Online Reporter
Dr Request Machimbira
Employee Relations
When properly configured and functioning well, the human resource (HR) office is the intelligence centre of the business, particularly on employee matters.
It is the radar room where atmospheric pressure, morale tremors and cultural fault lines are first detected.
Sadly, in real terms, the average HR practitioner is clueless or lacks sufficient detail about the predicaments employees find themselves in. We have custodians of policy who cannot locate the pain points on the very shop floor they claim to govern.
They quote the Labour Act with sacerdotal reverence, yet cannot explain why a night-shift operator has developed chronic back pain. The dashboards glow green, while the humans behind the data quietly haemorrhage.
An intelligence centre that receives no signals is not an intelligence centre. It is a museum.
The temperature of grievances and disengagement does not start at boiling point. No employee wakes up on Monday and decides to become a saboteur by Friday.
Disengagement is brewed, slow and bitter, in a pot that HR refuses to stir. It is nurtured by the ignorance or inactivity of HR practitioners regarding the dynamics of the workplace.
A missed grievance today becomes a whispered union meeting tomorrow. An unacknowledged ventilation issue becomes a medical claim, then a resignation, then a viral tweet that eviscerates the employer brand.
HR was built to sense the first bubbles. Instead, we wait for the explosion and arrive with fire blankets labelled “policy”, “procedure” and “progressive discipline”.
We treat symptoms because we were absent for the causes.
Most HR practitioners are in some fantasy league of sorts, where the employer plays God and the rest of the workplace are villainous characters.
The script is predictable. Management is benevolent, employees are cost centres, and HR is the high priest officiating the liturgy of compliance.
In the process, HR practitioners spend more time enjoying coffee in cosy boardrooms, prioritising “strategic” partnership with senior management over operational engagement with employees.
We have traded proximity for prestige and call it “being strategic”. It is not strategy. It is surrender.
Drivers struggle to put across their issues, or rather the HR office fails to act on their issues around breakdowns, fuel consumption, the state of vehicles and predatory traffic police.
A responsive HR practitioner creates time to accompany drivers on their trips. You cannot champion what you have never witnessed. This helps them to fully appreciate challenges and play the employee champion role as advocated by the modern father of HR practice, Dave Ulrich.
Sadly, HR aspires to partner with power rather than advocate for the powerless. We have amputated the very role that legitimises our presence.
A walk through the production line will not harm. It will make a practitioner more intimate with issues, including some that may not be reported, such as ventilation, facility cleanliness, the angle of a workstation or the silent resignation in a supervisor’s eyes.
Data does not live in SAP (Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing). It lives in sweat. The best HR metrics are not on a dashboard; they are in the plant’s decibel level, the canteen’s temperature and the speed at which an employee looks away when you greet them.
Management, by walking around, was never retired. HR simply stopped walking. Reacquaint yourself with the smell of hydraulic oil. Your relevance is calibrated there. I had an experience of working as HR manager for an organisation that had two canteens: one for senior staff and the other for junior staff.
Why should we eat from different pots at the same workplace? What has happened to our humanity? Even stranded villagers in rural areas eat from the same pot as their hosts. Yet at the workplace, we have two canteens. Clearly, something went wrong in the HR offices.
Our degrees have not helped us to recover our humanity. We quote “organisational culture” while engineering caste systems in the lunch queue. If we cannot share salt, we cannot share strategy.
It is good to have structured platforms like works councils. However, some realities of the workplace are perishable.
They cannot wait for your quarterly meetings.
A harassment incident, a safety near-miss, a driver stranded without fuel at midnight — these truths rot if not handled within hours.
When HR outsources listening to a calendar invite, it outsources trust. The employee learns to solve problems elsewhere: with lawyers, with unions, with resignations.
By the time the works council convenes, the workforce has already passed its verdict.
Dr Request Machimbira is the executive director of Proficiency Consulting Group and the International Wellness Institute. For feedback, email request @proficiencyinternational.com or phone +263772693404.
