One Size Does Not Fit All!

If HR managers can convert their HR function into one that loves people for who they are, they will in turn become the HR that the employees and managers love, for who they are.

- Vikas Shirodkar

There was a time when HR's main role was policy formulation and implementation. This would have music to the ears of Max Weber since HR was bureaucratic to the core. I recall when I joined Siemens in 1980, the Personnel Handbook, which consolidated all rules, policies and procedures that were people-facing, was a thick tome running into 300-plus pages. I always wondered whether there was any employee, or a personnel officer for that matter, who had actually read all the rules and regulations elaborated in the supra thick handbook. I often fantasised the personnel officer being gheraoed and harassed by the employees, and him using this thick, hardbound Handbook to hit back and injure them. Such a dream would have greatly pleased Freud, since symbolically, these were the very things done by the Personnel Officers - using policies and procedures to batter and hammer the employees into submission, compliance, and beyond.