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Performance Management

Published July 2009

Make HR Happy

  David Gartside and Jason W. Cutshall

Today's heavy, transaction-based workloads, budget and staff cuts, on top of high expectations from senior leaders, make it tough for HR executives to look on the bright side, but embracing technology, new service delivery models and development can allay some of their dissatisfaction.

Seventeenth-century French writer Francoise de Motteville wrote that the true path to happiness is "to love our work and find in it our pleasure." That's a tall order as the economy continues to sputter, layoffs increase and uncertainty in the global business community intensifies. In some ways, the HR leader is at the heart of the maelstrom: mostly as the bearer of bad news, the cleaner of messes and the person trying to find time in between all that to make a strategic contribution to the business.

Some surveys suggest HR leaders are among the least engaged of all professions. For example, the most recent "Happiness at Work" index from Badenoch & Clark, a U.K. recruitment consultancy, found HR professionals top the list when it comes to workplace unhappiness. Even banking and financial services employees were happier.

This unhappiness may be the result of a major disconnect between expectations and reality in the HR profession. Accenture conducts an annual poll of about 1,000 global executives across all major industries to assess the top 10 business issues on their minds. This year, half of those issues were talent-related — from reducing workforce costs to attracting talent and managing change. So on one hand, senior management looks to HR to deliver higher-value benefits to the business.

On the other hand, analysis of how HR leaders actually spend their time shows a high percentage of transactional work. Budgets are being cut, staff shortages are rampant, but the work still has to get done. The day-to-day pain of delivering bad news to the workforce, plus high expectations from the boss and a work environment in which it is almost impossible to meet expectations creates a clear recipe for unhappiness.

If the situation is to improve, changes will have to be made at a structural level, via more efficient service delivery models, new technologies and training, and different reporting structures and spans of control.

How HR Managers Spend Their Time

The disconnect between management's expectations for HR and the realities of HR's day-to-day responsibilities is borne out by Accenture data collected on an ongoing basis as part of its benchmarking service to large, global organizations. The analysis is two-pronged: evaluating actual time distribution statistics for HR staff and executive-level evaluations for HR's ability to meet senior management's expectations.
 
In terms of time distribution, the obvious question to ask is, what is an ideal mix of work for the typical HR leader? Consider three kinds of work: process and design tasks focused on enhancing workforce performance, strategic endeavors such as talent planning and forecasting, and transactional work handling processing across the employee life cycle. A reasonable expectation of time distribution would be roughly 20 percent strategy, 40 percent process and 40 percent management of transactional activities.
 
Actual numbers are quite different. Few HR leaders spend more than 10 percent of their time at the strategic level. At least half of their time is spent processing HR transactions. For some companies, time spent on transactions can be as high as 65 percent.

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