A holistic view of Human Resources
Human Resource Management is like a sack of unwrapped pennies, separately, none of its components will buy much. When they are added up, no bank will take them unless they are rolled and the deliverer’s bank account number is written on each secured sleeve of fifty. Part of the problem lies with the term itself. It conjures up images of hook-end staffs, scores of unwashed sheep, rolling grassy hills, and yapping Collie dogs. Indelicate as the metaphor may be, essentially, disorganized humans are rounded up and driven to the place where they can be more readily fleeced (for wool).
This is true, not because the function’s potential value is limited. In fact, it would not require too much imagination to consider Human Resource Management an application of psychology or medicine, something worthy of a moniker like “human health and well being in organizations” (HHWBO). Following this line of thought seriously for a minute, consider four aspects of human well being as it is affected by organizations: personal, economic, social and ecological.
Personal well being
If we assume the physical and mental are fundamentally the same, one, inseparable; then physical safety cannot be divided from mental safety. Harm is harm. No blood, no foul. Blood, foul. No amount of metaphorizing back and forth between the palpable and the perceived can change the fact that health is the whole person. The split between mind and body is just one of the many that is usually made. In the brief traditions of HR as a discipline, safety and career development, for example, are viewed as separate one from the other, and job commitment is thought to compete with other-life commitments, not to come from the same fountain of life. This tendency to break everything down into pennies, smaller and smaller parts; harms irreparably, our understanding of the human at play, our understanding of the human as spiritual and our understanding of the human in the organization, for ultimately, these are all aspects of the same being.
Clearly, there can be no careers without safety and learning for one’s career includes learning how to do it safely. Also, it is possible that some people are more committed to their jobs because what is happening away from work is so uplifting to them at a given time. Or the person might be downtrodden due to the job, or on an even keel due to what is happening away from work, and so on. These relationships are so complex, that maybe we should entertain the notion that they are one issue, summed up in one question. How’s life?
From the reductionist point of view, the same person might variously be considered a carefully selected raw material, a ball of clay to be molded, a cost to be reduced, or something akin to kindling for a fire. The basic assumption of a holistic approach to human organizational well being would be that no person’s existence could ever be reduced to a set of parts. Only when the pennies of my existence are added together to make thousands of dollars will anyone respect them as currency. The violation done to each person by the segmentation of his requirements for a quality existence into little sections, is more than a matter of existential concern. There are genuine, down-to-earth problems with this practice. A holistic view of life is preferable to a fragmented one for many reasons. I would like to consider some of them here.
A holistic view of life prohibits the treatment of human beings as merely a resource, by promoting the sanctity of their existence, independent of the organization where they are found. Within this perspective, the goal for each person is self-actualization, not some contribution to an organization. The individual’s well-being is not considered distinct from the well-being of the collective. The goal for each organization is maximized human well being, within and without. The well being of those who are active “members” of the organization is not separate from the well being of all human beings. Every person is considered a sacred union of body, soul and spirit, not a mind to be mined or a body to be borrowed. In collective or organizational terms, technical outcomes are not considered separate from human outcomes.
Is this point of view a little too pie in the sky, too idealistic? Perhaps it is, but only when considered in contrast to the prevailing point of view. In other words, if we could start from neutral, whatever that might be, with respect to holism versus reductionism; we might be more inclined to impugn the prevailing point of view, that leads us to see humans as sheep to fleece or chimps to train. If we had all grown up with a healthier, more holistic understanding of living, our current characterizations of human beings as role performers would no doubt seem a little dismal, a little dystopian. In other words, to make a case for holistic HR (or HHWBO), we have to first establish that what we currently have as a perspective is not neutral but closer to the opposite of a utopia.
Reverence for the living (sheep or human), requires us to relate to the animate and the inanimate in different ways. Whether we acknowledge it or not, our language reflects our thoughts and behavior. “Well-being” makes no sense when applied to an urn of sodium sulfate, but it makes all the sense in the world when applied to you and me. We need not postulate an eternal soul to show deep reverence for the living. Perhaps it does help to postulate an over-soul, however; sort of the way Ralph Waldo Emerson did. That is, it might help us to understand the significance of the living over the non-living. Perhaps if we thought of all life as one, not parts of one, we would see that we are all facets of the same energy. There is something fundamentally cynical about our prevailing policentric view of living. Such thinking has lead to the selfish talk and actions of colonialism, objectivism, and capitalism.
