Ask any organisation what is their most important asset and they will say it is their people. Alternatively, ask any group of people whether or not they are treated by their organisation in a way that reflects their supposed importance and invariably the answer is no.
The evidence is everywhere – just about every employee survey indicates that people are less than happy with their jobs and places of employment. Putting it another way, how many shiny happy people do you see going to work in the morning?
The truth is that most organisations have a significant people gap – the difference between people talk and people walk. As such, human assets remain unappreciated and underutilised. This has huge implications for individual productivity and organisational performance.
What is really strange about all of this is that organisations have invested vast amounts of money on HR departments, training, recruitment, and an assortment of other employee related mechanisms and initiatives.
Yet, it would appear that despite all of this, not nearly enough has been achieved and much of that employee related effort and expenditure is missing the mark. As such, although managers continually talk about the importance of people, the considerable gap between talk and action remains.
Why is this so?
I suppose the first and most obvious reason is that irrespective of the amount of money spent on HR and HR related initiatives, by definition that alone cannot be enough. If organisations truly believe that people are their most important asset then it stands to reason that people and the development of people should be the primary focus and responsibility of every manager.
With few exceptions, such as Toyota, we know that this is clearly not the case.
Consequently, the only rational conclusion that one can draw from this is that HR is nothing more than an excuse for managers to outsource their primary responsibility to someone else. Until and unless that changes, the vast amounts of money spent on HR initiatives will continue to go to waste – and no amount of turning HR departments into HR partners is going to change that.
The simple truth is that as far managers are concerned, people are just not sexy. So what is?
This we will explore in a series of follow-up articles which will examine how an obsession with leadership, technology, knowledge management, outsourcing, and a host of fads, have all been used by managers to marginalise human assets. Once we have completed this examination the answer to the people gap, The Human Asset Organisation, will immediately become obvious.
Watch this space.
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