While top company executives are hyper-focused on HR taking on more leadership during this time, Ben Brooks wonders if “they are really setting us up to succeed?” Brooks is founder and CEO of PILOT, a career development platform.
“From what I’m hearing from countless HR professionals across the country and the globe, expectations on their scope, speed to adapt and ability to fix nubby, long-standing people challenges are rising far faster than their capacity (and resources) to meet them,” Brooks writes in Human Resource Executive. “This is a massive risk to HR functions and the careers of anyone in people operations, as this increased focus on HR could easily turn us into the scapegoat for organizational challenges that we don’t fully own. Think of this as resentment in escrow.”
Brooks strongly advocates for HR to ask for a much bigger budget now.
“But most HR departments are only asking for extremely marginal increases in their budget (if they’re even asking for anything at all),” he writes. “The math literally doesn’t add up when we do this—agreeing to deliver massively more without the support and enablement we need to be successful.”