Do We Need HR? Repositioning People Management for Success

In contrast to Sparrow et al.’s previous book Leading HR, this book has not been written specifically for an audience of HR practitioners in professional leadership roles within the HR function who are striving to understand better what it is to have a real business influence. This offering sets itself in a broader business and more strategic context and is positioned as providing significant insight into people management. The book is therefore aimed at people-orientated organisational leaders. In any business or organisation such individuals may, and in my experience often do, have a view on the answer to the somewhat controversial question for professionals in the field, “Do we need HR?” That view can be influenced by a variety of factors, perhaps foremost by their experience of the HR service and the value added by the function within their organisation.

Rather than seeking to quantify or qualify an answer to the question in this quite limited way, however, the authors set out to address a clear agenda. That agenda covers the people centricity of the business themes identified, the impact for HR and subsequently the potential rescoping, restructuring and refocusing of the function. It is in short a fascinating and hugely thought-provoking way in which to tackle the issues and for an experienced HR practitioner such as myself, it has refreshed and refocused my thinking on what seem to be the issues that matter most within today’s ever changing organisations.

The first chapter provides the reader with informative insights into current business contexts including an overview of existing CEO concerns extracted from the 2014 Gartner CEO and Senior Executive Survey. The key issues (technology and people) provide a degree of alignment with one of the central tenants of the book – that good, contextually pertinent and strategic people management provides competitive advantage. Furthermore the authors observe that conclusions drawn by the work and society programme in the 1980s on challenges facing the UK including workforce demographics, skills gaps, economic and technological impacts as well as shifting attitudes at work, fundamentally remain to be addressed. Chapter 1 provides the backdrop in terms of a macro context to the focus on specific organisational challenges in the next four chapters.

Chapters 2-4 narrate an excellent and timely reminder of specific issues facing organisations in today’s climate covering innovation, customer centricity and lean management. The offering of new ideas and fresh thinking in relation to customer centricity in particular was very welcome. The ideas challenged my thinking as a practising HR professional managing a large HR service team in respect of who are my customers, internal or external, or indeed a combination of the two as advocated by the authors. I also found myself working through the implications for both the products that we as a service and a corporate organisation wide function commission, develop and then deploy to our customers questioning are these products and services really customer centric, i.e. do they start and end with the customer’s perspective in mind?

Similarly, the key questions or “acid test” in ascertaining if your own organisation is truly innovative struck a chord. Working in an organisation where “innovation” is one of four key values, I was not sure of an affirmative response to questions related to training in business innovation, a lack of bureaucracy to enact new ideas or the systematic measurement of innovation across the organisation. Additionally, across each of these three hugely interesting chapters, there was an underlying question of the HR function’s knowledge of the concepts (perhaps further reinforcement of effective HR business partnering?) and associated theory as well as arguably more importantly, what these challenges actually meant for HR practice or content in organisations. These two areas also interfaced with what I discerned to be the key messages in Chapter 5 on “Managing beyond the Organisation” – the importance of an HR professional developing and sustaining knowledge of different organisational models as well as consequently what implications there were for the future strategy focus and design of HR functions.

The authors’ identification and handling of the key human resource management issues of engagement, health and well-being and fairness as well as talent management in Chapters 6 and 7, respectively were particularly well considered. I really valued the theoretical perspective presented on the concept of fairness and the useful reminder that “felt fair” means very different things to different individuals and can be contingent upon their personal circumstances, interplay with working life as well as role and position within an organisation. Similarly the comprehensive exploration of the theory associated with talent management provoked me to assess in those terms how talent management has been implemented within my own organisation. It was reassuring given that we are grappling with both the value added as well as next steps, to understand that this is a massively under-researched and evidenced field which to-date has not yielded many answers to the challenging questions asked on the impact of talent management.

The final chapter of the book attempts to draw together the narrative stretched across this complex and interesting quest for an answer to the question, “Do we need HR?” Both good and bad news is cited for the function. The good news is that a people centricity or focus is key to tackling the challenging issues faced by many businesses and organisations in today’s ever changing context. The purported bad news is that other organisational functions may attempt to encroach on traditional HR territory in this respect and in particular general management may seek to claim this arena. This potentially seemed incongruous with the opening chapter of the book which sought to position HR firmly and accurately back within the realms of a general management context and with the other chapters of the book where a compelling case was made for people management and possibly HR’s role within that. However, not in my view incongruous with a case for HR per se.

The reconciliation comes in the final chapter where there is a very clear acknowledgement that it actually does not matter where or by whom that territory is claimed; what is key is that the strategic business challenges faced by organisations are met and that organisations recognise the need to do so through the integration of cross-organisational activities which HR should be a part of. This moves beyond the more traditional dichotomy associated with the interplay between HR and general management, i.e. that competent general management should result in less capacity required within the HR function. What this positioning indicates is that the people management capacity and capability needed from across organisations is such that any additional capacity or capability either within or outwith the HR function can be usefully deployed to meet these challenges. A potential challenge for individual HR professionals and their collective group is to position itself as central to effectively joining all of this up.

The style and tone of the book made for challenging reading and conceptualisation in places, however I suspect this is much more connected to the complexity of topics covered rather than the writing. I think it was noticeable in places that the style and tone could alter, not within but between chapters but presumably this is the result of the book having three individuals contributing their expertise to it. The book’s length was of considerable benefit in respect of the target audience of key influencers within business. Additionally, the boxed case studies, soundbites and summary of key issues as well as a number of chapters containing succinct yet informative concluding remarks I found to be particularly helpful.

In summary, this book has redefined the business or organisational context and consequently the HRM context and following content for me. It shifts current thinking on models of HR to redefining those models altogether with a confident underpinning that people centricity or focused people management has a central current and future role in addressing successfully the key strategic challenges that organisations face. The authors argue for a focus within HR functions on the strategic rather than service or transactional agenda. In practice I wonder if the dichotomy we encounter as HR professionals is to be able to provide both. In my experience HR functions rarely earn the credibility to operate on this strategic agenda without first delivering on the routine HR processes, systems and architecture associated with the provision of HR services to organisations. Contrastingly, however, this view is welded to those traditional models of HR and needs to be further opened to what the authors describe as constellations or reconfigurations of HR, joined up with other functions across the business.

Has the question “Do we need HR?” been addressed? Possibly not but then to provide a binary yes or no response to this massively complex subject matter is to over-simplify and may be missing the point. If the authors’ target was to stimulate thinking and offer a thought-provoking narrative and contribution in this arena, then they most certainly have achieved that. In my view this is a book that should be read and taken seriously by both leaders with business influence and HR professionals who aspire to make an impact and identify the value added by HR.