Sir, I wish you were our HR person

Recently, I was asked to help a manager in a large Indian conglomerate build a team of associates. I had gone out with a plan to conduct a few fun filled activities followed up with a "Lessons Learnt" session after each activity.

The group size was about 35 and hence it was difficult to conduct small group exercises with the them. However after carefully picking and choosing from the various activities, I zeroed in on three activities that focused on (1) team building, (2) reasoning and (3) couple of points that were "eye openers" for members in the past who had participated in the same exercise.

At the end of all the sessions that day, one of the participants came up to me and said, "Sir, we enjoyed your sessions very much. The exercises were real eye openers for us and most of all, we found training with you most exciting. You are such a person that anybody would love to be trained by you. Gentle and yet quite probing, you make us think and that is what is needed. How I wish you were heading our HR department in our Company".

Besides my ears turning red and my feeling very embarrassed with all the encomiums that I received, it made me think why is it difficult for people to like ( forget about "love" ) their HR departments in their respective Organizations. The answer is that the HR departments have not paid too much attention to their "Employee Advocacy" role within their Organizations. And even if they did, that role was not very visible to their own rank and file employees. The daily pulls and pressures in working for an Organization makes it difficult for HR Managers to spend face time with their employees. They therefore choose the tools of the Digital Age - emails, chats, blogs and SMSs and text messages to communicate with them. All these tools are no doubt essential in the modern world of communication. But they do have limitations...like Twitter has on the number of characters that you can send in a message !!

There is a joke that goes round some of the Organizations, "You see your HR department on the day of your Induction and then on the day of your Exit Interview". Otherwise we excel in working with our spreadsheets, HR Databases and now the modern avataar of virtual HR -- the Shared Service Center reps -- those faceless, emotionless, almost inhumane HR people......you can chat with them, you can email them but No, you may not be able to call them and talk to them. And if some of those Shared Service Centers have people who you can chat with, beware, they will be to the point, precise and most probably reading from a scripted passage. And they will be measured on how many minutes they take to answer your call...so you wont be able to talk about how wonderful your last holiday was or how terrible the weather was.

Is it any wonder why people like me....the HR Manager turned "Trainer" are now sought after and told that we should have been the Heads of HR ?