I very much enjoyed the excellent article in September’s HR Magazine (‘Keep It Simple’) on ‘bad’ complexity in business.

I'm sure many of us have witnessed groups of senior people who should be focused on pragmatic implementation of long-term strategy and product or service quality getting themselves into a twist over unnecessary process and protocols.

I was also quite amused by the article since in my view, the HR profession as a whole is one of the worst perpetrators of unnecessary complexity. And I don't mean - referring to an example in the article - because an HR officer might spend time chasing managers for completed appraisal forms. In fact, from the lamentable degree of voluntarism around conducting performance reviews that I've encountered in many organisations, I think HR staff might need to do more and not less of that particular activity.

What I mean is the general cant and obfuscation that surrounds the world of HR generally. I often train or speak to groups of HR practitioners who, led astray by HR guru writings and presentations or direct mail from consultants, have tortured themselves over the question how they can be more 'strategic'. Their exposure to all of this leaves them perplexed about what all this 'adding value to the business' means. What they really want to get to the bottom of is, the day to day practical things they might do to make themselves an indispensable pillar of the business rather than a necessary evil clearing up the mess made by managers who find managing people difficult.

I find that the mist soon lifts for them - with visible relief - when it's pointed out that whatever the business, whatever the climate, what managers want from HR invariably boils down to six things:

• Identifying what attributes people actually need to be able to the jobs, and then find ways to recruit them.
• Working out what and how to pay them.
• Support with motivating, performance managing and developing those staff while they're with you.
• Making sure they turn up.
• Support with moving them onwards or outwards when things don't work out.
• Handling change such as mergers and redundancies in a way that meets regulatory requirements and doesn't cheese employees off.

The only complexity involved is the need to work out how best to do these things within your particular environment for the foreseeable future. All the rest is just noise.

Helen Giles is director of human resources and consultancy, Broadway Homelessness & Support