Roaming around the dusty corners of the net this afternoon, I came upon this incediary quote:
Nestling warm and sleepy in your company, like the asp in Cleopatra’s bosom, is a department whose employees spend 80% of their time on routine administrative tasks. Nearly every function of this department can be performed more expertly for less by others. Chances are its leaders are unable to describe their contribution to value added except in trendy, unquantifiable, and wannabe terms–yet, like a serpent unaffected by its own venom, the department frequently dispenses to others advice on how to eliminate work that does not add value. It is also an organization where the average advertised salary for professional staffers increased 30% last year.
I am describing, of course, your human resources department, and have a modest proposal: Why not blow the sucker up?
You’re thinking this sounds familiar? How about:
As for training: Will every reader who has taken a training course sponsored by his HR department and found it very valuable please raise his hand? There’s lots of evidence that training is a good thing, but it points to the worth of just-in-time, close-to-the-work training–that is, training that should be lodged in line functions–not off-the-shelf courses. One company studied by the Corporate Leadership Council gave business-unit heads the power to sign off on HR’s budget; of the $889,000 HR proposed spending on training, the general managers okayed only $222,000–one dollar out of four. THAT SHOULDN’T be surprising. You don’t have to visit Washington to realize that bureaucracies self-inflate faster than airbags and, unlike airbags, often for no good reason. Says Vikesh Mahendroo, executive vice president of William M. Mercer, the big HR consulting firm: “HR is often out of sync with the needs of the business. The important question is, Will companies be able to bring the competence of the HR function to the level the business requires?” Mahendroo thinks they can–if they devote the same attention to reinventing human resources that they have to finance, manufacturing, and other areas.
Why do I bring this up now? Haven’t we had enough HR-bashing, what with Fast Company’s August ’05 cover-story, Why We Hate HR , still fresh in mind? Because Tom Stewart wrote these works in Fortune in January 1996.
1996!
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I seem to remember the CIA and military intelligence forecasting that the the Soviet Union would last for about another 25 years – this was in 1985. Yes, I did a short stint as a G4
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Nice analogy. I shared a student room with a serious cold war spy (Stasi) who was doing his spy thing right up to (and after) the fall of the wall in 89. Training reminds me of all this brainwashing activity. Eventually the good citizens of East Germany had enough – they just said NO.
However, training departments won’t fall (they’re not important enough to draw that sort of serious debate and revolutionary change), they’ll just paint themselves into a corner of compliance and basics. The web has already eaten away at their traditional territory. I guess they’ll just fade to grey – some would say they already have!
1996? Johnny-come-lately.
PERSONNEL (PEOPLE VS.)
Fire the whole personnel department.
Unless your company is too large (in which case break it up into autonomous parts), have a one-girl people department (not a personnel department). Records can be kept in the payroll section of the accounting department and your one-girl people department (she answers her own phone and does her own typing) acts as personnel (sorry–people) assistant to anybody who is rectruiting. She lines up applicants, checks references, and keeps your pay ranges competitive by checking other companies.
On the subject of pay ranges, I’ve long held the conviction that it’s much less expensive to recruit from the top of the barrel by paying top wages. Yet many big personnel departments in insurance companies, banks, and the like, consciously recruit from the lower half of the barrel to “save money.” If they only realized what they were doing to themselves.
The trouble with personnel experts is that they use gimmicks borrowed from manufacturing: inventories, replacement charts, recruiting, selection, indoctrinating and training machinery, job rotation, and apprisal programs. And this manufacturing of men is about as effective as Dr. Frankenstein was. As McGregor points out, the sounder approach is agricultural. Provide the climate and the proper nourishment and let the people grow themselves. They’ll amaze you.
Robert L. Townsend, Up the Organization, 1970
(Townsend was CEO of Avis Rent-a-Car and made it into the number two company in its industry)
Whew! I’m not much for political correctness, but I’m long been a supporter of the women’s movement. The “one-girl department” line made me gasp until I noted it was uttered three dozen years ago. How far we’ve come, eh?
jay
Yes, Townsend was a product of his time. I didn’t think I should rewrite that line, though.
It does conflict with his page on racism, where he says, “Let’s face it. The vast majority of corporations are still operating with dice loaded against Jews, black people, and women of all races and creeds…Women are still bottom-of-the-heap: ‘Don’t give her a raise; she’s making a lot for a woman.‘ “