I was watching a pretty terrible television programme on Netflix one morning while on the spin bike. It’s all about three girls working in New York for a magazine company in their early twenties, trying to make a success of their career. Of course, as normally happens in these teen dramas where the people are stupidly beautiful, stupidly made up despite them having “just woken up at their new boyfriends house” and stupidly successful, something must go wrong for them to realise just how brilliant and wonderful they really are. And in this particular episode, the young woman receives a text message from her boss asking her to meet her at a strange address at 6pm. Her reaction? She says “Oh god it’s HR. HR are going to fire me”.
And it hit a nerve.
This isn’t the first time either. I was watching a fictional murder mystery programme set in Northern Ireland where a cop is the murderer. HR are involved again; perhaps ironically this time as the “police” completing the investigation into the supposed misconduct.
It got me really thinking.
What is the identity of “HR”? Why does it annoy me so much when people assume that HR are just there to hire, fire and discipline?
From the two televised examples, no wonder HR perpetually has a bit of an identity crisis of it’s own. How is our identity displayed in the world of media? Needless to say in anything I’ve watched, it’s never been painted in the way I perceive it operating in that world every day.
But it’s not just the external world of the media which will always exacerbate the extremes of identity to make a point. It happens within businesses too.
My partner, Sam, would openly admit that his perception of what HR is has shifted significantly since he met me. He used to think (and probably still does a little) that all I do is payroll and recruitment, or had to get involved when someone was in trouble. Needless to say, that’s likely because his experience of HR at a rather large global financial services business he used to work for was just that. He got in trouble a little bit too much and enjoyed getting paid in a sales role… what else was HR for?
I’ve worked with numerous Managing Directors, CEOs and Permanent Secretaries who simply think that HR is there to fix something. And to a point they are right. I am there to fix the issues; without the basics, the value add is an unhelpful distraction. If you don’t pay people right and on time, of COURSE a discussion about culture, leadership development, talent, behaviours fall by the wayside… But so much of the time the basics aren’t right, so the identity of HR never shifts, because it is the only experience people have of what we do as a profession.
In psychology, an identity crisis is a failure to achieve ego during adolescence. Those who emerge from this stage with a strong sense of identity are well equipped to face adulthood with confidence and certainty. Those who fail to achieve a cohesive identity — or as the theorist Erik Erikson states who experience an identity crisis — will exhibit a confusion of roles, not knowing who they are, where they belong, or where they want to go. This sort of unresolved crisis leaves individuals struggling to “find themselves”.
Does that sound familiar?
How often do HR have to fight to have a seat at the table?
How often have you seen “HR” change their identity through language to try and reshape their strategic input to the business?
People, Culture, Talent, Diversity, Personnel, Employee Experience… these terminologies are seeking to try and rearticulate the value add of HR through a change in identity, in a bid to justify to the business who they are and where they want to go and how the business can help them to achieve that.
It felt poignant, having written my previous chapter on my own and organisational identity (see chapter 5), that I also work in a profession where you have to continually justify your identity to prove your worth. I couldn’t have picked a harder challenge for myself as a perpetual self-doubter!
But it’s also something I am so utterly passionate about as a professional in what I see as THE most important function in a business.
Whatever you want to call it; HR, people, culture, organisational development, engagement.. your people are your most valued assets. It’s a well-coined phrase and makes me feel uncomfortable to call a human being an ‘asset’, like a building or a car, but if we look deeper in essence it says you will be nowhere without your people delivering the product, the service, the marketing, the sale, the revenue. And yet so many businesses regularly question or berate the requirement and need of a function that focuses on just that…
Why? Why do so few businesses take our function so seriously?
I’d argue it is because of the conflicting identity of the profession. The continued debates of ‘the changing role of HR’. I wouldn’t say the role has changed; it’s really quite simple. Our identity in organisations is finally becoming more valued and we’re able to operate in a space the organisation didn’t recognise it needed (or wasn’t willing to listen).
I talked of human leadership in Chapter 3; it’s 2021 and we are ONLY just starting to talk holistically about the need to provide a human experience to our people at work.
Scary thought huh?
The same goes for HR/People/Culture — we are finally starting to see a shift in identity of what as a profession we can really enable in a business. No we might not have the ease of numerical tangibility of delivering $XX revenue — many people practitioners reading this will no doubt connect to my continued frustration of finding it hard to justify the commerciality of a ‘people’ practice (one for another day, it really shouldn’t be, and isn’t, that hard). But it does feel, finally, like the identity of HR is moving away from the hire and fire mentality I saw on those TV programmes the other morning.