We trivialize one manifestation of life by glorifying another. In truth, fertility is to animate, as sterility is to inanimate. This distinction is only worthwhile when used to discern life from no-life. Nothing is gained from ranking the living on such scales as fertile to sterile, capable to incapable, useful to useless. The fact that your IQ measures at 145 while mine is 100, is not as good to know as is the fact that your LQ (living quotient) is the same as mine, that is to say we are both 100% “brain alive”. We are both among the living. All life is liquid, and therefore changeable. Life is potential. We should not permit ourselves to be seduced by the temporary when it comes to evaluating individual manifestations of existence.
Organizations, especially those designed to turn a profit; tie behavior to standards, call it performance, and rank order these examples of performance. The result is that some are temporarily held up as precious, while others are temporarily seen as putrid. Cultures impose the rules by which we rank. But cultures too are fleeting phenomena. We must seek wisdom beyond culture, outside our particular province. Society itself is a term synonymous with efforts to evaluate, rank and file. Remember, however, it is we who do this evaluating, this ranking, this filing. We make these choices.
The holistic wisdom, to which I refer, suggests there is a level of living across individuals, across time, across societies. Only when we demonstrate an abiding respect for life at that level, irrespective of the accidents of temporal existence, can we be trusted as decision-makers in social institutions. Only if we show a deep understanding of life as systemic, can we be worthy of establishing meritocratic rankings, for such rulings are without meaning outside the context in which they are found. We should not exercise authority over other human beings without such insight. One product of our reductionistic view of life has been to establish categories of well being. Let us consider a few of these, now.
Economic well being
Money cannot buy happiness, or to state it personally, any happiness I might buy with money is below my standards. However, in our modern existence, we have deified money and its consumptive power until those who manage organizations have become the keepers of the store of economic comfort and psychological wealth. The history of business reads like an electronic spreadsheet with every cell, formatted currency. By now we fully understand that our lives are inextricably tied up with those of others. In theory, if we have a marketable skill, the world will beat a path to our door, or if we commit a crime, it will beat us all the way to jail. My fortune literally depends on how I fit in the world as it exists now. Imagine Bill Gates astride a white steed wearing shining armor (Try again, it can be done). When humans fought off cougars for food, Bill Gates would have been a pork chop, but in an era when what is important is something as abstract as predicting market trends, people hang on his every word; hoping his wisdom (and that of other fiduciary stars) might save them from their monetary folly.
We consider a large Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to be an indicator of our national health, despite the fact that a good deal of that GDP is driven by our efforts to fight off social and ecological diseases. We pay handsomely for antibodies against crime, bad habits, poverty, and toxic effluent. During any given year the GDP is higher because we bought locks for our doors, burglar alarms, car alarms, the club, snub-nose revolvers, open-heart surgery for cholesterol-clogged arteries, fences and gates to separate the wealthy from the poor, and caskets to bury those killed by exploding tires or industrial by-products.
During the process of modern living, invariably some humans become servants of organizations started by other humans. (Is it too late for a word to the wise? i.e. “it is much better to start an organization than to be finished by one.”). The temporary micro-societies (and some not so little) we call organizations, are among our most powerful instruments of classification. Some people are resultingly served by the economy, while others primarily serve the economy. Marx is no more wrong on this point than ever, despite the fall of so-called communism and the apparent heyday of capitalism. For in the end, all the -ism words we can conjure, cannot help us hide (or even explain) what we do to one another in the name of progress.
Coming back to our original topic, Human Resource Management as we know it today, exists mainly as a by-product of government intervention between organizers and organizees. Left alone, organizations tend toward provinciality, discrimination on the basis of traditions ranging from benign to malignant, and the institutionalization of a powerful few who in turn rule over the powerless many. Without persistent lawmaking it is not difficult to imagine something on the order of South African-level apartheid as the rule in Western businesses.
Tax laws, minimum wage, benefits packages, hiring practices, discrimination definitions, these are the organs of the body of Human Resource Management. In the U.S. for example, without the 1960s, there would be no affirmative action, and without affirmative action there would still be no peace in the streets of southern states. Modern Human Resource Management is brought to you by Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, John and Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Senator George McGovern, Jimmy Carter and Lily Ledbetter. Were it not for the concerted efforts of Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George Bush, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, refreshing our memories of the level of greed and selfishness required by a free-market view of prosperity, most Americans might be card-carrying members of the AFL-CIO, for better or for worse. HRM has a tight connection to the political, no less than unions.
Since a capitalistic economy serves best a few, on the strength of the efforts of many, it might do us some good to see how HR has lent its weight to both sides of this teeter-totter. Recalling our sheep metaphor, performance appraisal, selection, training and development, placement, job enrichment, and economic incentives, are all HR devices engineered by management to sharpen their wool shears. Affirmative action, health and safety laws, the EEOC, and labor review boards, are all designed to keep the shearers hand steady so no sheep blood is spilt.
