Online Reporter
Employee Relations
Dr Request Machimbira
HUMAN RESOURCE (HR) practitioners seem to make life difficult for themselves, detaching themselves from the opportunity to be more detailed and intimate, and to collaborate with employees.
For some reason, detachment is a familiar spirit in HR practice. It is a learned helplessness baptised as “professional distance”.
We fear contamination by the shop floor, as if empathy were a virus. We draft “open-door policies” and then instal frosted glass, key cards and gatekeepers.
We host “town halls” quarterly and call it listening. Detachment has become our default operating system, and we update it annually with bigger words and smaller impact.
HR practitioners need to understand the management style, management attitude and ethos. This cannot happen only in boardrooms. You do not understand a general by watching him at the parade. You understand him when the bullets fly.
How does the operations manager speak to a cleaner when the line is down? Does the finance director spit contempt or offer solutions when overtime is requested? If HR only sees leaders in curated PowerPoint presentations, HR will defend a fiction.
The real culture is not in the value statement. It is in the supervisor’s tone at 5pm, when he needs work to be done after hours, and the employee is worried about late-night transport and security in Chitungwiza.
Boardrooms have become grand theatres of actors, liars and psychopaths.
Indeed, we have psychopaths in big offices. The research is unambiguous: Corporate corridors attract the personality disordered. Sadly, HR is detached from reality, and employees are on their own. We validate the performance because we were not present for rehearsals.
We endorse the tyrant because we never interviewed his victims. HR’s absence from the operational theatre turns us into unwitting stage managers for abuse.
We dim the lights, cue the music and call it “business partnership”. Meanwhile, the audience — the employees — exit mid-play.
Going forward, HR practitioners need to programme their operations in a customer-centric manner.
The employee-first approach is actually a form of business partnership, not its antithesis. Only the detached believe you must choose between the C-suite and the shop floor staff. It helps practitioners to act as the central intelligence of the workplace, amplifying responsiveness and relevance of interventions.
Here is the mind-blowing truth the fantasy league forgot. There is no business without the employee. Revenue per employee is a lagging indicator. The leading indicator is whether that employee feels seen, safe and sane at 5am on a Wednesday, preparing to catch a lift to work from Nkulumane 12.
The necessity of reconfiguring is now a matter of urgency, and the following are novel ideas for consideration:
Mandatory field work
HR cannot heal what it refuses to touch. The demon of detachment is born in air-conditioned offices, behind dashboards and policy PDFs. We exorcise it with intimate presence.
HR practitioners must be mandated to spend at least 40 percent of their time on the floor, not above it.
Sit in the clothing production line until your back aches like theirs. Queue for tea with your staff and taste what they taste.
Open their lockers, look inside their lunch boxes, use their toilets. Smell the ammonia from the smelter. Feel the 2pm heat. Only then do you earn the right to call yourself a “business partner”.
Partnership without presence is perjury. You cannot regulate a reality you have not inhabited. If you have never heard the shift siren at 4am, you do not understand fatigue.
If you have never missed transport because your overtime was paid late, you do not understand trust. Data will never convict you like a lunch box with yesterday’s cold sadza. Go there. Or go home.
Repentance from workplace apartheid
A workplace apartheid is a quiet violence. Separate toilets. Executive canteen. Reserved parking. Air-conditioned offices while the floor swelters.
Dr Request Machimbira is the executive director of Proficiency Consulting Group and the International Wellness Institute. He is a leading, multi-award-winning human resources expert, strategy facilitator, board trainer, team-building coach, wellness consultant, independent labour arbitrator, board chairperson and published author. He writes in his personal capacity. For feedback, email request @proficiencyinternational.com or phone +263772693404.
