Institute for Employment Studies (IES) director Peter Reilly said HR should not only carry out its important daily functions, but also anticipate and find solutions for changes imposed on business such as regulatory regimes.
Reilly’s comments came as the IES published its annual report, IES Perspectives, which contains nine articles by IES members aiming to help HR professionals develop a more strategic outlook in their practice.
Reilly told HR magazine that while HR teams needed to continue to perform traditional HR functions to their best ability, the report encourages HR professionals to consider working on issues in which they were less involved.
He said one example was developing a culture of openness to help overcome externally-imposed factors that have a serious effect on an organisation.
“Things like mis-selling of pensions or payment protection schemes – those sorts of things are having a profound impact on how organisations position themselves,” Reilly said.
“I’d like to see HR more in the foreground on these sorts of issues. It’s getting into the stuff which is not just normal business-led stuff, but also what’s coming up over the horizon from the world outside.”
Reilly said achieving such change within HR would be challenging. “It’s genuinely difficult because the day-to-day stuff takes up so much time and attention,” he said.
“There’s also a question mark about whether all the HR people have got the skills to do this. Some of it is about disposition – to what extent are they prepared to put their head above the parapet?
“It’s also having the confidence to say: ‘I’ve got a legitimate contribution to make, and I’m going to make it’.”
The report includes articles on zero-hours contracts, diversity at senior team and board level, and crowdsourced leadership.
Reilly’s contribution to the report focuses on outsourcing – a topic he described as an “old chestnut”, but one that HR could do better.
“The piece is a plea,” he said. “If you’re going to consider outsourcing, do it in a fairly systematic way rather than simply because it seems like it’s politically expedient.”
