HR Managers Battling the Human Debt

Let's not sugarcoat it, no one's job is guaranteed in the age of AI. Not mine, not yours reading this and certainly not HR's. We all know that the vast majority of the activities HR has been reduced to handling are, while crucial, are perfectly "automatable". Hiring these days never requires anyone to "have a good feeling about this one"; the policies and the legality see to it that firing is more of a legal process than one that involves any care; antiquated performance management processes and stale yearly surveys are not going to yield anything and when it comes to learning, day-to-day development and ensuring humans are "humaning" happily that simply falls by the wayside and it is rarely anyone's job to be weeding systematically through the Human Debt and create happy teams.

Many of us wrongly assume HR is fine with this sorry state of affairs or doesn't care. We knowledge workers tend to realise quickly when starting in a new place that it has HumanDebt so HR won't be the "on our side" union-y type of presence in our lives we would have wanted in an ideal world, a mixture of enabling sage wisdom and interest in our lives and wellbeing, so we give up on them. The expectation of assistance. And as a result, we have no trust and no team with them and we assume they are callously detached.

But in my experience, that's not the truth. They care and they care plenty. Most of them simply learned to be incredibly good at the cognitive dissonance needed to carry on low-key fighting when it feels so pointless. Most of them suffer that they can't do more. Most of them desperately want to.

I get to talk to a lot of HR people either online or when I speak at events and I could fill a tome with their stories, their anecdotes and their illustriously innovative ways to solve things but I get all this info over a meal or a drink and never in an open discussion in a business meeting. I get long Zooms where we uncover "the real" and have heart-to-hearts and while most often I don't leave them feeling like they can tackle it, at least I leave the meeting with a friend and with knowing there are SO many Unsung/Unofficial Human Work Advocates out there and that knowledge of our tribe is valuable for all of us.

So in that spirit, here's a letter we got last week from one of these people.