"Another sad HR report"

[kevinh]

This was the heading of a brief article in the Australian Financial Review today referring to a survey conducted by AHRI (page 58 if you have a copy to hand).

Needless to say it was a pretty negative piece which assumed that the survey was an accurate reflection of the whole HR profession in Australia. For example the writer said "Depressingly, for HR people, nearly half of them doubt whether they are seen to be effective". Seen to be effective by who I wonder?

You can find the AHRI survey here.

[pbhr]

To answer Kevinh’s question, according to the AHRI survey HR is seen to be ineffective by a sizeable proportion of the 1816 business people who responded to the survey, with 49.5% of HR people saying HR is not seen to be effective or are unsure, and 73.5% of non-HR respondents taking the same view. That’s to be expected when 63.5% of HR respondents believe employees in the business don’t know what HR does or should be doing, and 80.4% of non-HR respondents say the same thing.

The Financial Review article could have added the positive finding that nearly 90% of all respondents believe HR is a vital function in business.

From that, two things follow. The first is that business doesn’t follow through with its own belief and recruit HR staff at the right level. The survey finds that only 54% of organisations have the top HR person reporting to the CEO - that’s something business needs to fix.

The second is that HR departments get their business priorities wrong, and are seen to be doing so. With 90% of survey respondents saying HR should serve the interests of the business, around 60% are also saying HR is seen to be serving the interests of the CEO. The sad fact is that CEOs do not always serve the interests of the business themselves, and often require frank and fearless advice from their business units to ensure they're on message. HR needs to be providing that sort of advice, and to be seen to be doing so.

[kevinh]

Originally Posted by pbhr

To answer Kevinh’s question, according to the AHRI survey HR is seen to be ineffective by a sizeable proportion of the 1816 business people who responded to the survey

pbhr, the report says;

"A considerable number of HR respondents (63.5%) believe that employees in the business do not understand or are unsure about what the human resources department does or what it should be doing."

and

"On the related question of whether HR is seen as effective, 45.9% of HR respondents believe it is not effective or they are unsure"

I took this to mean the perception of HR people, regarding what other employees in the business think. Surely 45.9% of HR don't believe they are themselves ineffective!

It would be interesting to see how the survey questions were written, because some of the response appear to be very subjective and completely unqualified.

Do the HR people think that all employees in the business don't understand or are unsure what HR do (or think they are ineffective) ?

Some would certainly not understand what HR do, just as they would be unsure what the CEO and CFO do.

HR includes a wide variety of responsibilities, many of which are becoming more specialised. How could you expect say a production worker to understand what HR does and whether they were effective? They may have some knowledge of what HR do but it would likely be limited to their own interaction with HR.

Incidentally, the AFR article did say at the end that "despite the findings, the vast majority of respondents did believe HR was a vital business function". Given that two thirds of the respondents were HR people that's just as well !

[pbhr]

The AHRI survey seems to be about how HR is 'perceived 'in business, so it's safe to say that most respondents would have been talking about how effective HR is SEEN to be rather than how effective it actually is. That said, perception can become reality.

[kevinh]

That gets back to my original question - "seen" by whom?

If you work in a company of 1000 people, and say "I think the employees either don't know or are unsure what HR does" - how many of those 1000 people are you talking about? and should they be expected to know what HR does?

It would have been better to leave HR people out of the survey all together and target employees directly and get their own views, rather than what others perceive their views to be.

Also, respondents would need to be split into different levels. It's no use mixing responses from senior management with production workers because the responses could (or should) be quite different.

However, at the end of the day it's not the workers on the shop floor who measure the performance of the HR department, it's the senior management. It's also the senior management who determine how much influence HR have.

[HRbeat]

If you're really interested, you can actually access the full report from the AHRI website. Some of the questions raised here are detailed in the full report, albeit some are not.

Does anyone here think it would be actually useful to provide the feedback direct to AHRI instead of us just talking here about what we think could be done better and what could be looked at next time?

HR Pulse is a new AHRI initiative and will involve various surveys that are relevant to contemporary HR practice and evolving role of HR in the business. My impression is that survey results seek to inform AHRI services and solutions to support HR professionals in this journey.

[kevinh]

Originally Posted by HRbeat

Does anyone here think it would be actually useful to provide the feedback direct to AHRI instead of us just talking here about what we think could be done better and what could be looked at next time?

I suspect AHRI are well aware of what is said on here :)

Thinking about it, HR Buzz could be a very useful sounding board for AHRI, because it reaches many people who are not AHRI members, (not that I am suggesting AHRI use HR Buzz for marketing purposes!).

HR Buzz is of course an indepedent forum and contributors may be more likely to speak their mind.

Judging by this thread there are clearly some ex AHRI members out there who are not very happy with what they did or didn't get from being a member, but they might not convey their opinions directly to AHRI. So AHRI may be able to get some vaulable feedback through HR Buzz.

[HRbeat]

Yeah...that's what I like about HRBuzz....people are freely expressing their opinion without being judged.