HR needs process improvement experts

Imagine that you’re the head of the human resources (HR) department. A major part of your job is recruitment. When some people are separated from employment for whatever reason, how would you handle the request for replacement by the concerned department? Many times, the approach of HR is an automatic submission to the requisitioning department’s request.

How would HR oblige? I asked this question to Kevin, an HR head of a multinational company. He claims the best approach is to offer the vacancy to internal candidates. If there is nobody qualified within the organization, then that’s the time to look for external candidates. People of Kevin’s caliber need not rethink the whole idea. It’s a normal practice.

I asked the same question to Romy, an HR head of a local conglomerate. He’s within the same age bracket as Kevin and has the same credentials and work experience. Like Kevin, he’s a firm believer in promotion from within. In psychology, the action of Kevin and Romy is called “automatic processing.”

They have an automatic reflex of people who have successfully done the same thing over and over without any issues in the past. Is there a better way? No, Kevin and Romy can’t think of a different, much better way. They are typical representations of Gen X, described as resourceful, independent and good at maintaining work-life balance, but often fall short of being critical thinkers.

They are the first generation who experienced working with personal computers and many of them ended up missing “critical thinking as one of the most important skills for the future,” according to the World Economic Forum. Lest that I may be misinterpreted, I must tell you that critical thinking is an imperative skill for everyone, and not only for HR.

Job evaluators

Therefore, what kind of skill should be acquired, if not incorporated in existing jobs within HR? It is none other than process improvement. That means all job evaluators must be experts in process improvement and workflow analysis. They must eliminate boring tasks and jobs that don’t add value to the organizations.

For most people, even seasoned HR professionals, it is difficult to understand the need for a continuing evaluation of job descriptions to determine if it’s still logical to continue filling up the vacant post. In collaboration with the concerned department, HR must discover the objective answer to the following questions:

Can the job be distributed to other workers who are overpaid and underutilized? Are there duplications of tasks between and among jobs? How can we make the job engaging and interesting? Can we outsource those jobs? Are the processes being done free from any wasteful activity?

Are the tasks designed to cut operating costs and achieve maximum efficiency without sacrificing quality and productivity? Indeed, there are a lot of issues to be resolved before HR agrees to fill up a vacated post.

There’s no need for “automatic processing” of replacements. Depending on the current manpower size of the business, HR must have at least two job evaluators or related task holders in creating and reviewing jobs to make it dynamic and flexible. You can understand this more if you know the framework of HR guru and thought leader David Ulrich in his book Human Resource Champions (1996).

In that insightful book, Ulrich introduced the four major roles of HR as follows: administrative expert, change agent, business partner and employee champion. The order is not important as these four roles must be performed simultaneously by HR to contribute fully to the needs of employees, their management and the whole organization.

Ulrich’s objective in creating that four-fold framework is to change HR’s mindset from “what we do” to “what we deliver.” To do more than that, HR must deliver services beyond the expectations of their stakeholders. After all, if you analyze these four roles, it boils down to process improvement being the heart and mind of them all.

Boring task

In 1959, psychology professor Leon Festinger (1919-1989) of Stanford University led a social experiment in which he asked his students to do a boring task in one hour. The objective was to determine if people would change their beliefs to match their actions. The volunteers were divided into two groups with members of one group being paid one dollar (approximately $10.55 today) for each volunteer.

The other group was paid $20 (equivalent to $216.18 today) for each volunteer.

Both groups were tasked to do a monotonous task of mechanically moving pegs in a board for straight 60 minutes. The first group whose members were paid one dollar each lied to other people that they experienced an enjoyable and interesting task. They convinced themselves that what they did was not exactly bad.

The other group who received $20 each member felt a boring task in one hour was worth the suffering. This brings us back to HR’s job evaluation program. If the HR head is receiving the lowest pay (like the volunteers who received one dollar each) compared to his counterparts and contemporaries in the same industry, would he condone the maintenance of monotonous and dull jobs in the organization?

What do you think? Whether we like it or not, many of us prefer the status quo, even unmindful of its destruction to our career goals, because thinking is difficult to do. It could be a lot of work, but it will help you understand the answer as to why many people hate HR.

Rey Elbo is a quality and productivity improvement preacher. Get free valuable insights about your management issue andsend it to [email protected] Anonymity is guaranteed.