People Are Our Greatest Asses (oops ...Assets)

Every Human Resources person worth his payroll, has heard these cliches over and over again. "People are our greatest assets" - usually put on posters all over the organizations that least believe in that philosophy. Ask anyone why they wanted to choose HR as their major in Business School or as a career and you get another cliche that makes me groan. The person will curl up their toes and say, "Because I really enjoy working with people." or that "my friends told me that I am really good with people." That basically means I am not sure what I am good at, but I think I can have coffee and make conversation.

So why do people choose HR as a profession? I chose it because
a) I knew enough about all other courses to dislike them.
b) This was the only one that I did not know enough about to dislike.
c) All of the above

Of course, when I started working after B School, they used to call it Personnel Management. Today you would be really deemed to be uncool if you did not know that we no longer handle Personnel. We are the new and improved Human Resources Department. I guess those days we had to handle the animals in the zoo ourselves, unlike the new kids who get computers to do it all. No more human contact. We can now outsource the contact part of it. Someone told me that anything that can be templated can be outsourced. So I guess human contacts have just been so classified. Outsource that stuff so that we can get down to doing real work.

In one company where I worked they were implementing a new fangled ERP system that was sucking up more resources than the Gulf War. I was told we had to implement that HR system so that it would leave the HR folks free to do real work. "If all the work was taken away, what WOULD be left for that fellow to do anyway?", I had asked. My boss who was standing at the podium with the big cheese of the ERP Company said that he would take my question offline. That basically means that he would either ignore the question or would that he would be allowed to stab me when he met me in the hallway later that evening.

Look at the seminar topics on HR. That will tell you what is the big question that the clods are grappling with? In those days seminars were around topics like, "Human Resources - Art or Science?" Two days or five days of asking bad questions left neither the participant nor the trainers any wiser. In fact I have always had a queasy feeling when I was told that someone was a trainer. It always reminded me of the trainer who came to teach Rover how to shake his paw without wetting the carpet. It was after I joined HR that I discovered there were trainers for humans too. Their task was not different from what Rover's trainer tried so hard to do.

I am just curious. Do all functions manufacture cliches like HR does or is it just us? Do all other blokes have self doubt like we do? Well you know every now and then we will hear seminars where people ask "Is HR a Business Partner?" The answer is obviously expected to be yes if you are to be let in to join the party. But truthfully speaking the jury is still out on that one.