A Critical Look at HR Management
just another "initiative of the month," a phrase, it seems, that was floating around Ford, as well as most other companies, in reaction to the many "initiatives" that had been foisted upon employees in the past.
Unfortunately, much of the "initiative of the month" guilt rests firmly on the shoulders of human resources professionals. We return from HR meetings and conferences armed with all the new stuff we are convinced will help us and our employers energize employees and make them happier and/or more productive. We hire a consultant or two, take employees away from their work to attend training sessions aimed at implementing those "initiatives" and send them back to their jobs. They're typically unhappy because their work has piled up in their absence, their bosses are very unhappy for the same reason, and it usually turns out that the "initiative" has no positive impact on employee satisfaction or the bottom line. A couple of weeks or months later, no one, including the responsible HR professional, remembers what that particular "initiative" was supposed to accomplish.
Then there's the bottom-up pressure that some HR professionals find difficult to confront. Rather than striving to understand a particular business issue, contribute to the decision-making process, and effectively convey the decision to employees, many HR types simply push employee concerns up to management without adding value. For example, at one company I worked for, we discovered that the labor costs at a major division were about 20 percent higher than the competition. This affected the division's profitability as well as its ability to attract capital needed for expansion and equipment upgrades. The corporate human resources department became involved when the company abandoned decentralization in favor of closer corporate oversight.
The only response I received from division human resources people after I explained the company's position relative to the division's labor costs and the need for change was, "Oh, we can't do that." Asked why, their resonse was, "The workers won't like it." Rather than recognizing and supporting the need for change, the local HR people stood on the sidelines and told workers that they were only doing what "corporate" demanded. In the end, we sent a corporate team in to handle labor negotiations and ultimately came to a settlement that satisfied the need for labor cost reductions and enabled the division to attract corporate capital. After the dust settled, a labor leader approached me and asked. "So
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