There is a lot of talk about the human factor in the workplace, and my opinion is that we will talk about it more and more as AI advances.
The more tasks that are entrusted to machines that were previously carried out by humans, the more the human factor will become central to performance, cohesion and innovation.
But there is still a gap between stated intentions and lived reality. You may say that I am repeating myself, but this is a shared observation and things do not seem to be improving over time. The proof of this is the recent APEC study ([FR] HR perception by managers) which tells us that for 81% of managers, HR is above all an administrativedepartment, that it is useful for their professional development for only 52% of them, and that it is useful for the development of their skills for only 49% of them.
These figures are still pretty bad, but they reflect a very real perception: HR is far removed from the concerns of day-to-day work and even struggles to demonstrate its value on subjects that are the basics of the profession.
Of course, I can be told that this is harsh, that this is not the reality everywhere (and thank goodness for that), but this is the average perception and, as the saying goes, “perception is reality”.
And yet, as another study showed, there is now an expectation that HR will do more and have a greater impact on the organization of work (The employee experience: a transformation lever at the service of performance).
And that’s where the problem lies.
In short :
- Increasing automation makes the human factor even more important, but a persistent gap exists between the discourse valuing the human factor and the reality experienced in the field.
- HR is perceived as being mainly administrative and disconnected from operational issues, struggling to demonstrate its usefulness in skills development and the quality of work.
- Despite strong communication around engagement and well-being, HR only marginally addresses the concrete daily friction that undermines employee efficiency and satisfaction.
- This situation reveals a broader problem: dilution of responsibilities for the employee experience, regulatory overload, and compartmentalization between HR and operations, to the detriment of sustainable performance.
- A transformation is needed towards a hybrid HR function, anchored in the reality of work, capable of diagnosing irritants, collaborating with teams, supporting managers and acting on the organization of work.
HR omnipresent in communication, absent in everyday life
HR discourse gives pride of place to notions of engagement, well-being, talent and culture. They steer the barometers, the recognition campaigns, the diversity policies and the training courses, and in this respect there is not much to criticize them for.
But when it comes to the quality of the actual work, they often have neither the control, nor the legitimacy, nor sometimes even the understanding of these issues (From employee experience to operational excellence: HR not so well equipped! and 2023 Employee Experience Barometer: the employee experience confronted with its contradictions).
They do not intervene, or intervene too late, on the subjects that wear them down on a daily basis: digital tools that waste time, uncontrolled information flows, extremely complicated processes (The organizational complication: the #1 irritant of the employee experience) that add to organizational debt (How to Tackle the Biggest Threat to Your Team’s Growth), conflicts of objectives between teams or even within a team, cognitive overload (Hyperconnectivity in the workplace: digital becomes a burden), transformation programs that do not change anything in their daily lives (Change and transformation need a new approach), catastrophic management (Is manager still a profession?) and I’m forgetting some.
Yet this is what the employee experience is all about, but not only if we consider, as I do, that it goes far beyond quality of working life and must have a very operational impact.
What employees want today is for us to deal with the everyday friction that prevents them from doing a good job and performing well in good conditions.
“Do I want meditation classes? Yes. But do they move the needle on the things that matter, that will really change the way an employee feels? No.” (Can companies actually help workers stay happy and healthy?)
The symptom of a deep organizational problem
Don’t get me wrong: this observation is not an accusation but a warning about the many excesses of contemporary organizations.
Firstly, an HR function confined to administrative, legal and institutional matters, often under-resourced to deal with substantive issues related to actual work. This is not a criticism because it must be admitted that the administrative and legal workload can become unbearable, especially in countries like France, and that HR departments do what they can with the resources they have. When they cannot do everything they would like to, they focus on the fundamentals.
Not a cove but it is still a problem of which HR is more the victim than the cause.
Then there is a dilution of responsibility for the employee experience, between HR, managers, business departments, IT tools… so that no one is really responsible for the “work that hurts”. And I’m not even talking about the gap between HR and operational issues at work.
Finally, there is an obsession with engagement and employer branding, which sometimes makes people forget that the best HR policy is first and foremost good work design (Exclusive: the (fake) Steve Jobs interview on employee experience and Is it heresy to put “people” and “operations” in the same sentence?) whereas the main lever for engagement is work design (Right fit, wrong fit).
For a people function centered on the reality of work
It may be time to get out of this paradox and create a hybrid, operational, field-based HR function (or rather a people function) that works with the teams on a daily basis and on the real irritants.
A function that:
- observes the real workflows and dysfunctions,
- collaborates with Ops to streamline, simplify and clarify (Just because work is invisible, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be improved),
- measures the workload and the mental and cognitive load (In the future of work the mental load is the new workload) and not just buy-in,
- helps to strike a balance between efficiency, well-being and sustainable performance conditions,
- intervenes upstream, not just in reaction to a deterioration or disengagement
- puts the role of the manager in its place and helps them to have an impact (What is managerial performance and its hidden face? Managers need more than an HRIS and What vision for a managerial information system?).
In short, a function that considers the organization of work as much as the individual, talent as much as the context in which it will be used in a work situation, because it is not right to put so much energy into attracting, developing and retaining talent only to see it go to waste once it is in an operational situation.
Bottom line
Don’t get me wrong: HR doesn’t need to be blamed, but helped and reinvented.
Let’s be clear: the HR function can’t do everything. What’s more, it is often caught between contradictory orders, political priorities and limited resources.
It is precisely for this reason that there is an urgent need to develop its scope, its skills and its place in the organization, not to make it a variable for adjustment but a lever for improvement and development at the heart of real work.
Alone or, ideally, by developing new internal partnerships to acquire the skills it lacks (HR and Operations: the only viable duo for driving employee experience and You don’t have to be HR to have an impact on the employee experience) and become the leader of a new approach.
Illustration: generated by AI via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
