I’ve been thinking about HR.
More specifically, I’ve been wondering when we decided to put it in charge.
Because I don’t remember anybody actually making that decision. Somewhere along the way, particularly as SMEs grew and became more “professional”, a function that existed to support managers in managing people started telling those managers whether they were allowed to manage them.
Advice became guidance. Guidance became policy. Policy became approval. And before anyone really noticed, managers who were supposedly accountable for the performance of their teams had lost a sizeable chunk of their authority to manage them.
And I’m increasingly unconvinced that this has made businesses better.
In fact, for many SMEs, particularly operational businesses where things happen quickly and decisions need to be made by people who understand what is actually happening on the ground, I think it can often make them considerably worse.
Managing People Is Management
Let’s start with something that really shouldn’t be controversial.
If I employ somebody as a manager, I expect them to be able to manage people.
That doesn’t just mean allocating work, producing rotas, checking KPIs and chairing the Monday morning meeting. It means dealing with poor performance. It means challenging unacceptable behaviour. It means managing absence. It means having difficult conversations. It means recognising the difference between somebody needing support and someone who is simply taking the piss.
Those things aren’t HR. They’re management.
Yet we’ve somehow created organisations where perfectly capable managers encounter an employee problem and their first instinct is to say: “I’d better speak to HR.”
That isn’t accountability. And worse, it teaches managers something very dangerous:
Managing people is risky.
So eventually they stop doing it.
The Long, Scary List
At this point, I can already hear the objection:
‘Employment laws are complicated. They can’t be left to operational managers.’
There are grievances, disciplinaries, investigations, redundancy processes, discrimination, maternity and family rights, reasonable adjustments, recruitment practices, documentation, TUPE and an ever-growing body of case law.
Sounds terrifying, doesn’t it? But most of it really isn’t.
A competent manager doesn’t need to become an employment lawyer any more than a transport manager needs to become a barrister specialising in road traffic law.
What they need is to understand the rules within the area in which they operate.
And for most everyday employee issues, the principles aren’t especially difficult. Establish what happened. Listen to people. Don’t prejudge. Be consistent. Keep appropriate records. Give people an opportunity to respond. Follow a fair process. Understand the obvious danger areas and know when something is sufficiently unusual or serious that it needs escalating.
We can teach managers this stuff.
In fact, perhaps we should ask why we’re prepared to entrust managers with hundreds of thousands of pounds of equipment, regulatory compliance, customer relationships, health and safety and the performance of an entire operation, but suddenly decide they’re incapable of understanding the basic principles of managing an employee fairly.
If they genuinely can’t do that, I’d question whether they should be a manager in the first place.
Escalate Up, Not Sideways
Of course managers will encounter situations they can’t resolve themselves.
That’s normal.
But I don’t think the answer should automatically be ‘call HR’.
The manager should be able to escalate the issue to an appropriate senior leader. That leader should have greater knowledge, experience, training and authority. Which means they should be capable of dealing with the more difficult employee issues which arise occasionally within the business. Only when the leadership itself reaches the limits of its competence should the business need specialist external advice.
That might be a particularly complicated TUPE situation. A serious discrimination allegation. A large redundancy programme. An unusual dismissal with significant legal risk. Something where there is genuinely specialist knowledge that the business cannot reasonably be expected to maintain internally.
In such a case, fine. Buy the expertise.
But the specialist advises. The leader decides.
Otherwise, all we’ve done is replace ‘I’ll have to ask HR’ with ‘I’ll have to ask the employment lawyer’, and management still hasn’t learned to manage.
For a typical SME, I’d much rather spend money properly training a handful of good middle managers and one or two senior leaders than automatically conclude that growth means it is time to appoint somebody whose job gradually becomes policing how those managers manage.
Management Abdication
But I don’t think we can blame HR for all of this. Because sometimes managers and leaders are remarkably willing to give their authority away.
I once worked with a business where a director had become fed up with the state employees were leaving the office kitchen in. Dirty cups left lying around. Stuff not put away. The usual irritating things that happen when grown adults decide somebody else will tidy up after them.
So what did the director do? He asked HR to sort it out.
HR was tasked with dealing with the problem, putting up notices and reminding people how they were expected to behave. But why was that an HR issue?
There was no complicated employment law involved. Nobody needed disciplining. Nobody had raised a grievance. The business didn’t need a policy on teaspoons.
It simply needed a leader to say: “This is our workplace. Please leave the kitchen as you would expect to find it.”
And this is how HR can gradually build itself as a power base without ever actually staging a coup: anything involving people becomes a “people issue” and people issues go to HR. HR is therefore expected to solve them. And if HR is going to be held responsible for solving them, inevitably it starts acquiring the authority, policies and processes necessary to do just that.
Then, five years later, the leadership team complains that HR has too much power.
Well… you gave it to them.
Managing people isn’t just about the big stuff. It is the daily, occasionally irritating, frequently mundane business of setting expectations, correcting behaviour, resolving disagreements and making it clear what is and isn’t acceptable.
