Dive Brief:
- In an article at Forbes, organizational effectiveness expert Edward E. Lawler III writes that contrary to several media reports of late, it's not time to "blow up" HR.
- Rather than taking it apart, he says a real solution should relieve pressure on HR to make changes that it hasn’t been able to make and allow it to do what it does best.
- Every organization needs an HR function that handles basic administration and compliance activities, he writes and inevitably, HR comes to be seen as bureaucratic, resistant to change, and sometimes unresponsive to the realities of the business world.
Dive Insight:
As Lawler points out in his recently published book (co-written with HR expert John Budreau), Global Trends in Human Resource Management: A twenty-year analysis, the best way to deal with these issues may not be to “blow up HR,” but to create a new unit that focuses on organizational effectiveness.
This may or may not include “traditional HR,” but it should definitely include business strategy, sustainability, organization design, organization development, and the interface among them and talent management, he writes.
In the case of HR, he says the skills needed to change up the workforce and how it works within an organization's structure are very different than those that are needed to do traditional HR work, such as processing payroll, administering benefits and assuring compliance.
There are already a number of organizations that are moving or have moved in this direction, he writes. There is no “right way” to do it at this point in time, but hopefully experience will make it clear how best to position an organizational effectiveness department and an HR department within an organization’s structure.
