There is no such thing called HR any more

On May 10, 1984, I entered Cadbury House on Bhulabhai Desai Road, better known as Breach Candy, Mumbai, to start my career as an HR professional with the company. Thirty years on, I feel a lot has changed. Firstly, Cadbury India Ltd is now called Mondelez India Foods Ltd!

One only wishes that the dairy milk chocolates that I used to feast on as an employee will remain as tasty as I remember them to have been. Secondly, after 30 years of being in the business, I have come to realise: there is no such thing called Human Resources or HR!

While it may sound like a bold claim, I assure you it’s true.

To begin with, the term HR never fully explained what the professionals in the field did. It was a term, often loosely and conveniently used, to refer to all professionals working with people and organisations.

With the evolution of a field its naming system, equivalent to its Binomial nomenclature, normally keeps pace with the emerging trends and scopes in the field. For a long time, HR, as a collection of professional streams, suffered from a kind of taxonomy confusion.

History lesson Let’s trace how this confusion came about.

The foremost thing the field’s practitioners did around the early 1980s was to differentiate and distance themselves from the field of Employee and Industrial Relations. Young practitioners were quick to abandon titles such as Labour welfare officer and called themselves HR Executives instead.

Soon, human resources development was seen as being different from HR management. Those in the consulting space added to the confusion by introducing the term human capital management. Meanwhile, the tribe of behavioural scientists, mostly interested in the field of Organisation Development (OD) and internal change management, did not quite find a meaningful place in the field’s taxonomy and remained a distinct tribe. It was never clear if OD was a part of HR.

Very soon, the words: talent and talent management found their way into the field’s taxonomy. Some saw it as a new practice, while other saw it as a substitute for the term HR. Many in the technology space started creating extensions, as spinoffs on talent, to create streams like talent acquisition, talent development or transformation, talent engagement and so on.

During this period a whole host of new ideas, innovations and fads started entering the field.

Employee engagement became as a role within HR, likewise Operations as a sub function of HR emerged.Meanwhile, there was a lot of excitement around HR professionals evolving into business partners and not remaining in support function roles. This resolve soon reflected in additions to the taxonomy in the form of a new tribe: the HR business partners.

Employee partners While partnering became important, the specialist functions too gained prominence and began to evolve as clear verticals with their own professional streams. This was a visible trend especially in the case of learning and development, compensation and benefits and talent acquisition.

One soon found that there were a set of young professionals who did not fit into any of these slots. They were soon called “generalists” — a term which connoted someone who was confused about what they were supposed to do or did a little bit of everything.

With more and more professionals preoccupied with partnering with the business, leaders in HR and business soon realised that there was no one to partner with the poor employees and as a result employees were feeling completely alienated. Soon there entered an addition to the taxonomy – the employee partner. Turns out that they are really the good old Labour Welfare Officers in blue jeans!

With so much action all around, the leaders soon realised that their own title of HR Head and VP – HR and so on, didn’t actually reflect their roles. While some settled for designations such as Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO), others called themselves Chief People Officers, People Function Heads, People Strategists and so on.

At present, if you were to go to any of the HR professional networking forums and exchange business cards, you will realise that very few, if any, will carry the term HR on their cards. While the cynic may dismiss the matter as much ado about nothing, an occupational hazard of HR or over intellectualisation, the truth is, that one of the signs of maturation of any profession is such an evolution in its streams. HR like any maturing multi-disciplinary profession has evolved in a manner that the term HR no longer accurately describes what many of its practitioners really do, and that is alright.

It all boils down to the question: what is the more accurate taxonomy for the profession today? Here is how I see it:

Functional specialisation is one dimension of the evolving taxonomy. There are at least eight functional specialisations within the field such as Staffing, HR Operations, HR Analytics, Employee Relations, among others.

Differentiation from a functional design perspective is another dimension of the evolving taxonomy. The function now has Centres of Excellence which house the specialist functions. It has shared services to take care of all processes and service delivery activities across the employee life cycle. Then there is the employee facing side of the function (employee relations/ employee partnering / employee engagement) and the business facing side of the function – business partnering.

Processes designed to deploy HR solutions are another dimension of the taxonomy. From staffing, to on-boarding to performance management, the profession has scores of processes and sub-processes that together help deploy solutions to its users.

Beyond all this the profession keep responding to business needs by coming up with contextually relevant solutions to address issues of organisation effectiveness. This could include things like values and culture, Diversity and Inclusion, employee wellbeing, employer image and reputation and so on.In conclusion, I reiterate: there is no such thing called HR. It has several branches now. To prevent confusion, as more roles get added to the field its taxonomy should get updated to help everyone make meaning out of all the newness.

The writer is the founder of Totus Consulting, a strategic HR consulting firm.

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