HR and the role of line managers
Human resource management (HRM) is the overall process of managing people in an organisation. HRM encompasses the vast array of decisions frontline managers make about the people they supervise e.g.
- Who should I hire?
- How do I fire?
- What is the best way to find and select top performers?
- How can I manage or coach my people for superior performance?
- How can I reward good performance objectively (and motivate for even better performance)?
- How do I deal with non-performance?
- Who should I promote into positions of higher responsibilities?
- What are my staff training needs and how do I meet this need effectively?
- How do I bridge the capability gap in my staff?
Isn’t managing HR the HR Manager’s Job?
Absolutely not!
Line managers play a vital role in ensuring that employees are motivated, productive and competent, and aligned with the business strategy.
Managers whose responsibility is HR function, and who are housed in an HR department are increasingly focusing on broader strategic issues e.g. Predicting the organization’s long-term hiring needs based on projections of company growth and competency requirements or benchmarking company against competitors.
It is the line manager who is working with employees’ day in and day out. They are the ones who have to spend time with employees, get to know them, listen to them, challenge them, reward them, etc. If this is so, then line managers are in the best position to assess employee needs and make managerial decisions that directly affect them.
However, many line managers, under pressure to meet operational, marketing and financial targets, often struggle to fulfil their people management duties.
This is partly because they are not equipped with the tools, skills and knowledge they need to be effective.
As a result, managers sometimes effectively abdicate responsibility in some aspects of people management.
The phrase “that’s HR’s job” is heard too often in many companies – whether describing employee development, managing an individual’s performance or dealing with absenteeism issues.
This places a heavier burden on the HR department and means that many HR professionals, rather than being proactive and spending time on high-value activities, are bogged down with basic administration, fire-fighting and hand-holding.
Ineffective line management doesn’t just impact on the HR department: it hurts the bottom line. A survey found that over 80% of HR managers felt that employees would be more productive if their line managers were better equipped.
Recent research involving nearly 3,000 employers found that organisations with a comprehensive, structured approach to people management, covering areas such as recruitment, development plans and employee appraisals and high involvement of line managers, perform measurably better than those without, indicated by higher profits per employee, higher profit margins and higher productivity.
Sometimes it’s easy to be critical of managers, but often they’re not properly equipped to be effective. Investment in management training is often patchy, support consists of a set of policy documents sitting on a server somewhere, and useful information on their employees is stored in a database or a filing cabinet that only HR can access.
Faced with a lack of clear guidance and easily accessible information, it’s not surprising that many line managers’ response when an issue arises is either to pick up the phone to HR or to ignore the problem and hope it goes away (or at least transfers to someone else’s team).
Part of the problem may also lie with the HR department itself. For all the talk about wanting to devolve more responsibility to the line, in practice HR professionals are sometimes reluctant to trust line managers to manage.
They are unwilling to give managers the tools and information they need to do the job effectively: after all, knowledge is power, and by being the gatekeepers of all information relating to employees, policies and processes, HR may feel that it has power.
However, this is not in the long-term interests of the HR function.
If HR teams are to fulfil their potential and be true partners to the business, they need to let go a bit more and trust their managers with the day-to-day stuff.
This doesn’t mean being unsupportive or abdicating responsibility for the way that people are managed. It does mean defining strategies and policies and then putting in place the frameworks and the systems that enable managers to take accountability for the day-to-day execution – but in a controlled, informed and effective way.
Just wishing that line managers would take more accountability and HR professionals could be more strategic is not going to make it so, of course.
Better solutions are needed to support key people management processes and quality Training & development of Line Managers in the Fundamentals of HR is a critical success factor.
Do read more on this and other fundamental Business issues on www.workforcegroup.com or send an email to info@workforcegroup.com
Bolaji Olagunju is the Lead Consultant/CEO of Workforce Group, a Management Consulting Firm that offers diverse services in the areas of Learning, Research & Development, HR and Business Consulting, People & Task Outsourcing and Recruitment Services.