Why HR Should Rarely (if Ever) Speak with Staff

Before agreeing to work with a new retainer client, our team at A Modern Way to Work may spend hours in discovery conversations. Not only do we need to get a thorough sense of how a client’s business works, it’s important for us to determine if our company is a good fit to be their HR team.

That said, one admittedly unusual opinion our team holds (and often vets around) is the notion that HR personnel should rarely (if ever) speak with staff.

Once they’re set up for success in fact, we believe the best companies shouldn’t need our HR people at all because:

A) They’ll inherently value their team members

B) Their managers will be well-trained in the drivers of engagement

To explain this unique idea in a little more depth, here are 3 reasons why we think HR should speak with employees a lot less than you probably think.

1. Directing employees to people managers preserves critical relationships

The world’s greatest companies invest significant time, money, and energy into training their people managers to be equally great.

Not only does the primary relationship between an employee and their company unfold through people managers, decades of Gallup research show the top driver of engagement at work is an employee’s direct supervisor.

When you present HR as your go-to problem-solvers, it can:

·       Get in the way of critical manager-employee relations

·       Encourage employees to complain in the misguided hope that something will change

·       Prevent staff building the necessary skills to effectively resolve conflict with managers (assuming, of course, those managers have been selected and trained the right way)

On top of all that, the reality is that most HR teams have very little power to affect change anyway, without approaching an employee’s manager themselves.

2. Well-built, supportive systems reduce HR reliance

Part of AMWTW’s mission is to build infrastructures that support people managers. We view ourselves not just as HR professionals, but as back-end builders of systems that:

·       Promote engagement in the workplace

·       Give managers and employees the tools they need to be successful

All the systems we build—from compensation strategies, to recruitment and selection processes, to performance review and feedback systems—are ultimately designed to make the elements of engagement, diversity, equity and inclusion inherent.

That’s why we believe that, so long as these systems are constructed with the appropriate users and business goals in mind, HR should rarely ever need to get involved with staff.

3. People involvement can’t be outsourced

One of the biggest downsides to getting involved with employees from an HR perspective is that it can leave business owners thinking: if we’re there speaking to and having difficult conversations with their staff, then they don’t need to be.

Some founders even go so far as to ask if we’ll be their “eyes and ears on the ground”. For us, however, that’s a big red flag that they’re probably:

·       Looking for a way to not involve themselves in people management

·       Adverse to the idea of having to focus on people at all

·       Not a good fit as a potential client

At AMWTW, we don’t just believe people manager involvement is critical to business success, we feel strongly it’s not something that can be outsourced. And after nearly 8 years of applying our methodology with clients and their people leaders, we’ve yet to regret not getting involved at the employee level.

In fact, as more and more of our clients become self-sufficient experts in how to lead and manage their teams, it only empowers us to move on and help others achieve similar goals!