Reality however more often than not looks quite different. Here the department which unequivocally and pronouncedly treat humans as resources is often experienced as a stumbling block for digital transformation programs. The excuse often heard, is the high degree of regulation in many countries and the diversity of rules between nations. But there is more to it, why the typical HR department is often perceived as the conservative factor, or to be more precise, the innovation blocker, when it comes to cross corporate processes.
HR stands for Human Resources. Even if we would agree that humans are to be considered as factors of production triad of land, labour and capital, HR doesn’t live up to its own claim in breadth and in depth: It does not deal with all humans – just with employees.
The total workforce today is much larger than the number of hard core of employees. Even those show less static behaviour today. They change jobs more often, they need or want more flexibility in their employment terms, have to change job functions more often within a corporation. The increasingly important contractors, interim managers, intern, collaborators, … are often not well supported – or even not considered at all.
Not only their scope is limited, they tend to restrict themselves in coverage of the total talent value chain. In many cases they just restrict themselves to administrative tasks, paying only lip service to personnel development, playing only a supportive role in the hiring process and neglecting the strategic component of talent management.
When some 15 years ago the Management of the relations of the corporation with all its human stakeholders was recognised as a vital organisational infrastructure and coined the term identity management, HR was reluctant to grab this opportunity. Quite often they regarded it an IT topic, as the demand was raised by management of access to computer systems, by IT security or by Compliance issues. Also their clock cycle had months as the standard unit. In Identity Management it was days. Today, in a digitized world, it ought to be real time.
So in the majority of cases end-to-end automation of business process with some involvement of digital identities hit an invisible wall, when HR simply refused to be part of the game. I intend to hold back on speculation about its reasons. In some cases, however, I have seen the position of the HR manager being used as the final stop for managers, who did not make it to the top range.
Against this background, it seems particularly questionable why the HR department in many companies claims ownership of the corporate culture.
Maybe the most important shift to take place before we can seriously address a digital transformation of whole companies, is to abandon the traditional business School approach, that management’s first and most noble role is “doing the numbers” but putting the spotlight on the humans, which in the end have to “be” the change.
