HR is a contact sport

The increasing outsourcing of HR tasks and the use of technology in place of personal interaction brings the genuine danger of HR losing touch with employees. The new face of HR should not be faceless

- VISTY BANAJI

The factory looked like a war-zone. Much company property had been destroyed. There were serious injuries. I won’t reveal the nature of the injuries or when this episode took place to prevent the organization where it happened from being identified. Besides, such explosions are frequent enough for us not to probe the specifics of a particular instance. In nine out of ten cases of violence at the workplace, the management is taken totally by surprise and has no time to plan counter-measures, leave aside preempt the conflagration. While many people have analyzed the fundamental causes of industrial violence, my limited purpose here is to understand why early warning systems, which could have prevented the worst excesses, failed and how we can prevent such failures that repeatedly catch us with descended lower-garments.

The single thread that is common to almost all workplace violence is a break in the chain of face-to-face communication between people at the Bottom of the Pyramid and HR / ER people whose reports reach top decision-makers. The greater worry is that the newer models we are adopting for organizing and managing HR make catastrophic failures in feedback channels more rather than less likely.

Losing touch