Human Resource Management Needs to Die

Often, maybe even more often than not, words have a meaning that lead to effects you might not have attended. I am currently on my way to…

Often, maybe even more often than not, words have a meaning that lead to effects you might not have attended. I am currently on my way to the HR Tech Congress in Paris, where I am holding a talk with Anna, our Head of People Operations at Giant Swarm.

We are talking about our deep belief in empowering people through transparency, going as far as having fully transparent salaries, no fixed work times or holiday rules. For HR Tech Congress this is probably more on the radical side but I am looking forward to some good discussions.

I will be likely meeting many Human Resource Managers there though, and that is where the problem with words starts. The terms “Resource” just seems so amazingly wrong it pains me. There is actually a good post on Quora on the history of the term Human Resource Management, and as expected, the department was created to focus “ _on the best possible use of the resource and they ensured maximum possible benefit for their organization_ ”.

That might have been true when your only goal was to produce 120 instead of 100 screws an hour per employee and they were easily replaceable. These people were resources, used up, disposed and replaced with new ones.

This is probably part of the reason that many big corporations do not have any developers anymore. The resource “developer” could be replaced with any other resource “developer” and when that stopped working we invented the “architect”.

Anyone who really worked on software projects knows, that developer does not equal developer though and what you want is really good developers and then you want to build processes around them to allow them to achieve their best. That by the way is the only reason for processes. Like management, they are supposed to be barrier removal tools, and do not have a reason in and of itself. Scrum is only good if it helps you and not a tool to control developers by a more hip methodology.

But if they are not resources, what are they? Thankfully there is already a term that is widely used within the industry to signify what I am talking about: an asset. It’s actually defined as a “ _useful thing or person_ ”. And it goes automatically deeper based on how those terms are used, because: resources are used, while assets are leveraged.

This is exactly what you need to do with your people, leverage them to the best of their ability and work to improve that asset any way you can. It also means you will not use them up or that they have to be used as much time as possible because it is what comes out at the other end of the pipe instead of what you push into it.

So let’s change the our understanding and start by killing of “Human Resource Management” and call it “Human Asset Management”. It’s a small change but a significant one. True, it doesn’t sound too good and might be too close, which is why companies like Google or us, call it “People Operations”. Whatever you do though, stop calling it Human Resource Management. That term needs to die.