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PSI
> News
> Are personnel specialists holding back workplace performance?
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Press ReleaseAre personnel specialists holding back workplace performance?Date: 19/08/2008 The evidence from 25 years of the Workplace Employment Relations Surveys (WERS) shows that a growing number of workplaces have a personnel specialist in place and that an increasing proportion of these specialists have relevant qualifications. Personnel management is becoming more embedded and more professionalised. It is reasonable to assume that personnel specialists are hired to apply contemporary best practice and thereby, perhaps indirectly, to improve performance. Analysis in a new paper co-authored by PSI's Alex Bryson fails to support this assumption. Personnel specialists are more likely to be associated with traditional industrial relations practices - like the presence of a trade union representative, establishment-level bargaining and a joint consultative committee - than with human resource practices, such as employee share-ownership, profit-related pay, information provision, briefing groups, and problem-solving groups. Yet, on the basis of ratings that they have provided, where more human resource practices are in place, performance is more highly rated. Moreover, where personnel specialists are present, including qualified specialists, performance tends, if anything, to be poorer. This raises challenging questions for the personnel profession. We need to consider how robust these findings are and to set them in a wider context. The starting point for the analysis in this paper was an assumption that personnel departments and those who work in them have shifted their main focus over the 25 years of the WERS surveys from industrial relations to human resource management. The 1980s and 1990s were decades in which the importance of effective management of employment relations appeared to receive higher priority, spurred in part by the shift in focus towards human resource management. If in the past, a key element in the role had been to ‘manage’ industrial relations, by the 1980s the focus switched to the need for a more effective management and utilisation of human resources. This coincided with the burgeoning of research on human resource management and performance (for reviews of the evidence, see Boselie et al, 2005, and Combs et al, 2006) and the up-beat call to arms for personnel specialists issued by Ulrich when he invited them to become human resource champions. If this call was ever answered at the corporate level, and there is strong evidence that Ulrich’s work has been highly influential (CIPD, 2007), it does not appear to have filtered down to the workplace. While we have seen a growth in the presence of personnel specialists, and while they have become more qualified, this has not been reflected in any pioneering of new human resource practices. Indeed, if anything, personnel specialists have been bringing up the rear, holding on to the well-established industrial relations practices rather than championing the introduction of human resource management. Read the paper: From Industrial Relations to Human Resource Management: The Changing Role of the Personnel Function, by David Guest and Alex Bryson |
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