Part 2.

Being human at work:

for better and for worse

Whether digitally or in person, employees have more contact with HR teams than ever. In the same vein as the previous question, those more traditional requests are often handled digitally through self-service tools. However, there is a consensus that an employer’s responsibility to its people has grown in recent years, and that HR has been expected to take on much of that work.

Does this make the job “messier”? This is the sea in which HR swims (even if, to continue the analogy, it’s deeper now than it’s ever been).

But where we might historically have expected employees to suppress their authentic selves in the interests of “professionalism”, we’re now told that it’s right and even beneficial to the organisation to be ourselves in our working lives. How that manifests itself will vary from business to business and even team to team. But it undoubtedly adds work and responsibility to the line manager, to HR and possibly even to the boardroom. Where do we draw the line? What is the “right” path to follow?

Trends in HR-employee interaction.

The COVID pandemic was, of course, a major driver here. Whether this trend will continue as the effects of the pandemic recede is still to be seen. But there’s no doubt that wellbeing is now a mainstream issue for employers whereas, perhaps just a few years ago, it might have been filed under the “nice to have” tag. It’s also worth remembering that the appetite for this blending of personal and professional lives differs from one employer to the next. Although all of our panel work for large organisations, not every employer wants to invest the resources required to have these sorts of conversations at scale.

Some of our interviewees also cited the age of their colleagues as a factor. Undeniably, Gen Z employees are more aware of mental health and wellbeing issues in the context of work, and expect their employer to take it seriously.

Only one person mentioned privacy concerns (in this specific regard, although we’ll come back to it elsewhere) and an active interest in how their employer uses their personal data, but they also connected it with the younger cohort of employees. It’s not just technology influencing our change in behaviour - it’s also a generational shift, albeit one that many older workers are happy to embrace.

How employees see the value of HR.

More than half of our respondents cited wellbeing as the most valuable contribution that HR can make to an employee’s experience of work. Several of our panel linked wellbeing directly to company success, tying it into a broader theme of demonstrating the value of, and showing appreciation for, employees’ contributions.

There is a real understanding of the need for balance in the employer-employee relationship: a sense that the demands of the job should be balanced by empathy and understanding from the employer. Some talked about culture (or in one case the “consciousness” of the company, both from a cultural and strategic point of view) and its importance in helping employees to feel valued and listened to. The word “listening” came up again and again: an acknowledgement that people need to feel heard, and that nothing saps engagement like feeling powerless, invisible or marginalised, particularly in an environment where we’re all entitled to be treated with respect.

There were relatively few outliers, but two are worth paying particular attention to. One opinion accepted that wellbeing and mental health support were crucial for employees, yet also noted a growing trend in which employers are stepping up to fill gaps which were historically the responsibility of government and professional healthcare.

At the other end of the spectrum, there was a clear assertion from one contributor that “HR offers no value to the employee at all, except as a by-product of the value it offers to the employer”. This point of view, which leans heavily on the competence and availability of line managers as guardians of the employee experience of work, takes the idea of personal responsibility for one’s welfare and career to its logical end point. We’ll look at this more closely in the next section.

Whatever the perspective of our individual panel members, it all comes back to talent. Even the view that HR’s sole responsibility is to the employer, and that any benefit to the employee is incidental to that aim, is rooted in maximising the value of people. From this perspective, HR becomes an enabler of better manager-employee relationships and a conduit for employees to take responsibility for their own career development, their own engagement with work, and ultimately their own success.

Possibly the strongest consensus we’ve seen so far. Talent and, more specifically, skills, form the fuel on which a business runs. Again and again our HR leaders talked about talent: ensuring that their business has the right blend of skills; planning strategically to fill skills gaps or to make sure those gaps never materialise; and looking at retention, succession, and development as ways of energising the organisation.