Perhaps the pandemic has had something to do with this. Our human fragility was questioned in a way we’d not experienced in my lifetime. It made us stop and think about our individual and collective purpose; I asked myself many times “What am I on this planet for?”.
And the same applies to organisations. So many of us sat down and thought… “What am I spending my time doing? How am I making a difference?”. The new concept of ‘key worker’ in the UK created a two tier hierarchy of roles that were ‘key’ and those that were not.
I felt it in my own world. My sister is a psychiatrist in London, feeling first hand the pressure on the NHS system around her. My mother a speech therapist in Kent, seeing the fundamental impact a lack of schooling and contact to enable effective child speech services to those children most in need. And then there was me, my partner Sam and my father, sitting at our desks, hammering out work that were, really bluntly, just helping someone else to make a lot of bloody money.
This dichotomy shifted not only the identity of organisations but also the identity of the people function. So many blogs and articles I read highlighted talked about how HR was ‘finally’ transforming, coming into its own, taking this opportunity to highlight the function's value.
I hated every single one of them.
This wasn’t about an opportunity for HR — this was about a shift in identity in the organisation with our function that finally started to see that we were more than they first thought we were.
However, I’m not going to sit here and state that it’s all the organisation’s fault. That would be a falsehood.
As a function, we need to sit back for a moment and look and what our identity really should be in line with what the organisation needs. The ever expanding role of the function doesn’t help — once we really were just payroll and recruitment. We are required to offer inputs on high level business guidance and leadership on defining the very future of work. Helping organisations make a move from traditional, rigid systems to new agile organisational structures. We are reimagining the way we work after the pandemic, as well as continuing to respond to the ever-changing landscape of furlough, no furlough, lockdown, no lockdown. We are becoming the trusted source of information over any other; recent data has shown that individuals trust organisational messages more than they do the media or a politician.
That’s a heavy weight to have on your shoulders.
And yet we also have to remember to do what is commonly termed “the basics”. Yes that does mean payroll, hiring, firing, redundancies, attraction, retention, performance management, reward, systems management (and implementation), analytics…
No wonder our identity is being challenged. We are both utterly confused by what we need to focus on as the role gets bigger and bigger, but expectations and completely conflicted dependent on (in my experience) the individual’s own experience they’ve had with an HR team.
It feels to me like HR is having an identity crisis — both of itself and its perception by and of others.
And literally as I type, an email flies into my inbox from one of my regular newsletters saying “Experts warn while the pandemic has increased awareness of good people management, undervaluing the profession could cost employers talent”.
I don’t believe the pandemic has increased awareness of good people management; I believe it’s increased awareness that we have been so damn absent from it that HR is only finally now coming out of the identity box of “admin” to being a true, strategic partner to the business.
Needless to say there’s something in it about the capability of the function itself to shift that perspective. Why haven’t we achieved this before? Why did it take a pandemic to truly see the value of a function across the country and the globe?
Because identity is powerful.
The creation and maintenance of identities are guided partly through perceptions of oneself, other people, and situations that guide it.
The situation has dictated HR should play in a certain space, just like on that TV show. The perception of the people around you reinforces that space you play in. And in the end it is a self fulfilling prophecy — your perception and thus identity of yourself as an HR professional is to play in the ‘how can I help’ camp. The ‘I’ll do anything camp’. Rather than identify and capture the strategic need of the business and park all the other crud that may well sit in the HR space (because it is a lot!).
When you manage change, you don’t come up with a list of 50 things that you need to do. You won’t remember them, you won’t value them, and 47 of them are likely to have a minimal impact for the effort exerted.
So just like change, HR should think about its top 3 priorities and how that enables the company’s strategic direction, AS WELL as thinking about the identity they want to have in the organisation. That could be getting the basics right and there is nothing wrong with that requirement if that it what the organisation needs.
Remember, identities are transient, they change… HR can do the same as the identity of the organisation shifts.
I probably didn’t intend this chapter to be quite such a cathartic experiment in vocalising my irritation and sadness at the perception in the world of my trade and the way we self perpetuate it. If I’m completely honest, sometimes I question why I do what I do, because deep down I’m ashamed to say I work in HR when I talk to people. That’s a sad state of affairs for someone who is so passionate about it.
But it was that which made me realise the need to do something about it; if there is nothing else I achieve in my career, I want to shift the identity of HR in those I surround myself with to realise it’s value. It is everything they know already, no doubt, but it is so, so much more, with more power to match.
We can put on our different HR faces and identities, just like I can with Meg down the pub and Annie on a bad day.
So, please, let’s start somewhere.
Think about your HR identity — what do you want it to be? And just go with it…