Despite Herculean effort to do so, modern life is still not reducible to mere economic terms. Many still reflect on something we might call social well being. Let us turn our attention to that topic for a moment.
Social well being
Do we work so we can live or live so we can work? Or is that even a sensible question? What about you, do you work to live or live to work? That is, do you work so your relationships and activities unrelated to work are made possible or enhanced? Or do you live for the time when you are producing, be it writing, singing, bolting on fenders, or just what? Chances are, the answer may vary across time, and over episodes of your life. When you are working in that career job, you may deteriorate into a mumbling idiot during a two-week vacation. But then, let you get back to work and your mind is once again as sharp as Ockham’s Razor (never assume more things than are necessary to prove a point).
If you are a Human Resource Manager, you might experience a little cognitive dissonance. For example, suppose you believe that most of the current staff works near 100% of their capacity to produce what is demanded by the firm’s customers, but other managers believe a 10% reduction in staff would be a good idea, because “we have too many people now.” If we reduce our force, the result will be greater efficiency through increased individual productivity. One HR manager might see this as a test of his integrity, another might not see the contradiction at all, and a third might announce right away that the notion of downsizing is absurd with people working as hard as they currently are.
One of the things that makes the last position so difficult for the HR manager to boldly assert, is that she or he, is so often without hard numbers, without the evidence of quantity. The first law of organizing is: anything that can be quantified, will be, and a corollary to that law, is: (sort of like paper covers rock) quantified beats qualified every time. You can take this a step further. Those things that are not quantified, for all practical purposes, do not exist. Related dictums are: if it moves, count it; if it does not move, count it anyway; and what is more, count the number of moves it makes if it moves, and if it does not move, count the number of moves it did not make.
Work is in the public domain. If you hunker down under your machine and hardwire it so it continues to operate, and your schedule says that time should have been spent running the machine, it becomes part of the public record that you missed your quota for that day. The minutes you logged as mechanical engineer, are among the few things that do not go in your permanent file. No exception is made for the possibility you might know more than the minimum to perform your duty. Every effort is made to determine where you came up short. That’s built into the system. No one beats the house at this game of black jack.
Every HR manager, tacitly; metaphorically; puts her or his hand on the organizational Bible and affirms she or he solemnly swears, she or he will faithfully fulfill the responsibilities of the office to which she or he is being sworn in, including to support the organization in its effort to obtain as many pounds of associate wool per budgetary quarter as is deemed efficient, effective and quantifiable. There can and will be no exceptions to this commitment, for any effort to stand between associates and productivity shall be construed as early efforts toward a union. In the event that the HR function begins to operate more as an ally of the associate than a partner in productivity, the individual occupying the role of HR and the function itself shall be in jeopardy of downsizing, outsourcing, or other methods of re-engineering.
Real priorities may not always be stated publicly:
STATED: Associate morale, compensation and well-being
OFTEN REAL: Executive wealth and privilege
STATED: Customer Satisfaction
OFTEN REAL: Shareholder wealth
STATED: High performance work teams
OFTEN REAL: Subordination of personal well-being
STATED: Hold down labor costs
OFTEN REAL: Raise executive wealth and privilege
STATED: 1000 days without a lost time accident
OFTEN REAL: Ten minutes without a nervous breakdown
Ecological well being
In most cases it is the HR manager’s responsibility to walk around the plant with the OSHA inspectors. These inspectors will not have long to spend, since they will be visiting two other firms on that particular day, so it is incumbent on the HR manager to summarize the steps taken to make the work environment a safe and hospitable to human beings (this may mean as little as conditions unlikely to cause someone a trip to the hospital).
Many organizations are turning to the legal profession to find HR professionals, or they are retaining the services of crack attorneys. The firm looks at the fight as our acronym against all their acronyms. In this corner, standing 5 feet 5 inches tall and wearing the red high heels we have the company’s HRM person. In the other corner, all standing well over average height and wearing smiles, EPA, EEO, OSHA, NAFTA, SEC, FDA, and GATT.
HR professionals must be astute enough to cast the organization in the best possible light, when it comes to dealing with regulatory agencies. Those who are inept at this, but more than adequate at everything else, may get along famously until there is a little spill down at the Georgia plant. During the aftermath of the spill, the damage control, everything must be spun in just the right way. It might be chauvinistic to point it out, but what a time to NOT have some ugly old man as your HR manager, huh?
