HR is not for wimps

The people we love to hate are really getting it in the neck these days.

- Pilita Clark

If all the world's human resources (HR) staff disappeared tomorrow, would anyone care?

I am not entirely sure after seeing the response to an article one of my colleagues wrote about whether HR still needed humans in the age of artificial intelligence (AI).

"HR employs humans?" asked one of the scores of Financial Times readers who rushed to the comments section to call HR managers "incompetent", "useless", "hideous", "two-faced snakes" better thought of as "human remains" or "human wastage".

People love to hate HR, along with information technology, compliance and other divisions that enforce corporate rules. But I was struck by one common reader complaint: HR people often sound as if they are on the side of employees when in reality they have, as one person wrote, "always been there to protect management and companies' interests".

I'm not surprised if today's workers feel betrayed by an HR profession that has shifted far from its roots.

Modern workforce management arose more than a century ago after employers realised healthier, less exhausted factory workers were more productive. Today, HR promotes employee well-being, diversity, inclusion, engagement and a host of other measures that would have stunned a Victorian mill worker.