Next week we will be previewing our new research on the Human Resources function, and the findings are important. Let me summarize the narrative and I promise you’ll hear more in the coming quarter.
Human Resources has been around for hundreds of years. Originally defined as a back-office administrative function, HR teams were always looked upon as clerks, administrators, recruiters, or training managers. In the early 1900s we relied on HR to manage payroll, the job hierarchy, and the overall design of rewards, cascading goals, and rewards.
In the 1950s and 1960s, as conglomerate business models ruled the economy, HR professionals moved up the ranks. In addition to taking care of these administrative processes, we took on the responsibility for leadership development, succession management, and the “pre-hire to retire” career model. Most employees worked in the same company for a long time, so HR teams helped design our progression, pay bands, and various programs (including retirement) to manage that simple process. Corporate Universities, targeted toward this institutional career model, also became the rage. And we started to deal with unions, labor relations, and new regulations around retirement.
In the 1970s and 1980s we entered a war for talent, accelerated by the technology revolution in the late 1990s. This shifted HR towards building a highly muscular talent acquisition function and also forced companies to invest in sourcing, assessment, and advanced recruiting tools. Companies invested in complex stacks of recruiting technology and similarly found that retention, engagement, and culture were part of the equation. So we took our experience in industrial psychology and built a deep set of skills in surveys, retention analytics, and engagement.
As the digital revolution grew, another issue emerged. Employees started feeling burned out with all their new tools and HR was asked to look at productivity, retention, and what we now call “employee experience.” So a new domain emerged: HR teams trying to simplify the massive stack of technologies in HR, developing programs that were user-centric and design oriented, and coming to grips that “HR is not here to do things TO people but FOR people.”