HR wants to rebuild its image as the organisational guardian of moral values, says Jill Evans

At this year’s HR Forum aboard the cruise liner Aurora, the wind of change was blowing through the restaurants and seminar rooms. Over lunch, delegates were debating the ethics of super-injunctions, and in seminars, some speakers were giving the profession’s ethical agenda a good dusting off. One senior HR director described what happened when his company finally twigged that a manager was useless and sacked him. The action was apparently greeted with a huge round of applause and questions from the manager’s team on what had taken them so long to do anything about it. Staff had been “in bits dealing with this man,” the HR director said. The function, he thought, “had a responsibility to other people whose jobs and lives are being made a misery. If anybody has a duty of care over this, it’s me.”

A plenary speaker said: “It’s not just power that counts. Consciousness is the most important thing. Inform people and they motivate themselves. Change is our destiny. Routine is a standstill. We need people who are open and alive.”
In another session, an HR director said the profession was in danger of becoming the “next set of Luddites” – always drifting back to well-tried and tested processes, driven by a primeval survival instinct to toe the organisational line. He thought that if HR wanted to make itself “irrisistible” to organisations, it not only had to be technically proficient in a range of fields, it also had to be driven by ethics. The session decided it was HR’s responsibility to see that people were treated fairly, and sometimes that included being an arbitrator between the employee and the organisation. HR’s job was about respect for individuals, about becoming a philosophy rather than just a department and, while it had to be rugged over business decisions, it had to be “the conscience and heart of the organisation” too.

Nobody was suggesting a return to the old “tea and sympathy” days – but they did want to ditch the image of a function that relied solely on rules to dictate the direction of travel, and emphasise HR’s role as the guardian of organisational higher values.