So, being a Friday I thought it would be a good day to make a post about some of the things that I think make a bad HR professional. I haven’t seen anyone yet with all five behaviours, but even a few of these makes it difficult for us to be seen as business focused, value added professionals and not just the corporate police. So enjoy my top 5 behaviours of bad hr professionals.
- Being an employee advocate. As an HR professional your job is really threefold: Risk mitigation, attracting and retaining the best talent, and keeping a productive and capable workforce. While this necessitates good practices for employee engagement, our job is to always think about the business need first. It isn’t always noble, but a good hr person can make the hard choices. You still need to advocate, but only when it makes business sense.
- Rampant policy creation. This is often seen when hr is afraid of confrontation. Using blanket policies to police single individuals. Before you make a policy, check to make sure it is an organizational wide issue (or new required regulation). If it is just a few bad employees, perhaps you need better performance management training for your managers, not a policy.
- Getting out of date. Yeah, sure you keep up to date on some of the major legal changes, but when was the last time you took a course or read a book on lean management, or taught yourself to use a new technology to benefit your role. What about industry news, what are the big trends? If the industry is consolidating, or outsourcing how does that impact your organization and people. Simple relying on experience or passive methods of staying aware isn’t going to work anymore. Get out there and actively challenge your thinking, and be aware of the global business economy.
- Not being quantifiable. If you even somewhat frequently rely on hr being an art not a science…I have a problem with you. Usually this comes from being lazy. There are all sorts of metrics you can use, and most aren’t that difficult. Start tying training or engagement to profit per employee, work out how much an investment in either improves the bottom line. Start simple, workforce costs, employee engagement, and employee productivity. Then tie those to other functions key numbers like customer satisfaction or revenue/sales. This brings me to my final point. (Dr. John Sullivan has some HR Metrics articles here).
- Work in a silo. Nothing is more damaging to hr then acting alone and trying to force a policy or change on the line area. In addition, if you want to get to the table you need to get out there and be available for them. Not even as an hr professional, just being someone leaders can bounce ideas off of for a second opinion. That’s how you develop rapport and become more valued.
So, there you have it. Agree/disagree? Let me know (or better yet, write an article and I’ll post it). Otherwise, enjoy the long weekend,
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