Top table, low impact
Having HR on the board makes zero difference, survey suggestsWant to improve the potency of HR in your organisation? Well, you can forget bothering to promote your HRD, if the implications of a new survey are to be believed.
Engage, Enable, Empower: The Powerhouse of Organisational Strategy was released by award-winning consultancy Purple Cubed yesterday. The research involved 12 qualitative individual interviews and a quantitative survey of 220 respondents. Top line takeout: the whole engagement piece is a bit of a mess.
You can see Jane Sunley, CEO of Purple Cubed, discussing the findings here. But in a nutshell, no-one can agree on how to define engagement. (‘We had thirteen definitions from twelve interviews,’ says Sunley.) Two-thirds of respondents didn’t have a joined-up engagement strategy, and 86% of board directors admitted that their engagement strategy was ‘inadequate’, or about as useful as the Oscars’ D&I policy.
The survey asked questions such as: ‘Do you agree that your organisation has a strategy in place to become more productive over the next year?’ and ‘Do you agree your organisation has a robust people engagement strategy in place that all employees are aware of and championing?’
The interesting thing is that respondents from organisations with HR on the board didn’t score these questions any higher than those that didn’t.
Here’s what the report says about this finding:
Throughout the survey it is evident that regardless of whether HR is on the board or not, it doesn’t impact upon the answers to our questions. Is there therefore an argument to suggest HR doesn’t need to be on the board – because it can be just as effective outside of the C-Suite as it would be inside?
Yes, there is that argument, and credit goes to Purple Cubed for the positive angle they’ve been nice enough to adopt. Had this been the Harvard Business Review, the interpretation may have been a tad harsher.
Robert Purdy, director of IT for EE and a panelist at the report launch, defended the importance of HR at the highest level. ‘Culture is really important, and I think it’s vital that culture has a voice on the board through HR,’ he asserted.
Less controversially, and more heart warmingly, the report also records that 57% of respondents believe HR is effective in their business, 27% think HR is highly effective in their business and 100% of CEOs surveyed think HR is either effective (50%) or highly effective (50%).
Great. But – is board-level presence less important than we’ve assumed for all these years?
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