HR’s New Role
In this tight labor market, cost cutting is out. Championing employee concerns is in. by Peter Cappelli and Ranya Nehmeh
Summary.
From World War II through 1980 the focus of the human resources function was advocating for workers—first as a way to keep unions out of companies and later to manage employees’ development in the era when all talent was grown from within. Then things changed. Driven by the stagflation of the 1970s, the recession of the early 1980s, and more recently the Great Recession, HR’s focus increasingly shifted to relentless cost cutting. Decades of slack labor markets made slashing HR expenses easy because it was hard for people to quit. Pay and every kind of benefit, including training and development, got squeezed. Work demands went up, and job security fell.