HR: Humane Resources

Twenty years ago after creating the new employee “Service Camp” for the Coeur d’Alene Resort I was given the opportunity to move from operations to HR.  I loved the possibilities but hated the realities.  Too much time limiting liabilities and very little investment in growing resources.  (Oh, and I also hated the little office in the back hall.)   In the nearly two decades since, I find that for many (not all), little has changed.

There are still far too many resources devoted to protection and not nearly enough time promoting perfection.

HR needs more than new directives – it needs a new design.  

It is time for humanity to reap the rewards that the profession of human resources is positioned to provide.  This does not mean that HR suddenly becomes the center of the attentional universe.  We don’t need another oracle for answers.

What we do need is a system where employees at all levels are given the opportunity to share new ideas, experiment with unique solutions, try, fail, succeed, encourage, criticize, create and grow.  What employees want most is not money or “motivation” they want the opportunity to grow.   The entrepreneurial ideas that energize engagement are crushed under the obesity of excessive oversight.

Changing habits developed through years of top down direction does not happen overnight but it can begin now and it must come from within.   The ideal solution for both stability and responsiveness is the collaboration of both hierarchy and meritocracy.  A process that maintains efficient, predictable hierarchies in tandem with open, transparent meritocratic communities that value “multiple skills, types of knowledge or working styles without privileging one over the other”  Resist the temptation to confine and control.  Instead allow team members to establish their own boundaries.  You will find that people are far more capable and vastly more considerate than you ever imagined.

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