This Is What’s Wrong With Human Resources – And How To Change It

 The worst thing we ever did in corporate America was to take the most vital part of any company – the people powering it – and label it so dismissively as “human resources.” We reduced talent to a simple asset: one to be standardized, controlled, commoditized, and managed like any other form of capital. We created a department whose sole purpose is to extract value and enforce compliance, and put them in charge of an ecosystem built around formalized processes, sameness, common practices, and conformity. The rise of HR can be traced back to the dawn of the industrial age, and the reason behind its creation is also at the very core of what renders it obsolete today. Businesses have always thrived on the process of making ever slightly better things, in ever improving ways. For centuries, humans have tried to emulate machines: we’ve mastered repetition, following orders, being on time, optimizing ourselves and our outputs. It’s time to accept that machines are best at being machines and celebrate what being a human is all about: not least our ability to question, challenge and adapt. But what we see most often is companies adapting around old systems, instead of completely rethinking leadership and management, or transforming the way they recruit and retain, or the types of roles they create. We recruit people to fit into a space, instead of reconfiguring, expanding or reshaping the space. We’d rather hold on to the job spec than bend it around a remarkable person. Perhaps the greatest opportunity in this new, post-digital economy lies in this promise: that each of us can realize our full potential by expressing our broad range of our skills. Because that inherently benefits the companies that employ us.

Reference: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/human-resources-disrupt-talent-recruitment-retention/