And leaders who outsource managing their people shouldn’t be surprised when they discover they’ve outsourced some of their control over the business too.
HR Can Make Managers Worse
There is another consequence of all this which I think receives far too little attention.
The more responsibility we transfer to HR, the less reason managers have to develop their own interpersonal skills and management judgement.
Poor performance becomes an HR problem.
Absence becomes an HR problem.
Behaviour becomes an HR problem.
Recruitment becomes an HR problem.
Disciplinaries become an HR problem.
Eventually managers are managing operations, while somebody else manages the people.
Except people are the operation.
And once managers discover that difficult conversations carry procedural risk, while avoiding those conversations carries remarkably little personal risk, we shouldn’t be surprised when difficult conversations stop happening.
Poor performers remain poor performers for longer. Behaviour that should have been challenged early becomes established. Good employees become frustrated because they can see somebody getting away with things they would never dream of doing themselves.
And the manager gradually loses credibility because everyone in the team knows that, when it comes down to it, they can’t actually do very much without asking permission.
That isn’t reducing organisational risk. It’s creating a different kind of it.
And Then There’s Grievance Mining
Which brings me to one of my favourite expressions for a particular modern workplace phenomenon.
Grievance mining.
Genuine grievances matter. Bad managers exist. Bullying exists. Discrimination exists. Employees need a safe, credible and properly managed route to challenge unacceptable treatment.
But there is also a particular kind of employee who discovers that the grievance process itself can provide leverage (or even power). And once that happens, ordinary workplace management can undergo a remarkable transformation.
A performance conversation becomes “bullying”.
A reasonable instruction becomes “being singled out”.
A manager disagreeing becomes “a hostile environment”.
Three unrelated incidents over eighteen months become “a pattern of behaviour”.
And inevitably somebody produces a screenshot from Teams dated 14 March 2022.
The really interesting question isn’t why some employees do this. Give human beings a system and eventually somebody will work out how to game it.
The more important question is why businesses facilitate it.
Because grievance mining only really works when an organisation rewards it.
If every allegation, however trivial, immediately causes the organisation to retreat into defensive mode, managers learn very quickly that challenging an employee creates considerably more work and risk than leaving them alone.
It is extremely cheap for an employee to make another allegation.
It can be extraordinarily expensive for the business to process it.
Management time. Meetings. Statements. Investigations. Notes. Appeals. External advice. And perhaps another investigation into something somebody said during the first investigation.
Eventually the process itself becomes the punishment.
And sometimes I don’t think HR even believes the complaint has merit. They’re simply frightened of what might happen if every element of it isn’t formally investigated.
So the result is exactly the same: management paralysis.
A grievance procedure should protect employees from bad management.
It shouldn’t protect employees from being managed.
So Do SMEs Need HR?
Sometimes, they absolutely do.
I wouldn’t pretend that turnover provides some magical dividing line where a £49 million business doesn’t need HR and a £51 million one suddenly does.
But a labour-intensive business employing 700 people across multiple sites, with high employee turnover and constant recruitment, may have a very different requirement from a £60 million business employing 120.
And a really good HR professional can add enormous value.
They can train managers. Improve recruitment. Make sure policies and contracts are fit for purpose. Help develop people. Spot patterns that individual managers can’t see. Provide sensible advice on difficult cases and help build better management capability throughout the organisation.
But notice the common thread there.
Help. Advise. Train. Support.
Not control.
I think growing SMEs should have to answer a slightly different question from the one they traditionally ask.
Not: “Are we big enough to need an HR manager?”
But: “What problem are we employing an HR manager to solve?”
Because if the answer is that our managers aren’t capable of managing our employees, perhaps we’re solving the wrong problem.
Train the managers.
Give them clear policies and sensible processes. Give them the knowledge and support they need to understand employment law to a reasonable standard. Give senior leaders deeper capability so difficult issues can be escalated through the management structure.
And when something genuinely specialist comes along, buy specialist advice.
What I wouldn’t do is automatically create another layer of authority between the manager and the people they are supposedly responsible for managing.
Because authority and accountability belong together.
If I hold a manager accountable for the performance of their team but somebody else controls who they recruit, how they manage performance, how they discipline, how they reward and whether they can dismiss, then I haven’t really made that manager accountable.
I’ve just made them responsible for the consequences.
So perhaps the question isn’t whether SMEs should sack HR.
It’s a much simpler one.
Who made HR king of the hill?
Because if your managers aren’t capable of managing their teams without asking for somebody else’s permission, what exactly are you paying them to manage?
About Gerald Price
Gerald Price is a business change consultant and interim managing director specialising in business turnarounds, operational improvement and commercial performance, especially within the waste and recycling industry.
Having worked with operators across the sector, he regularly writes about leadership, strategy, waste policy and the commercial realities facing UK waste businesses.
More articles and insights can be found at www.gpcp.co.uk and https://www.linkedin.com/in/geraldprice/
