human resource policy, human resource management

In their birthplace, whatever happened to TLC and QWL? American employers may still be practising Tender Loving Care and promoting a superb Quality of Working Life. But neither looms large in business magazines or business rhetoric. Take Fortune: over the last year its ideas section has covered virtually no human resource issues.

One piece promised an exception. Its trailer talked about a company's 'most important asset': oddly, it wasn't referring to its people, but to the corporate brainpower. This is apparently distinct from the people who possess the brains. Only one piece over these months tackled a plain, unvarnished human resources issue: and that, ominously, was whether personnel departments should exist at all.

As in Britain, the workforce has become more docile and malleable as union power has dwindled, jobs have fallen to technology and restructuring, and pay levels have been depressed. In the eternal war between capital and labour, capital is on top in every sense. Those same business magazines are dominated by celebrations of CEOs and their wondrous achievements (which attract financial rewards of monstrous proportions).

Against this background, human resources professionals could easily come to be regarded as unnecessary goods, even in the absence of other factors. They aren't absent. Traditional human resources responsibilities like payroll are being farmed out. There's very little that can't be covered by out-sourcing - the Corporate Leadership Council lists benefits administration; information systems and record keeping; outplacement and similar activities, like relocation; even health and safety.

The article implies not only that HR's day is done; but that its disappearance would be no great loss to anybody (except those currently in human resources jobs). Yet this thesis is surely incompatible with the entire thrust of the new management, with its stress on 'liberation' and the 'learning organisation'. The latter's guru, Peter M. Senge, espouses a new kind of company, in which the human asset really is all-important.

Senge argues that, for seven decades, companies sought above all to boost productivity. human resources people played a key role. They aided and abetted the drives for manufacturing efficiency which accompanied mass marketing, new product and process technology, and bean-counter control systems. When the gentler Theory Y took over from the carrot-and-stick, hire-and-fire management of Theory X, human resources people were again the nursemaids of change.

If Senge is right, though, the future will make Theory Y seem positively authoritarian: the new watchwords are 'distributing power while increasing self-discipline', 'improved conversation', 'voluntary followership' and 'systemic thinking skills'. human resources people could certainly hope to find golden opportunities here. But much of modern American practice, as opposed to theory, smacks of Theory X; what's more authoritarian than dismissing workers in their thousands?

The call for abolition of personnel departments is nothing new in America - but paradoxically, it once came from a passionate devotee of Theory Y: Robert Townsend, in his iconoclastic Up the Organisation. One of Townsend's favourite latter-day companies is Nucor, a steel-maker whose 6,000 human resources are handled after by three head office staff who have no control over the human resources people at the plants (one apiece). What's new today is the practicality of abolition - the transition to 'a highly automated employee-services operation handling what used to be paperwork in a ragingly efficient way.'

Fortune adds: 'This function becomes little more than a gateway to outside suppliers.' Yet, as author Thomas A Stewart recognises, a huge and dangerous strategic gap must result. No strategy will succeed without effective, willing and collaborative human participation in planning, implementation and follow-up. Winning that participation needs expertise - and the expert's place is at the top, the CEO's office.

By apparent coincidence, the next article features Al Zeien of Gillette, a CEO so influenced by his human resources strategists that they persuaded him to conduct personally 800 annual performance reviews. But 'keeper of the CEO's conscience' is how one American quality director describes his job - and in TQM companies the quality function usurps much of the role and authority which, in the heyday of organisation development, personnel departments took upon themselves. The writing is on the wall: either human resources people seize their strategic opportunities at the top, or they won't have any opportunities.