Then and Now

You know that others think you are getting old when the President of HRNZ asks you to write an article about what has changed in HR since you started. Well, in a nutshell, pretty much everything has changed since the mid-1970s.

First, it was Personnel, not HR. Personnel departments were much smaller than the HR of today and did not deal with the diversity of subject matter that HR advisers now confront daily. Personnel had three primary functions: industrial relations, recruitment and personnel files. This may seem strange to the modern professional, but times have changed significantly over the past 45 years.

Industrial relations (IR) covered almost everything about people management because this was the time of national awards; these all included unqualified preference clauses, meaning every employer in that industry could only employ union members. That might seem outrageous today, but it had its benefits. Employers did not need HR advisers to deal with large numbers of personal grievances (PGs). Only a union could take a PG, and the union acted as a filter because the union staff did not want to waste resources taking losing cases; so the IR officer and the union dealt with discipline situations and grievances. Lawyers specialising in employment law were unheard of, even cases before the Arbitration Court were advocated by IR officers and union secretaries. Everyone’s conditions of employment were nationally bargained collectively as well, which was very resource efficient.

Few poor performance cases existed. These mainly came out of the so-called neoliberal economics of the mid-1980s. Now, people are supposed to be encouraged to perform their job because there might be some extra dollars at the end of the year, back then, ensuring people performed their work was the manager’s job. I still regularly quote the adage I learned then, “If the worker hasn’t performed, the manager hasn’t managed”. The neoliberal-imposed pay secrecy rules of today did not exist either; everyone knew what everyone else got paid because the Award published those rates. In my view, pay secrecy only protects unfair employer decisions; there is nothing in it for the workers. One terrible aspect was that many Awards had traditionally included separate, substantially lower, pay scales for women; this was only outlawed in the early 1970s. A disgraceful level of gender pay segregation still exists in New Zealand today, but it was substantially worse in the 1970s.

Personnel directors and IR officers, including myself, were very different from today’s senior HR professionals. They were experienced people managers during a career in operations who moved into Personnel later in their working life, and they were nearly all male. The females in the profession were mainly in the recruitment and filing sections. During my time, the profession has gone from overwhelmingly male to overwhelmingly female. A corresponding increase in professionalism has occurred as well, due to the substantially higher level of tertiary qualifications with which HR staff now enter the profession, most straight out of university. There is good and bad in every change, and the good is the high level of people management knowledge that HR staff now display from the get-go. The not so good is that personnel managers brought with them high levels of understanding of the business. Therefore, HR was not far removed from the organisation’s mission, the much lower levels of operations experience in many HR departments today risks HR becoming something separate from the business, and that must be avoided.

Early in my HR career, people in the Personnel department would be paid well below other professionals in the organisation. That was probably appropriate, given the lower levels of qualifications held. It is of great satisfaction to me to see that professional HR staff of today are paid in line with, and sometimes better than, other professionals in their organisations. This is a change very much for the better.

Overall, the changes have substantially been for the betterment of both the organisations that HR serves and for HR professionals themselves. Albeit, like almost all change, some good things disappeared with the bathwater.