Red herring in Human Resources
The piece went on to suggest that human resource management (HRM) could be outsourced to a recruitment company. The inherent assumption is that HRM is the best way to manage people. This is something that has never been proved and something I've researched in much detail for my second satirical look at management, entitled HRM The Tower of Babble.
Recently FÁS published a large supplement in the national newspapers profiling companies that had been successful in its HRM initiative, the Excellence Through People (ETP) programme.
The underlying assumption of the ETP programme is that HRM practices and techniques are a key driver of organisational success. The entire ETP programme is built on this premise.
But HRM is a byproduct of organisational success and not a driver classic chicken-and-egg management stuff.
Evidence of this is apparent in the types of organisation which have the largest HRM departments, budgets and initiatives pharmaceutical, information technology, cost-insensitive semi-state and large corporate groups, struggling to weave their organisational fabric together via one centralised department.
Human resources or, more appropriately, people are not just the organisation's greatest asset they are the only asset. HRM does nothing to clarify this gem of commonsense.
If anything, it degrades people by reclassifying them in the same category as other 'resources' such as buildings, machines, energy, raw materials, etc.
As a function it evolved from personnel management, something long thought to be the bastard stepchild of accountancy and aptly defined by Peter Drucker in 1961 as 'largely a collection of incidental techniques with little or no internal cohesion'.
HRM is modern-day personnel management with a splurge of 1950s touchy-feely motivational theory thrown in.
Treating people as people (and not resources) is a prerequisite for organisational success, but managing people through HRM practices is a complete red herring.
On the positive side, any initiative that incites managers to do something they would not have done otherwise to think is a good thing. The ETP programme is a very expensive and tortuous method to incite management to think and raises more questions about the competence of Irish management than it answers about organisational success.
Outsourcing any management function is a useful re-engineering exercise when that function has become ineffective or inefficient (canteen management, advertising, distribution, warehousing, IT, etc), but outsourcing HRM to a recruitment company is a recipe for disaster.
Recruitment companies would be doing themselves a lot more good if they concentrated on improving standards within their own industry.
Instead of doing lots of things badly, why not just do a few things right?
Jack Feeney,
The Lodge,
Mount Carmel,
Lake Road,
Cobh,
Co Cork.
