One of the best things about social media is the way that idea leads to idea. How you can see a tweet, a blog post, or even a song (see this rather awesomesauce one from Doug Shaw and Neil Usher), how someone can take one of your own blog posts and build on your thoughts and lead to you having more thoughts. This happened to me at the weekend, and lead to some thoughts about the very fundamentals of Human Resources. Check out this excellent post from Christopher DeMers, which sparked my thoughts here.
What struck me was this. That in the race for the seat at the table, the desire to prove our strategic worth, the need to find the elusive people stuff return on investment, we’ve lost something. In our desire to leave the personnel welfare tag behind, to be more than transactional, more than a service function, we have embraced clinical language, rebadged old ideas, jumped on bandwagons and just maybe, occasionally, forgotten who we are and what we are all about. What we stand for. And we’ve lost something, something important.
We’ve become embarrassed to argue for good people stuff for the sake of good people stuff, without some measure of proof for the bottom line, lest we are seen as uncommercial. Or heaven forbid, that we might be labelled pink and fluffy.
We talk of human resources and human capital. We turned how people feel about where they work into a percentage score. We argue for engagement because there’s revenue growth in it, allegedly. I could go on.
Just maybe, we’ve lost some of the human side of human resources. It’s not cool to be fluffy. It’s not cool to have how something makes people feel as the starting point for your people stuff.
I’m always arguing for simplicity in what we do. For chucking out your HR chintz. I’m always talking about doing good people stuff in my tweets and blogs.
And now I have realised something.
I’m pink, I’m fluffy and I’m proud.
Whatever comes next for our profession, whatever is to come in the future of work, let us put the human of human resources at the forefront. Let’s start with how it makes you feel.