It’s time for HR to get out of the Weeds of Work
By Pia Engstrom Managing Director, HR Dept Australia.
As the role of an HR professional becomes more complex, it’s important they are implementing strategies to protect their wellbeing and pull them out of the day-to-day work to focus on big-picture, strategic work.
Working in HR means you need to be both a jack of all trades and a master of many. It’s a delicate balance between managing the business as usual tasks – such as managing conflicts, ensuring leaders are equipped with the skills they need, ensuring compliance, etc – and, increasingly, taking responsibility for aspects of a business’s strategic agenda.
This is all happening against a complex situational backdrop. This year, they are navigating some of the most comprehensive changes to Australia’s industrial relations system, cost-of-living pressures are adding further stress to employees’ lives and leaders are struggling to adopt new ways of working.
All of this is to say that HR professionals now need to wear more hats than ever before. They need to be the professional mediator, the compliance officer, the future-of-work strategist, the talent expert, the leadership coach… and the list goes on.
While the varied nature of the work is often what draws people towards a career in HR in the first place, too much of a good thing can lead to overwhelm, stress and, in some instances, burnout.
Australia is one of the most burnt out nations globally, with the average Australian worker taking on 6.1 hours of unpaid overtime each week (that’s over 300 hours per year).
Not only do HR professionals need to craft strategies and programs to manage burnout levels in employees, they also need to maintain their own wellbeing which, when you consider their workloads, isn’t always an easy task.
So what’s the antidote? Below we share three key areas HR can focus on to protect their wellbeing and time, and elevate themselves into high-level, strategic work.
1. Devolution to line management
The State of HR research (2022), produced by academics at Swinburne, RMIT, Deakin and the University of South Australia, supported by the Australian HR Institute, found nearly half (47%) of HR teams have passed on some of their traditional HR responsibilities onto line management.
Nearly one fifth (19%) say that line managers take on the lion’s share of what might be seen as traditional ‘HR tasks’, such as hiring, onboarding and other recruitment management practices, reward and recognition programs, performance management, team building initiatives, succession planning, etc.
It makes sense that managers would take on more of this type of work; they’re the ones working in the trenches with their teams. With the right training and coaching from HR, line managers can shoulder a lot of the responsibility for day-to-day HR management, freeing HR leaders up to work at an executive level on strategic projects, such as redesigning work to suit a hybrid work environment.
2. Make technology your new best friend
Historically, the ‘people’ and ‘technology’ sides of work have been thought of as polar opposites. However, in 2023, this couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s critical for HR professionals to understand how these new technologies work and learn how to use them to streamline work processes and gain back more time to think.
That could look like embracing traditional technologies, such as intuitive HR information systems (HRIS) that allow you to consolidate your processes and see your data from a bird’s eye view. Alternatively, HR might decide to be a trailblazer and experiment with some of the new tech on the block.
Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT late last year, there has been a proliferation of generative AI-enabled technologies that promise to help us work faster, smarter and more effectively. Early research shows it could save people roughly five hours per week – that’s almost an entire work day.
Think about the repetitive, menial tasks that chew up HR’s precious time and consider how a platform like ChatGPT could assist.
For example, you could ask it to:
- Analyze candidates’ resumes and produce a shortlist
- Produce job advertisements that are tailored for a specific persona you’re trying to attract (e.g. if you wanted to entice more women into an engineering role or craft a job description that would attract a Gen Z jobseeker)
- Make the tone of your board presentation more authoritative or persuasive
- Act as a research assistant for a policy that you’re creating
The opportunities are seemingly endless. So take the time to experiment and think about how you can recover some time back in your day.
3. Get more strategic with how spend your time
Along with delegating some of the BAU HR tasks to line managers and embracing technology, it’s also important to ensure you’re spending your time on value adding tasks.
For example, research shows that the average person wastes 58% of their time on ‘work about work’ (i.e. searching for information you need, communicating about work, chasing the status of work, etc).
On top of this, Australians are said to spend 22 hours per week (yes, that’s over half work week) in meetings. It’s not always easy to say ‘no’ when you’re invited to a meeting or to participate in a non-essential work project (such as sitting on a committee or organising an event), but learning how to protect your time and focus on what matters most will pay you, and your business, back in spades.
What’s next?
Work is only going to get busier and more complex as new technologies, types of work and external factors (e.g continuing skills shortages) emerge.
Now is the time for HR leaders to reflect on how they can redesign aspects of their work to protect their wellbeing, increase their strategic input and ensure they’re able to engage in exciting, energising work.
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