Workforce Management Daily Conference News

HR depts still struggle for strategic role

By Jonathan Pont

or all the talk about human resources finally getting “a seat at the table”—a phrase that’s likely to be heard dozens of times over the next three days of this conference—there are many who believe that the profession still has a long way to go.

An in-depth study of 50 organizations released this month by Hewitt Associates finds that human resources is often just plain “stuck,” and concludes that many traditional HR practices stand in the way of sustained organizational change. And in the view of Edward Lawler, who has studied the profession since the 1960s, HR still is not the strategic player it so badly wants to be.

“Human resources is still predominantly an administrative function,” says Lawler, director of the Center for Effective Organizations at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. More often than not, he says, HR gets bogged down in the tactical details related to retirement plans, health care benefits and the myriad regulations that govern employment.

According to Hewitt’s report—titled “Is HR Stuck in the Middle?”—43 percent of HR’s time is devoted to program administration and customer service. For a company of 25,000 employees and 250 HR professionals, that’s more than 140 full-time HR employees who do nothing but answer questions, gather information, process transactions and manage data, according to Hewitt. In other words, they’re doing nonstrategic work.

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12,000 TURN OUT; SHRM EXPECTS NUMBERS TO RISE

So far, attendance at the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference this year in San Diego appears to be down considerably. Last year’s conference, which was held in New Orleans, had 17,000 attendees, according to SHRM’s 2004 annual report. This year there are about 12,000 attendees.

Jen Jorgensen, a SHRM spokeswoman, said that the number cited in the annual report includes the hundreds of volunteers from the local SHRM chapter who attend the conference.

Jorgensen conceded that there might be a small decline in attendance this year because the conference overlapped with Father’s Day and because it’s hard for many people to get to the West Coast. But SHRM is still hopeful the numbers will pick up as the conference continues.

“We are still expecting more attendees to come,” Jorgensen says, adding that often people attend the SHRM conference for only one day. “We expect the (final attendance) number to be comparable to last year.”

JOB BOARDS HIT THE STREETS

Monster and Yahoo!HotJobs hit the streets of San Diego on Sunday to tout their job boards. Monster rented ad space on downtown pedicabs and is sponsoring a double-decker bus that offers free guided tours of the city to SHRM attendees.

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Bill Cosby at the convention center hall

Getting behind the Cos

Opening keynote Bill Cosby tells an appreciative SHRM crowd that he identifies with their struggles.

By Douglas P. Shuit

ill Cosby kept an audience of 12,000 human resource professionals in stitches Sunday, opening the 57th annual convention of the Society for Human Resource Management in San Diego with a nonstop volley of jokes that won him thousands of new friends.

Cosby seemed to hit perfect notes with the audience, talking about the tough job they face trying to deal with the concerns of both workers and management.

Management wants to know how to get rid of an employee and asks human resources to figure out a way to do it, he said. The employee, at the same time, turns to human resources to tell them how to save their job.

“And that’s why (you) drink,” he told the audience, cracking up the group by asking, “So why are you here instead of drinking?”