The great resignation, quiet quitting, low employee engagement, and the changing workplace dynamics brought about by the difference in values and expectations of Gen X, Y, and Zs. The need for HR to be a strategic partner has become so critical that being a stuck HR is not only bad but also dangerous to the organization.
If you are an HR Manager, here are 10 signs that you are stuck, and you need to get yourself unstuck for the sake of your organization.
1. You are administering compensation and benefits, but you are not doing it strategically. As a result, there are rumors of favoritism and issues with fairness. You are losing your people to competition because they don’t feel rewarded for the value they bring to the organization.
2. You are managing recruitment, but you are not doing it strategically. As a result, your vacancies remain unfilled. Your hiring decision-makers are complaining because the people they are interviewing don’t fit their expectations. Your offers get declined, and people leave too soon.
3. You are managing employee events like outings, “team building”, sports fest, Christmas parties, and the like, and call them employee engagement activities. No, they don’t lead to better employee engagement, plus people complain about them.
4. You are scheduling training events, but you don’t have a learning and development strategy that ensures alignment of the learning and development initiatives with organizational direction, much less have a means of knowing how the initiatives are impacting performance.
5. Your days are busy attending to complaints of employee violations. You are, thereby spending so much time conducting disciplinary investigations and handing out disciplinary memos. Despite all these, noncompliance continues to increase, which means whatever you are doing, is not deterring people from violating company policies.
6. You are administering performance appraisals, but the employees fail to recognize their value. Even the managers and supervisors fail to recognize their value as they don’t take it seriously.
7. Your company supervisors are either doing the work of their staff or micromanaging, and you don’t see anything wrong with it because you are also either doing the work of your staff or micromanaging.
8. The boss tells you what to do, exactly what to do. You don’t ask why, even if that question is screaming in your head. You have stopped asking because you received too many nos in the past.
9. The employees hate you or like you but don’t respect you. That’s because they think you are either throwing your weight around at their expense (that’s why they hate you) or helpless to help them with what they need (pity).
10. And the top indicator that you are stuck is that you are not learning. You are not developing the competencies needed to be seen as a strategic partner of top management. You don’t understand the people’s problem of your organization, so you always come up with non-solution, like group Zumba attended by 5 people as a way to improve employee engagement.
Maxwell said everything rises and falls on leadership. HR can not afford not to be a leader.
If any of these describes you or the HR Manager in your organization, something needs to be done. When the HR Manager is stuck, the business managers take the cudgels for creating strategies for the development and support needs of their people. If they can’t do that, then the organization is truly in trouble. My advice if you are a business owner, and you have a manager like this, invest in that person’s development. Find a way to afford it. You will need someone who has your back when it comes to people and culture matters. If development is not feasible find yourself a better HR.
They are hard to find.
