Human Resource - Dominator
The best article ever written about the predicament of HR in the modern organization is by Peter Capelli. What makes Capelli's article so good is that it explores the economic and organizational contexts in which HR operates. HR staff are neither idiots nor demons (well, most of them) but individuals who operate within systems that constrain and direct their behaviour.
So I want to respond to Tom Goodwin's and Adriana Stan's article on disrupting HR by first looking at the big picture context. In the last 25 years, Western economies have changed. The manufacturing workforce has shrunk due to a mix of automation and off-shoring. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. Increased productivity is the core driver of increasing wealth. However this new wealth has not been evenly distributed in our societies and some groups do feel left behind (or never in front position in the first place). We've had an increase in precarious work - zero-hour contracts in the UK, right to work states in the US (which really means "right to fire"), a sharp contraction in labour union participation, and the gig economy of Uber and their libertarian techbro brethren. Meanwhile the middle classes enter the tournament of getting a degree and then trying to get a high-paying job and working ever long hours against their greatest enemies - each other. No surprise that inequality in Western economies has been growing since the early 70s.
This Second Gilded* Age offers us neo-feudal society. A small technocratic aristocracy owns most of the wealth. About 10-20% of the population will get decent jobs offering them services and the remainder gets low-wage work, and triple surveillance - their employer, er, service purchaser monitors their work performance for milli-second ranking and optimization, the state monitors them with CCTV cameras and Chinese-developed facial recognition, while Facebook & Co monitors their every click to monetize to someone somewhere. Discipline and Gamify**.
What is the role of HR in all this? Well, it's whatever the CEO tells them to do. What does the CEO want? Increase revenue and reduced costs. What about social cohesiveness and personal meaning? Cry me a river. There are plenty more where you came from. No one is indispensable.
Do I think our recruitment processes are royally screwed? Yes and Yes Again. Do I think we don't manage people well at work after we have hired them? Totally. What about all this talk about bringing your whole self to work? Hmmm.
But I also think the work place is not changing as fast as some people think. And broken ways of working persist because they work for now and their true costs are either hidden from us or paid by someone else.
So what can we do? Well, not a lot. But perhaps a little. If you are hiring can you try to make your job ad a bit less crappy. If you are a manager can you try to manage your people. If you are an employee and your job sucks then perhaps get the hell out.
I don't see us designing a better system. I see us failing forward into something marginally less rubbish. So lets get to it and start ****ing things up right away.
*Guilded. The middle classes do not have unions. They have professional associations.
**Thanks Michel.