The Underpinings of HR

Thoughts on HRCA Course

I recently had the pleasure to attend a course in HR career development (HR Career Accelerator) lead by the fantastic team at PTHR. Given the world of HR is increasingly multifaceted and a lightning rod for various internal and socio-economic tensions in people management, I wanted to learn about the development of specialisms that now exists in the field and get a sense of where it is heading.

Before my journey into HR and thinking about the nature of work, I perceived careers rather simplistically – something that happens to you and is out of your locus of control. Call it deterministic naiveite. It all started for me with the oddest of things – a video game. In 1991, Sierra published Jones in the Fast Lane, a gameboard-style career simulation game with quirky characters and a highly stylised narrative of “making it in life”. You start the game with 4 simple goals: obtain a high level of wealth (earn a salary, invest in a simple stock market, and buy lottery tickets), happiness (acquiring goods and taking time off from work), education, and career. The latter is presented as “working hard, climbing the corporate ladder, improving your skills, dependability, and advancing your education.” Your character would go to places on the gameboard and try to achieve these goals as fast as possible against an opponent (each turn would last a week in the game). You eventually finish all the courses at the university, get the highest paying job at the Factory and move into the ‘Le Security’ flats. Simple as that. Of course, there is no doubt in my mind that the game is detached from real working life, choice, and is fundamentally Calvinistic motivation personified—the notion that one should perfect their life, especially in the work area (working hard) and thus achieving moral pureness. It paints a rather winner takes all linear career picture. Yet, it sounds reassuring and safe compared to our modern careers. They are nuanced, rapidly change in unrelated ways, difficult to plan, and even chaotic (HRCA course). HR would have a laidback role if the world looked like the one in Jones: managing employees as hired hands under the technocratic sun. But is Jones such a farfetched idea? Post-pandemic HR is responding to constant pressures brought on by instrumental (control) versus normative management archetypes (consent). It is this friction that makes up part of the UK productivity problem (Sky News, 2023).

Since the early industrial betterment, cycles of managerial ideologies have zigzagged between the rational/instrumental and normative perspectives. Like a pendulum swing, organisations are at various times throughout history viewed as a community, multi-stakeholder, shared purpose vehicles that consider employees as members (welfare capitalism after WW2, organisational culture in the 1980s) or at other times as shareholder for profit enterprises which abide by Adam Smith’s maxim of “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” This maxim is still alive and kicking today. You don’t have to look far—corporate greed and deregulation (prioritising buying back shares, cost cutting and no State oversight or State issued standardisation) have contributed to a recent massive train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, that polluted nearby rivers and air (Corporate Greed and Deregulation Fuel Threat of More Bomb Trains as East Palestine Demands Answers, 2023), and an air travel meltdown caused by the operational failure of a US airline leaving thousands stranded around the US.

"Managerial ideologies have zigzagged between the rational/instrumental and normative perspectives."

The two archetypes sip through to the very fabric of organisations and exert pressures and frictions within organisations. Therefore, HR needs to transition from an observer to an active participant by understanding management ideology and psychology of our times. Only then can it strike a balance between employee and organisation interest and solve the productivity problem. I was delighted that the HRCA touched upon similar themes and topics, and focused extensively to

• present and uncover the underlining current of people management,
• explored human-centric approaches,
• strategic partnering,
• new ways of learning and unlearning,
• talent potential and planning,
• ESG, and
• automatisation.

Most pertinently, the course delved into velocity, values and value that influence how we approach and manage change. With changing patterns, high and low frequency change and the Law of Accelerating Returns, organisations seek to capture the holy grail to understand the employee value proposition and develop People Professionals to unlock the secrets of seemly unlimited employee performance. One path forward mentioned in the HRCA course is to transition from top-down financial purpose-driven "this is how it’s always been done” organisations to autonomous, transformative, and experimentation-prone organisations. Large and small. By changing mindsets from sequential thinking to universal, organisations can learn from a dialectic change (thesis, antithesis – conflict – synthesis) (Van de Ven & Poole, 1996) and leverage diverse competing perspectives. A well-known example mentioned in the course is Patagonia and its founder Yvon Chouinard. Yvon, in his interview, stated that “Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet and go up the stairs two steps at a time /…/ We don’t care when you work, as long as the work gets done” (Neate & Rupert Neate, 2022). So, long before flexible working and outcome-based performance was allowed by managerialism, it was standard at Patagonia. Then there is the question of individual change in relation to work.

Ever since my readings of M. Foucault and M. Weber, I have been fascinated by the subjectification function of work. The pandemic opened Pandora’s box on an age-old question: What is work’s purpose? According to Foucault, it’s the nature or characteristic of work that gives us meaning and it enables others to give us meaning, how to perceive us through work occupation. Before Foucault, Weber reasoned that work relies on a virtuous act, a moral obligation (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber, 1905). The HRCA course tied this to IKIGAI and the pursuit of flourishing. IKIGAI, a Japanese concept meaning ‘a reason for being’ sets out 4 reasons: 

1. What we love,
2. what the world needs,
3. what we can be paid for, and
4. what we are good at.

The concept was presented as an employee engagement tool. Besides moral subjectivity and cultural relativism, I imagine IKIGAI does have the hallmarks of recognition, autonomy and self-fulfilment, all factors that influence employee engagement (CIPD). And if we are motivated by doing the work we love, for the good of the world, get recognition for it and perform a virtuous act, then it stands to reason it can contribute to a high commitment/high-performance work system. Highly motivated employees will drive performance as it is generally agreed.

