The HR Strategist For People Who Hate HR
Never admit to being an HR professional on Reddit. I learned that one the hard way when I commented on a post about some stolen chicken tendies from the break room fridge. This is when I discovered from the Redditors that not only must I be useless and bad at my job, but HR in general is useless and bad at their jobs, and always on the lookout for reasons to fire people.
People generally don't understand what HR does, and in most people's minds we're the paper pushers or the company police. This stops business leaders and employees from being able to access their HR department's full potential. This is not to say that compliance isn’t important, but that is the pay to play, the 1’s and 2’s that you can teach a skilled admin to do. That is the operational side of HR, and at EdgePoint we’re unlocking the strategic side.
I’ve heard over and over, “HR is just there to protect the company” but nobody ever finishes the sentence. HR is there to protect the company from liability. We protect the company from toxic managers, we protect team morale from low performers, we protect the bottom line from profit crushing turnover. We spend hours researching laws in different counties, states and countries to prevent business leaders from making illegal decisions. We educate, we mediate, we influence, we strategize, and we document.
· If your onboarding process is a handshake and some paperwork
· If your recruiting consists of “post and pray” or ghost jobs
· If your training program is “watch these videos”
· If people ask how to get to their next career step and your answer is a shrug
One of two things is going on. Your HR department may be all operators and no strategists, or you have strategists and you haven’t fully unlocked their potential. As a business leader, you can certainly make the choice to have your HR department decorate the office for the holidays, and plan Fun Fridays. These are not the activities that make a business successful.
There are a lot of traditional, punitive and pedantic HR practitioners out there that reinforce the stereotypes. They're uncomfortable stepping into a strategic position so they live in HR operations. That’s a comfortable place to be because there is a ton of operational admin debt in HR, they will truly never run out of work to do. At EdgePoint, we believe strategy is the work. The tough and awkward conversations, holding managers accountable for managing their people, getting the people what they need to be successful. We don’t sit back and let “zero-tolerance policies” and “at-will employment” do the work for us. And once we’ve made sure that the programs and strategies are in place, we’ll still audit your I9 binder.
What stops all of these people from truly engaging in the work? To quote Geena Davis, they’re dying of politeness. I’ve worked with some incredible managers and business leaders and they all had one thing in common; they were never rude, but they were blunt. We have to be able to talk about the elephants in all the rooms, in plain language. We have to stop talking about cross-functional teams, and synergy and alignment. We have to say, “The machine broke because the routine maintenance wasn’t done. Who is responsible? How do we make sure it doesn’t happen again?”
My being downvoted to hell on Reddit aside, my whole job consists of making sure the people who drive your business are positioned to win. That means less 'compliance theater' and more operational integrity.
I’m proud to work in HR - not the kind that polices the break room fridge, but the kind that builds the foundation for your next decade of growth.
