HR is dead! Long live HR! This historic formula pronounced by the Duke D’Uzès is representative of the debate that animates me with Jas Chong. It’s true that our meeting was unusual: she attended my conference with Oana on Open Agile Adoption at Scrumday 2014, and declared to me straight out (she’s Asian after all): you were too condescending. Perhaps also because I had started her HR openspace session with HR must disappear?

Should HR disappear?

What’s hidden behind this blunt formula? The HR people I’ve encountered have lost their sense. They should be the great facilitators of the organization, they are only its cleaners, or worse the executors of dirty work. Great facilitators of what? Of the organization’s culture, interactions, dynamics. Yet this role of meta-facilitator is also the one I attribute in a modern organization to top management.

In our modern organizations, leaders have perceived the role reversal that has occurred in recent years: they no longer oppress, they emancipate, they no longer dominate, they support. Emancipate, support, isn’t that the role of HR? Thus they disappear because their function merges with that of the organization’s leader.

What’s the point of having HR reduced to menial tasks?

It’s on this point that Jas’s discourse and mine converge when she invokes the term dignity, or when she evokes an identity crisis. The current state of HR is very bad news. HR is dead, long live HR! Their margin for progress is enormous. Should they disappear? Perhaps not if they seize the opportunity of this new positioning as meta-facilitator within the organization; leaving operational aspects to leaders.

HR Transformation

As a result of this reflection and no less complete discussions, we therefore propose a common approach that we have called – in a flash of originality – HR Transformation.

You can meet us this Tuesday, September 16th at the Westin Vendôme hotel (Paris) for a morning that will illuminate these reflections we hope, allow us to share our points of view, exchange, and give us, I hope, a first action plan through a workshop. You can also meet us at Agile Tour Brussels at the end of October, and we hope also at other events.

The site HR Transformation, and registration for the morning of September 16th.

This is where agility comes in. Jas is interested in agile, I’m interested in HR. We both know that agile culture and practices are completely in line with the idea we have of HR.

Agile culture

Who conceives better than the agile/lean community the current importance of corporate culture? What action is more critical for an organization than hiring? (Have people generally inclined to associate agile with some sort of naive benevolence noticed the justified inflexibility of agile organizations in separating from people who don’t conform to their culture?). What action is more critical for an organization than maintaining its culture, or adapting its culture to new challenges? What better lever for an organization than its culture? But what does culture mean? And how is it addressed?

Agile tooling

Agile tooling will primarily serve to place HR back in the rhythm of the organization. Agility will enable concordance and resonance between the organization and its HR. Concordance in its ability to evolve and have the organization and people evolve at the same pace as the object of the business itself (hence my undisputed preference for the terms “People & Organisation”, “people and the organization”, rather than the classic “Human Resources”…). Resonance by relying on the importance of feedback, by constantly adapting its practices to the organization.

You’ll have more details here: HR Transformation