HR Leaders – Vulnerable and Exposed

While many are finding corners to cut in their roles with the help of AI and other tech – HR leaders are facing more pressure, scrutiny and increased personal exposure. It’s become quite rare for me to go a week, without one of my clients, expressing frustration, becoming emotional or otherwise talking about pursuing the ever-elusive work life balance through other roles.

The reality is – they’re not wrong. We live in a time when employees have more rights, are more aware of their rights and more willing to exercise them. (This being an observation, not a criticism.)

This in turn has a direct impact on HR professionals whose work is intrinsically linked to these matters, and who are being held personally accountable for breaches such as wage theft, adverse action and what we’re likely to see an increase in, the failure to properly address by elimination or minimisation, psychosocial risks in the workplace.

We have already seen decisions that show a willingness by courts and tribunals to hold HR personally responsible for matters they consider existing within their wheelhouse, such as ensuring the correct notice is paid or exercising an obligation to disagree with a business decision where HR’s role is to ‘know and make it known’ to the business its obligations despite any awkward power imbalance.

This responsibility in performing the role with an awareness you can be personally penalised with fines is in addition to, the criticism that can come in decisions where a peripheral issue may be the scrutiny of how workplace policies and procedures are applied or implemented or how they have led to an issue arising.

You may have read about the penalty awarded by the Hight Court in Elisha v Vision Australia a whopping $1.44mil, that matter arose due to a lack of following a workplace disciplinary procedure that was adopted as a term of the applicable employment contract. Where contracts often are the responsibility of HR.

The HR leader is also, ordinarily the person responsible for identifying the matters that require legal advice or guidance on behalf of the business.

The challenge?

HR often know to immediately engage legal, when they receive a claim, or a level of “icky” is attached to a complaint (involves a C-Suite exec, sexual harassment or something else that would obviously make headlines). The challenge is knowing when to escalate a matter that appears to be run of mill – but isn’t, or when the response to a situation seems in the best interest of all, but in reality however unwittingly is adverse action.

Those HR leaders or teams with internal employment legal counsel may have some benefit, but only where the inhouse team has developed relationships such that they are a trusted advisor and readily available to offer support and guidance to the HR team. However, far too often, they too have limited resources and are balancing numerous responsibilities, so acting as a hotline to a larger HR team as well as operational managers within the organisation, is not a functionality they can reasonably perform or perform without their own exposure.

It would be remiss if I didn’t note, at this point, that handling employee grievances is but one facet of a HR role alongside talent acquisition, remuneration and rewards, employee relations, training and development, performance management, retention of staff, payroll (or adjacent responsibilities such as instrument selection, classification allocation), employee engagement and adaptation of business strategy to people strategies as well as some degree of change or transformation management.

If you feel anxious reading how vulnerable a HR leader is you’re in good company.

Having recently spoken to William Prest, Associate Director at Hays, he noted:

“Hays research in compiling the CPO Viewpoint Report comes after interviewing 190 senior HR leaders and revealed a number of both surprising and intriguing themes. Including that most interviewees felt the need to upskill to properly fulfil their role given the new duties involved – with more than half indicating they are on the hunt for a different role to provide a better workplace culture, more meaningful responsibilities and a better work/life balance.”

Join Will and myself, for a joint presentation between McCabes and Hays on HR Leadership – The Transformation, on 19 June at 11.30am AEST where we discuss these matters and provide some mechanisms for protection. Register here.