Online Reporter
Employee Relations
Dr Request Machimbira
For decades, human resources (HR) auditing has lived a cursed life in corporate boardrooms.
It arrives not as a strategic partner, but as an inquisition.
The history of HR auditing is not an enviable one. It has been defined by a trial-and-error capacity on the part of its practitioners, resulting in an audit philosophy that assumes a municipal police posture, obsessed with compliance, fixated on ghost employees, payroll variances and missing files.
Its singular success metric is how much fear it can instil. It confuses finding fault with adding value.
I call this version of auditing the Tsikamutanda audits, after the infamous spiritualists at the turn of the millennium whose extreme exorcism assignments always left villagers shell-shocked by the mysteries they unravelled. Like them, the traditional HR auditor enters an organisation not to diagnose, but to exorcise; not to understand, but to shock; not to enable, but to perform. It is theatre, not intelligence.
An HR audit is not an exorcism project. It is, by its proper nature, far more sophisticated. It is oversight, it is quality assurance, and it is enablement of the human resources configuration of an institution.
It is the one audit that should tell the board whether the organisation is structurally, culturally and economically engineered to deliver its strategy.
In my view, a balanced HR audit must interrogate four imperatives: the efficiency, the effectiveness, the impact and the risk orientation of an organisation from a human resources perspective.
Consequently, the audit plan, its scope and its questions must be ruthlessly aligned to these four pillars. Anything outside this is noise.
It is precisely here that traditional auditors fail. Wielding their municipal police batons, they miss what truly matters. From structural compliance to structural functionality
First, auditors must check the extent to which an organisation is structured for functionality. The traditional auditor, unfortunately, only asks: “Is there an organogram? Is it approved?” They tick compliance and miss effectiveness.
A structure can be compliant and yet be commercially impotent. A company on an aggressive expansion drive will not succeed with a bloated sales function and no Research and Development Unit.
A manufacturing entity with a warehouse, but without a demand-planning capability is built for stock-outs.
Organisations have produced blueprint after blueprint, only to be frustrated by structural misalignments, and sadly, the auditor is complicit because he blessed a dysfunctional structure as compliant. An intelligence audit asks: Does the structure serve the strategy? Does it enable the value chain?
The tyranny of findings without empirical anchors
The second blind spot is metrics.
Does the organisation have a Board-approved set of human resources metrics or dashboards to track human capital strategy? Metrics constitute the empirical basis upon which HR efficiency can be interrogated.
Without benchmarks, audit findings are witchcraft. For anyone to authoritatively conclude that 25 grievances in a workforce of 300 is critical and high-risk, it must follow an analysis of established internal and external benchmarks. What is the industry norm? What is the historical trend?
What is the risk appetite? Unfortunately, auditors instil panic without any empirical basis for their assessment. They declare a fever without ever owning a thermometer. An effective audit first audits the existence of the dashboard itself.
An audit of a function, not a department
One of the major limitations in HR Auditing is its centricity on the HR Department. A human resources audit is not an audit of a department, but of a function. Human resources risk does not live in HR. It lives on the shop floor, in the engineering bay, in the warehouse and in the sales route.
The audit must check the effectiveness of labour deployment standards in production, the depth of competence in engineering and the supervisory ratio in the warehouse.
Is the organisation optimally staffed to deliver? Are critical roles single-point failures? That is HR risk, yet the traditional auditor never leaves the HR office.
The neglected interface: The line manager
This leads to the service delivery model. The audit must check an organisation’s HR service delivery model and its efficiency. What role do managers and supervisors play in the HR service delivery framework?
The neglected truth is that the line manager is the true interface of HR service delivery. They are the ones who approve leave, manage performance, enforce discipline and drive engagement. To conduct an HR audit that excludes line managers is to audit a hospital without talking to the doctors. It becomes exclusionary, theoretical and less informative.
An intelligence audit measures the HR competence and accountability of line leadership.
The ultimate commercial test: Utility
Finally, we must return to commercial language. Two critical metrics that elevate HR auditing from administrative to board-level are Revenue Per Employee and Labour Cost Per Employee. These metrics are essential in establishing the utility of the human resources function.
They answer the only question shareholders truly care about: Is the workforce delivering on its promise within acceptable budget thresholds?
Is our human capital cost structure competitive? Are we sweating our assets, human included? No audit is complete without interrogating this equation. In conclusion: from pandemonium to intelligence
In summary, an effective HR audit strengthens the intelligence of the organisation. It does not exist to cause pandemonium and unjustified panic.
It exists to tell the executive a simple, powerful truth: Are we structured to win? Are we measuring what matters?
Is our people risk distributed across the business, not locked in one department? Is our service delivery model enabled by its true owners, the line managers? And are our people delivering commercial utility? Until we move from Tsikamutanda audits to intelligence audits, HR will continue to be audited, but never truly understood.
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.
