At the root of the problem lies the acute emotional alienation that the average individual contributor experiences with both the HR manager and the line manager. One clearly sees that the intensity of contact has come down significantly and the little that exists has become transactional. Understanding the reasons for this reduced contact and, therefore, the emotional alienation would be critical to dimension the problem.

The emotional alienation: HR and line have been driving a series of significant changes in the way learning, earning and growing have been managed. These changes have been huge and quite hard to digest and live with. The dissonance caused by these changes has clearly led to emotional alienation and the flip flop state of feeling "victimised" and "persecuted".

The five areas of change at the centre of this alienation are:

Unfortunately, the employee does not see the HR manager and the line manager on his side in managing these changes.

One can answer this by taking a look at what the traditional ER manager did. He was variously referred to as welfare officer, personnel officer, plant personnel manager, employee relations manager and so on.

At the minimum he had three specific roles to perform:

To be sure, there were at least three major checks and balances to ensure that the role was played and played well:

Law: Compliance with law was an important pre-occupation, be it working conditions or welfare or disputes or terminations. Law was a deterrent.

Unions: The presence of trade unions played a significant role in ensuring that organisations did more than them to wrest the relationship with employees.

Style of leadership: Even in the absence of unions, we had business leaders known for their strong personal belief in people and their style of ensuring that people were well looked after. This provided the impetus for others to maintain relations with employees. The house of Tata, Murugappa, TVS and so on were legendary for their direct involvement in managing employee relations.

In contrast today, all the three checks and balances are missing. The awareness of law and its rightful interpretation continues to be a problem. In fact, most modern HR managers know little about labour laws. Trade unions have almost disappeared, at least for now.

Needless to say, the performance pressures on CEOs prevent them from engaging with employees proactively. More importantly, having enjoyed the freedom to hire, fire and make changes to peoples lives at will and not having seen any form of collective action, many modern CEOs are not aware of what they have and how precious it is. Neglect of the ER dimension may lead to the very sad situation of unions coming back, all over again, something that must be avoided.

Initially, this sounds revolting. The best way to step back and understand how the more modern function of marketing has evolved and coexisted with the traditional sales function. The entire field of marketing has been focused on strengthening customer relationships through a variety of efforts. Sales, on the other hand, is and will always be, the engine of revenue and growth. It is the sales force that stays in touch with the markets, makes the customer contact and launches new products, services and solutions.

Let us now contrast this with the evolution of HR from ER and look at whether the two have managed to coexist.

Firstly, we have not maintained the distinct identities between HR and ER roles, and have begun to see them as one profession. In fact, everyone is called an HR Manager, regardless of what he or she does, especially in the modern businesses.

As a result, the ER part of HR has suffered. The next big mistake was the step-motherly positioning of those who performed ER roles vis-à-vis HR. ER managers were asked to look after workmen and HR managers white-collar employees. ER was not seen as a strategic process and HR was not seen as a relationship process.

Organisations put their best and most articulate people in HR. Very quickly, ER stopped attracting good talent.

Preoccupation with staffing, performance, quality and the like took the HR manager away from engaging with people and focused his energies on engaging with processes. Worse, the HR managers were doing this without any grounding in ER roles. In its eagerness to align with business and participate in executing strategy, HR not only forgot the ER role but also killed it.

This is, perhaps, the most contentious and difficult issue to resolve. All modern ER managers, CEOs and experts have held that the people manager or line manager is best qualified and positioned to manage ER.

There are three reasons why it is not so:

To what extent have today's organisations prepared their line managers to perform people management responsibilities? The answer: Virtually, none at all. Either over-promoted, or promoted for technical abilities, many line managers just do not have the skills in performing people management tasks right from selection of employees to taking corrective action.

Lack of preparation to do these tasks creates stress and resentment and it shows in the quality of ER demonstrated. It is not intentional. It is just a lack of skill.

There is widespread belief that managerial span of control is increasing. It is of course common knowledge that the pressure to do the numbers is also ever increasing. In the end, in the battle between task and people, task has turned out the winner. Today's manager just does not have the time for ER. Should he make the time? Absolutely yes. HR is unable to help the line manager in this Much of the above could be overcome if the quality of relationship between LM and HR was strong. Unfortunately it is not.

One aspect of the problem is the conflicts in expectations. Line managers want operational excellence and many HR managers hate the routine and the line accountability. Line managers are limited in their ability to place qualitative expectations and many HR managers are limited in their ability to influence change or market their initiatives. The other more serious problem is of trust and credibility. HR managers quite often lack the skill to raise issues, present data about people problems or just practice constructive employee advocacy. Overreacting or carrying information to the next level leads to reach of trust and breakdown of relationships.

The way forward: The message is loud and simple. We need to make ER an integral part of the HR management framework. It cannot be delegated to something that a junior ER officer does, when he has some free time. ER is the foundation on which the function must be built. It is, in fact, the window through which one can see the world in which people live and work. The tools, techniques and methods may be and should be modern, but the approach should be the same.

(The author is founder and CEO of totus consulting, a strategic human resource consulting firm.)

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