I was reading this commentary on HR practices basically not living up to expectations and thought I’d deliver my rebuttal. (Financial Express article here – pop-up warning if you follow the link)
Mr. Reddy argues that:
Veterans in the field have also noticed the scientific basis of HR practice giving way to ill-fitting fashion, fad and self-serving assertions. Thus, the industrial engineering-led job evaluation systems and incentive mechanisms have slowly disappeared from HR knowledge base, favouring a market mechanism that can be justified any which way. Manpower forecasting, modeling, cost-benefit-analyses and long term plans have been given up in favour of just-in-time tactics…
Despite two decades of the strategic HRM ideal, there is a lurking suspicion that the intervention of HR professionals continues to be mainly tactical to merely maintain hygiene. Some critics also wonder if HR practices of failed companies are any different from those being advocated as best practices. Perceptive people in the field also find much sleaze and snake oil being peddled as new ware, displacing the scientific basis of HR. Caught in a vortex of verbosity and dissipating scientific temper, some have taken a low-road to their own competence building.
Reddy, YRK, January 7, 2006. “Time to reconstruct HR practices, approach,” The Financial Express. Retried from http://www.financialexpress.com on January 27, 2006.
As usual (and I’m sure totally expected) I disagree. First of all, I’m not entirely sure that the “industrial engineering-led job evaluation systems” were a good thing at all. Viewing our workers as a commodity resource as any other machinery in a manufacturing plant is certainly not the best use of the human resource. While I acknowledge that the switch to “talent” may indeed be the latest fad, the talent theory is certainly a better approach than one of industrial engineering and stopwatch process design.
I also must heartily disagree when Reddy states that “manpower forecasting, modeling, cost-benefit-analyses and long term plans have been given up in favour of just-in-time tactics.” We can view today’s serious concentration on workforce planning as being more focused than any time in my memory of HR (admittedly not terribly long). I’d also like to point out that advances in HR technology are putting HR professionals in a place where true data based decision support is light years beyond what “scientific basis” of “modeling, cost-benefit-analyses” might have been available 3 or more years ago.
Perhaps Reddy is dissatisfied with the performance of HR in a specific industry. I’m thinking that in his microcosmic world (of perhaps manufacturing in a small Indian region) HR is failing. If we open our eyes and look around, I think HR has been at a turning point for several years. We are FINALLY fulfilling the expectations everyone has always had for us. This is our time.
