Human resources - it's not working, is it? The name, I mean. People in marketing, operations - even accounts - make jokes at your expense although not always to your faces.
It's not just jokes about human remains either. The resentment goes deeper than that. The HR department has come to symbolise human restraint, a kind of office police that reminds managers when they are going astray in using prejudicial language. It invokes health and safety rules, keeps tabs on employee movements and drags everyone in the business before those infernal employee appraisals.
Managers hate HR because they don't want to carry out appraisals and don't want to lose their best people. Instead they want to recruit who they want how they want and, if the inclination arises, they want to fire them too. I'm reminded of David Walliams as the female office worker at her terminal in the Little Britain sketch: 'HR says no ...'
Was it any better when it was personnel management? Not at all. Managers were just as rude about personnel as they are about HR. Peter Drucker described it as 'partly a file clerk's job' responsible for 'all those things that do not deal with the work of people and that are not management'.
Not long ago, chairman of Channel 4 Luke Johnson described HR as 'probably the very definition of a necessary evil for a 21st century business', a term that should 'strike fear into the heart of every self-respecting entrepreneur.' I must admit that for most of my working life, that was my impression too. Whenever I applied for a job, personnel were the people who expected a form to be filled out. And whenever I was ill a personnel manager would check whether I had recorded the day in the system.
Personnel were and still are the guardians of the systems around which we structure our work in organisations. All of the whacky internet ventures - Facebook, Google, Ebay - began as informal arrangements, but sooner or later expansion demands structure, and with structure comes HR.
That's the problem. People don't start businesses looking forward to the day they will build an HR department. It emerges after the first expensive law suit for wrongful dismissal or an inability to structure shifts of employees to get work accomplished.
So you know you're needed in HR. They - the managers - might not like doing appraisals but they understand the sense of setting targets and discussing workloads and training needs with people on a formal basis. But it's wearing, knowing that half the managers around you would rather you were not at the table.
I wonder if one of the problems is the title. Personnel didn't work and neither does HR. So what about human capital management? Even Theodore Schultz, the University of Chicago economist who established the theories behind human capital confessed to some distaste for the term. 'To treat human beings as wealth that can be augmented by investment runs counter to deeply held values,' he wrote. But, at the same time he acknowledged 'by investing in themselves, people can enlarge the range of choices available to them'. So there seemed to be more merit in the idea of human capital than in human resources.
Painful as it is to write this, I think it is time HR changed its shell again. On the periphery and in senior management this is already happening. The careerists are abandoning HR in their titles and shifting to talent management, performance management and organisational development, all job descriptions that show they have an impact on the bottom line.
Performance management generates cash and brings a smile to the face of the CEO. Talent management is sexy - everyone will pay homage to the kingmaker. So what's it going to be? David Bell at Pearson simply calls himself director of people. Why should that be so novel? It's what the job is all about, isn't it?
- Richard Donkin is author of 'Blood, Sweat and Tears' and 'The Evolution of Work'; richard.donkin@haymarket.com
