Hate your HR? We tell you why we cannot eliminate HR from our lives!

We hate them when they delay our appointment letter! We hate them even more when our salaries are delayed or isn’t what we were expecting it to be! We hate them when our official leaves are cancelled! Basically, we love to hate them!

The human resource department of any organisation is probably the most ‘misunderstood’ department in a firm. And it just takes a few cups of coffee and a bunch of grumpy employees to question the legitimacy of this crucial department in the company!

“The role of HR is often associated to hiring, firing, attrition and retention. It’s rare to see people understand the crucial role HR professionals play in the functioning of any organization,” said Rajeev Bhardwaj, vice president, Human Resource at Sun Life Financial Asia Service Centre.

He further tells us that the job ofthe HR has already evolved from that of an administrative function to being a strategic portfolio. But interestingly, that is not how the rest of the world perceives this function. In fact, while planning the story, we found out that most employees in general feel that HR is the most futile department in a company.

“Apart from cost cutting and making our lives difficult with random HR policies, what else does the HR do?” questioned Abhijeet Rawal, who works with an American FMCG company in Gurgaon.

Thought leader and best-selling author Bernard Marr, who authored books such as ‘Key Performance Indicators’ and ‘Big Data’, attributes the passionate dislike for the HR department to the fact that the human resource department is always caught in a Catch 22 situation.

“Another issue is that HR departments are trying to serve two masters – which, in most cases, is not very successful. On the one hand, they are there to provide support for the employees and, on the other hand, they are there for the company and the senior management to help manage (and monitor, discipline, appraise, etc.) employees. This conflict of interest can cause friction and in many instances HR departments swing to the ‘support the company’ side, rather than the ‘support the employees’ side,” said Marr in his November 2013 post, Why We No Longer Need HR Departments.

Pooja Mishra, a media professional recalls an instance when on the HR’s suggestion, the company decided against giving Diwali bonuses as a measure of cost-cutting. “These HR people get fat pay cheques for taking away what is rightfully ours,” ranted Mishra.

Marr noted that in an organisation, the HR is only of value when they deliver value, else, they are just another expensive roadblock in a company. “I have recently seen a number of companies that shut their HR departments down completely; outsourced the function or reduced it to a minimum. The reason they have done it, and not suffered any significant throw-back, is because HR wasn’t delivering any real value. Most of their time was taken up with bureaucratic and administrative tasks or legal issues. If HR doesn’t deliver some unique benefits then outsourcing it makes a lot of business sense,” he writes.

So what is it that the HR is supposed to do? And how can it deliver value in an organisation?

Bhardwaj of Sun Life Financial Asia Service Centre, points out that apart from being an employee’s first interface with an organization, an HR manager is also “a thorough professional in people-handling, who helps the organization attract, nurture and retain good talent”.

Additionally, he notes, “While all the other functions in an organization are overt, the HR department mostly functions subtly, in conjugation with the company’s top management. Owing to this, a critical role HR managers perform is that of balancing expectations of both the employer and employees, and advocate interests of both sides.”

Taking a note of what he tells us, there is no doubt that HR is a critical function of an organisation. But until its importance is realized, the HR is doomed to be in catch-22!

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