Remember the "Human" part of HR

In today's business world, companies are under unrelenting pressure to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of their workers. But are employers making the investments necessary to get the results they want? In "The Adaptive Workforce," a report compiled from an intensive survey of employers, Forrester Research Inc. says it finds a world where employers are struggling both to solve new workforce problems and to make use of some of the new tools available for doing so.

The survey of 458 executive, managers and staffers focused on the white-collar workforce, where human-capital issues are arguably more important and urgent. Researchers found that half the firms recently have had a downsizing and that most are struggling to get the required work done with fewer people.

Even in this economic downturn, though, companies have not stopped hiring and recruiting. Of those surveyed, 46 percent report that they are actively recruiting. And in the busiest sectors, IT and sales, a majority of respondents report finding a shortage of qualified applicants.

Two trends in the data strike me as particularly interesting. The first is the apparent disparity between what senior executives say their companies are doing and what lower-level managers say is actually happening. For example, 56 percent of executives report that their companies actively work to dismiss low-performing employees, but only 31 percent of lower-level managers say that. Such differences are not unusual, reflecting a gap between executives' lofty aspirations and reality. I suspect that even the lower-level managers are overstating the turnover. It would be quite amazing if a third of companies really had a systematic process for getting rid of poor performers. Frankly, I would be surprised if a third of companies had a systematic process for firing anyone.

The second interesting pattern from the data concerns efforts to develop human capital in these organizations. Most of the respondents report real concerns about meeting their human-capital needs, and 70 percent of the executives say their organizations are serious about developing employees. But it is difficult to find evidence from the rest of the results to indicate serious efforts are underway to reach that goal. The formal processes for development, such as training and evaluation programs, do not seem to be in place. To my surprise, only 20 percent of the respondents reported that they used internal hires as a way to meet skill needs. It is hard to see how organizations could be serious about development if they're not filling more vacancies internally.

The Forrester report outlines a number of models for rationalizing and organizing efforts, such as recruitment, hiring and development, in order to make them more effective. But it's clear that the companies in the survey do not have rational systems in place or anything like an organized set of practices. No doubt this is inevitable.

Companies are facing constantly changing circumstances, and it may be impossible for them to put in place completely coherent systems and practices on the fly. What would be most helpful would be assistance for companies that would like to get better at their human-capital management. Many have only been able to tackle problems in a piecemeal fashion, often while fighting fires elsewhere.