"IKIGAI, a Japanese concept meaning ‘a reason for being’"

However, IKIGAI won’t work in any environment, I propose that IKIGAI only functions in consent-based environments, where moral and subjective views are considered, and stakeholder theory is implemented. It doesn’t work in a controlled unitarist environment. Employees will, however, seek a culture of transparency, to voice their concerns and speak up about what is working for them (CIPD Podcast, 2023), to perform that virtuous act, and if denied look for something else. So, once the paradigm shifts to fulfilling the intellectual enquiry, active listening through employee voice and social engagement at work is successful, IKIGAI can certainly enable the pursuit of flourishing. I believe these are necessary discussions to have in HRM, to develop better job design and ways of working going forward. On the contrary, we might be seeing further employee relations breakdowns and ill-effect outcomes.

We are already experiencing rampant burnout levels in the UK and worldwide (Bunjak, 2021). Conversely, looking at my profession, HR professionals are severely stressed and approaching burnout—94% of HR professionals feel overwhelmed (Kelly, 2022). It’s not just an individual issue but equally a workplace issue. Organisational factors such as workload, flexibility, lack of fairness, lack of learning and development and career opportunities, misalignment of employee and organisation values and low levels of psychological safety all contribute to burnout (HRCA course, 2023). There has been a lot of talk about automatisation and machine learning saving the day, alleviating the workload and enabling flexibility.

We don’t have to gaze into the future of autonomous intelligence to see that assisted intelligence and partly emerging augmented intelligence are already here. When automating repetitive, standardised and time-consuming tasks merges with humans and machines collaborating to make decisions, our working lives will get restructured in fundamental ways (HRCA course). But there’s not much evidence that the future of work is going to be jobless, or even burnout free. Quite the opposite, work intensification has been increasing despite the advances in technology since the first measurements began in the UK in the 1990s (O’Connor, 2022). In their piece, O'Connor raises a compelling point about how employers have harnessed technology to extract more effort from employees by monitoring them closely and leveraging HR data to make cutbacks. Moreover, technology itself is complex and requires more maintenance. Consequently, we will likely see a greater divide between highly skilled and support employees in the future. Both groups will likely still experience high workloads—picking up miscellaneous queries (e.g. Twitter and Facebook report cases) and involving uniquely human traits, respectively.

"work intensification has been increasing despite the advances in technology"

In response to these trends, the HRCA course listed 8 transform areas for HR:

1. Workforce planning and skills forecasting,
2. talent competencies,
3. person-organisation fit,
4. recruitment process,
5. better integration,
6. upskilling,
7. learning culture, and
8. rethinking retention.

After decades of hunkering down, HR has been called to rethink work to meet business and changing employee needs. HR will also need to address the constant pressures in instrumental versus normative management archetypes, ultimately adopting more of a generally unitarist or pluralist role. The field will have to adapt quickly to an uncertain technological future with heightened geopolitical risks, hybrid working models, and overworked, wary employees. In a complimentary way, IKIGAI can serve as a tool, a mindset to create a virtuous organisation. In the end, a career in Jones in the Fast Lane is a bygone of different age and mindset (hopefully). If we cannot have secure linear careers, perhaps businesses and HR should create thriving cultures, support careers and jobs that are experimental, innovative, fulfilling and just fun without the risk of burnout.

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1. CIPD Podcast. (2023). Is your employee value proposition fit for a new era of work? | Podcast. Retrieved 28 February 2023, from https://www.cipd.co.uk/podcasts/raising-employee-value-proposition
2. Corporate Greed and Deregulation Fuel Threat of More Bomb Trains as East Palestine Demands Answers. (2023, February 17). Democracy Now! https://www.democracynow.org/2023/2/17/norfolk_southern_east_palestine_derailment
3. Kelly, J. (2022, April 14). 98% Of HR Professionals Are Burned Out, Study Shows. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/04/14/98-of-human-resources-professionals-are-burned-out-study-shows/
4. Sky News. (2023). Growth pains: Ahead of Jeremy Hunt’s first budget, we ask what’s holding the British economy back? Sky News. https://news.sky.com/story/growth-pains-ahead-of-jeremy-hunts-first-budget-we-ask-whats-holding-the-british-economy-back-12830229
5. O’Connor, S. (2022, June 7). Why are we all working so hard? Financial Times.Sky News. (2023). Growth pains: Ahead of Jeremy Hunt’s first budget, we ask what’s holding the British economy back? Sky News. https://news.sky.com/story/growth-pains-ahead-of-jeremy-hunts-first-budget-we-ask-whats-holding-the-british-economy-back-12830229
6. Neate, R. & Rupert Neate. (2022, September 15). Yvon Chouinard – the ‘existential dirtbag’ who founded and gifted Patagonia. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/global/2022/sep/15/yvon-chouinard-the-existential-dirtbag-who-founded-and-gifted-patagonia