through which they hoped to enhance their organisational
status. Personnel managers were then able to increasingly gain access to the
8
©
2014 Great Place to Work® Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.
‘Sack the HR department!’
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Why HR can be the source of disengagement, and how to avoid – or fix.
boardroom by aligning themselves more closely with organisational and senior
managerial goals. The re-labeling of ‘personnel’ departments as ‘human
resources’ departments epitomised this change of focus and motivation.
‘HR don’t follow their
own rules about
recruitment and
promotion.’
This, then, is the HR paradox: that HR sought to gain greater influence in
organisations to promote the interests of employees, but to gain influence
they aligned themselves increasingly with management and consequently are
now less aligned with staff.
By aligning themselves closer to management HR are
now seen as less aligned with staff.
So in summary, Great Place to Work® trust surveys show that HR functions are
often criticised by non-HR colleagues and that HR professionals often hold
different views from non-HR colleagues. We also recognise that HR specifically
organised the delivery of HR in an attempt to improve the effectiveness and
efficiency of delivery, and that HR staff have increasingly aligned themselves
with organisational goals and the priorities of senior management to increase
their organisational influence. This now leads on to the question of: what can
HR do to raise employee trust and engagement?
What can HR departments do to improve employees’ trust and
engagement?
This final section outlines some actions that HR departments can take. It refers
firstly to the generic issue of fairness and then describes three case studies
where HR departments have taken initiatives to improve the services they
provide and improve the way they are perceived by staff. This has helped them
raise their credibility and authority in leading improvement projects to raise
employee engagement.
HR’s role in creating a fair workplace and building trust
The Great Place to Work® Trust Index© employee surveys show clearly how
important fairness is to staff. This is borne out by the way staff who are treated
unfairly or who witness unfairness often dwell on it and talk about it for weeks or
months. The kind of employee comments (above) indicate that people look to HR
to ensure that the workplace is fair. HR departments should focus their efforts on
promoting fairness and this will improve levels of trust across the organisation.
Trust Index Survey© results quite often show that employees don't think that
promotions are made fairly on merit. This is a big concern to staff and HR
have a real opportunity to help the organisation improve by ensuring that fair
policies exist and that they are followed consistently. The credibility of a good
policy is badly dented when, for example, the policy of advertising all internal
vacancies is not followed in particular cases.
9
©
2014 Great Place to Work® Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.
‘Sack the HR department!’
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Why HR can be the source of disengagement, and how to avoid – or fix.
Many HR departments work hard at overturning
disengagement with significant results.
The Great Place to Work® trust surveys indicate that in some organisations
backstabbing and politics are a significant issue. HR has an opportunity here
to facilitate the development of organisation values which discourage such
behaviour and of ensuring that the behaviour of people who act in such ways
is not rewarded by their being promoted.
Case Studies – how three HR departments improved in
response to employee feedback
‘Human Resources
claims to be the
advocate of
employees, wanting
to nourish and invest
in them, but they
have no structural
accountability to the
employees, so it's
all a sham.’ *
Organisation A – improving the reputation of HR. After reading survey
comments that were highly critical of HR, the HR department in Organisation A
began its own improvement journey by launching a customer service survey to
gain much more information about what staff thought about HR and wanted
from HR. This was a painful but transforming experience for HR which helped
them focus more closely on providing the types of services that people wanted.
They also made the crucial discovery that most line managers had neither
the skill nor commitment to act as people managers. They addressed this
by making line managers’ people management role less of a burden and by
introducing a management induction and training programme, the main
objective of which was to encourage managers to embrace the management
part of their roles and execute it professionally.
Organisation B – raising trust. In this organisation the Trust Index© survey
showed that managers were less trusted than they had been in the past.
A number of survey comments also suggested that HR should reassert its role
in leading the organisation’s training and development. With senior management
support, HR introduced an organisation-wide management development
programme to address the management behaviour issues. This has led to an
improvement in survey results and in HR’s reputation in the organisation.
Organisation C – raising fairness. The Trust Index© survey indicated that
there were serious problems with both performance management and
rewards. Many staff volunteered comments about the two systems. These
two inter-related systems were both managed by HR and HR decided to try
to improve the performance management system and the performancerelated pay systems because of the heavy criticism and also because both
are central to staff engagement. HR’s first step was to launch an employee
survey focused specifically on performance management and performancerelated pay to find out what was wrong with the current systems and what
staff were looking for. The new systems that HR introduced satisfied
*
10
©
This employee comment is not from our database but does demonstrate that criticism of HR is not uncommon.
2014 Great Place to Work® Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.
‘Sack the HR department!’
‘Unfortunately HR have
demonstrated how
ethically bankrupt they
are... They allowed and
'defended' an 80%
headcount churn in our
UK business. This is
unjustifiable, it made
no business sense
and took momentum
out of our business
effectiveness – the
complete opposite of
what anyone with the
slightest business
acumen would have
been trying to build and
in any other company
HR would have been
‘churned’ too.’ *
|
Why HR can be the source of disengagement, and how to avoid – or fix.
employees’ main requirements of being fair, impersonal and transparent. This initiative improved staff perceptions of HR as well as addressing
problems that had eroded employee engagement.
HR has been accused of not being accountable to
employees, and of siding with management.
Conclusions
Given its changing role, it is not difficult to see why HR has become the
champion of employee engagement in many organisations. HR has considerable power to influence engagement because of its role in managing pay and
benefits, training and development, staff communications, management
strategy and values and other people-related systems. The way HR functions
are delivered and the culture of the organisation (e.g. small friendly family team
or more traditional command and control culture) will also impact on the HR
function and delivery. To champion employee engagement, HR need to be
good role models of effective and efficient delivery. They also need to champion
employee engagement without offering to take the responsibility for this from
line management. If HR fail to deliver, staff are more likely to be critical of HR
and HR-led engagement initiatives may not succeed. Whilst some of the criticisms reported in employee surveys may be more of a perception than a reality,
they nevertheless still need to acknowledged and addressed.
If HR put their shoulders behind the drive to improve employee engagement,
they succeed in resolving the historical dilemma of improving the quality of
working life and at the same time improving organisational performance and
the bottom line.
*
11
©
This employee comment is not from our database but does demonstrate that criticism of HR is not uncommon.
2014 Great Place to Work® Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.
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