I think he’s right.

The most common association most people have with HR is that it’s a place of rules, policies and reasons why “you can’t” . Of course HR is often laden with compliance responsibilities, which makes it an enforcement department. Also many line managers are such cowboys in dealing with people issues that it’s often up to HR to bring things back into line. That reality is not a sufficient justification for just how boring, staid and “rules driven” HR has become, almost making it the department of “anti-business”.

I have reflected in a completely unscientific way on this dilemma & wondered from my own practice how we can make HR a more business-like, fun and friction-free function?

My 7 key imperatives for HR execution are addressed to the 7 usual functional areas HR usually comprises & offers in each case a friction free role as opposed to being mr. or mrs. “you can’t”. It’s my hunch that taking the more fun route may well be better for business & help to make HR a more respected, more admired department in a business.

I will start at the top & ask the HR director to, instead of standing in the way of the flow of business, to actually make sure her organisation is famous for something. Are you the most dangerous, most interesting, most laid back or most egalitarian place to work? What are you famous for? Stop worrying about “best practice”. As Karl-Erik Sveiby, my old Swedish mentor used to say: “Catch up people are unhappy people”.

Next stop in our tour of the department of “human remains” is the talent function. Mostly these folks are not busy with “talent” in the Los Angeles sense of the word, but in a nice rebranding of the admin function that used to be called “recruitment”. Here I would simply ask – “what is the unique experience you offer as an employer?” Yes I know it’s close to what I told your boss, but you are supposed to be “all marketing” as Dave Ulrich suggested all those years ago.  Your job is a value proposition, not an admin process.

Ok now we are off the training department, or the department of “bums in seats”. My injunction to you is more left field. It’s to suggest that people who come to be “trained” should have fun. The simple reality is that you can nominate, arrange, cajole, keep rigorous attendance registers, but in the end if it’s not fun, interactive & compelling they will just be on their Blackberry’s all day. This choice means paying a little more for a simulation or an experience than a stand-up bore, but believe me it’s worth it.

Office number 4 on the right is the holder of the purse strings, the deeply important expert in remuneration.  My question to this master of excel and tax tables is simply: “how hard is it to replace the package somewhere else?” I know SARS makes it hard to not just go “full cash package”, but in the end we retain smart people, people with options by offering a combination or monetary and non-monetary rewards that means that any competitor wanting to recruit them may find exceedingly annoying to replicate. And yes, you can bring your dog to work.

Right next to the lair of the paymaster is the supreme evaluator of outputs – Mr. or Mrs. Performance management, the mythical creature who can translate lofty strategy into KPI’s and KPI’s into money.  We all know that the most important determinant of excellence in human performance is being able to answer the question “how am I doing?” Beyond all the cascading strategy maps, KPI’s and and scorecards, your role is simply to get people to understand their contribution to the big picture and how they help to make money. If you can own, drive and push the concept of leverage, you are making it easy for business. If the scorecards you create have categories of 3.5% contribution, you’re just being silly!

Apparatchik number 6 – almost done – is the domain of the organisational development guru. A room full of multi-level org charts and business processes mapped out. My challenge to you is to stop thinking of roles and structures and create assignments and challenges. The new world of work is not about your box, but about the way you can team, collaborate, flow and create value. Connections and capabilities, short term challenges and flexible teams are what excites talent & delivers value, get with the programme, your role is to prepare people for instability, not to box them into structures.

Our last visit is to the true admin area where leave is calculated, payrolls are administered and many many forms are generated.  We have tried for years to get you out of the business, to replace you with self-service systems and portals and yet you are still there! Why? Well because of all the complexity and friction created by your so-called specialist colleagues. My advice? Sit tight, be proud and hold your place, draw your salary and wear bright clothing! Sure you don’t actually add much value, but you have an important function: To remind us how needlessly complex HR processes are!

Recently I was sitting in the back row of a very prestigious training and development conference, the kind of event where one would expect only the very best in people development processes.

With so much of our world moving away from one-directional communication to interactivity I was expecting the people development community to be at the forefront of this trend. In short I was expecting almost all of the presentations and workshops to be conforming to the ambitions of Business Learning 2.0 – a movement expressing the need for business learning to make the move the internet made from brochure ware to interactivity.

I guess it is to be expected in this era of social networks and user generated content all over the place that business learning would also become the same.

In many ways the words do indicate that, many presenters offering lip service to simulations, action learning and generally co-created learning experiences.  Even the imported & much hyped “engaging trainer” I was listening to, insisted that learning is best achieved when people sit in groups of four. Unfortunately the session was conducted in a traditional classroom style set-up. Was it so hard to ask the organisers to move the furniture around?

As the session continued the difference between traditional facilitation and training became at once clearer and more subtle to me. Indeed this highly animated “trainer” was getting people off their seats, moving around instructing them to share their journey with each other, use talking chips and all manner of tools aimed at getting participants to be active and – from her perspective – engaged.

The sad truth was that although the commands were to move about and talk to other people they were still commands. We still have not left the model of the  classroom and the role of the teacher commanding from the front behind us. Still it was the trainer who was the centre of attention, calling the shots and the “participants” merely following instructions. This is not BusinessLearning2.0. To offer a true “learning by doing” experience, the first barrier to overcome is the trainers need to be central. A true interactive learning experience allows participants to make real decisions & experience the impact of these in a lifelike way. In the end the participants own the learning & that’s what makes it so powerful. And yes it does mean that the trainer sometimes feels like he or she is merely at the margins of the learning. This is a good thing….

 He rambled on, waving his arms and thrusting pieces of paper in the general direction of an audience too polite to leave despite being bored and mortified.  This was a moment of self-indulgence, a disrespect of the minds and dignity of the audience and a simple abuse of the podium.  Shocking? Sure. A relic of the past? Maybe not. Think back to your last corporate training or strategy presentation. Was it really that different from that hour and a half at the UN on the 24^th of September 2009? Think back to your session. Were you respected and included as an active participant? Did you have to think, engage and come to your own conclusions?  Were you truly there to help shape the moment, the learning, the end of the journey?  Was the room set up for conversation or for monologue? Were you really there to participate, or were you just there to fill the seats and get some guy in a suit the satisfaction of having “spoken to the people”?

Has the time not come to buy training differently? Instead of looking purely at price, at topic or at formal requirements to the exclusion of all else, has the time not come to ask “what is your methodology?”

KnowHouse is one of a growing breed of learning experience providers who offer exclusively interactive, simulation based learning programmes where people have the experience of discovering for themselves what they need to do next. We believe that the real opportunity in any business from a learning perspective is to get talented employees to fall in love with learning again.

A company where people love learning, will always out manoeuvre, out-innovate and out-perform a company where people have given up on being respected in learning & strategy spaces.