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HR’s transformation through the Noughties
5 January 2010:
Over the past 10 years, the HR world has undergone great change. It has had to cope with the impact of recession, a raft of employment regulations, and found itself outsourcing HR activities.
So has HR changed for the better over the past decade? Is it taken more seriously as a profession, and how rosy is the outlook for the future? Helen Gilbert speaks to industry experts to find out.
Duncan Brown, director of HR business development at the Institute for Employment Studies
We're in recession, so HR management is generally much harder than in 2000, but I am proud of some of the innovative ways in which HR professionals are helping to maintain jobs and staff engagement in very tough conditions. Achievements include the adoption of the concept of employee engagement in many organisations, and building total reward and best place to work approaches to enhancing their engagement. And HR information systems have generally improved a lot.
Failures include not closing the gender pay gap or addressing the issue of widening pay differentials; obsession in the profession with employment law; and failure, with notable exceptions, to measure the impact and effectiveness of HR policies and practices.
The most successful employment law change has been the right to request flexible working, which struck the right balance of legal 'encouragement'. The worst was the retention of the default retirement age, which was a messy compromise and just gets in the way of organisations improving their performance management processes and encouraging more employees to work for longer. I hope in 10 years' time the whole notion of 'best practice' – in other words, copying what everyone else has done – will be dead and buried, replaced by 'best fit', with HR professionals crafting differentiated approaches to people management in their organisations that suit their circumstances and their culture, as the best HR directors do already.
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Source: Personnel Today
