If all the world’s human resources 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 is still needed humans in the age of AI.
“HR employs humans?” asked one of the scores of FT 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 IT, compliance and other divisions that enforce corporate rules. But I was struck by one common reader complaint: HR people often sound as if they’re on the side of employees when in reality they have, as one person wrote, “always been there to protect management and companies’ interests”.
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I’m not surprised if today’s workers feel betrayed by a 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 wellbeing, diversity, inclusion, engagement and a host of other measures that would have stunned a Victorian mill worker.
The upshot is that the team rolling out a mindfulness app one day might be sending out pink slips the next. No wonder people call them two-faced.
But what if HR’s focus on employee welfare is also grating on chief executives who want to see more hard evidence that this really helps the bottom line?
That is a question the profession needs to address more rigorously, according to the head of one of the world’s largest HR associations, Johnny Taylor, president of the US-based Society for Human Resource Management.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do [as] a profession in terms of becoming reliable sources of strategy to our CEOs,” he told me on a recent trip to London.
Taylor said that, for too long, HR heads had told chief executives they needed to, say, behave more empathetically to stop employees from jumping ship, “and frankly, the CEO has often said, ‘I don’t know that I believe that.’”
[ You think you’re annoyed with HR? Wait till you hear how HR feelsOpens in new window ]
The same goes for a raft of other widely espoused HR policies, including hybrid work. Taylor said there was not enough long-term evidence to show if it’s better for performance than five days in the office. He also thought bosses were unsure if sabbatical leave delivered “tangible benefits”.
Then there is the question of whether highly engaged or more diverse workforces really boost a company’s financial performance significantly.
“Frankly, we have not made the case that engagement actually is good for business or bad for business,” he said. “We say companies that are more diverse do better. We have no real basis for that, we absolutely don’t.”
Taylor has a point on employment engagement. More than 20 years after it became an established management concept, it still suffers from multiple definitions and measures.
And his views on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes are not unique.
Long before Donald Trump started cracking down on these programmes, a number of researchers questioned the weight put on widely cited McKinsey studies suggesting companies with more diverse leadership teams tend to perform better financially.
The UK’s Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, another large HR association, this year said the case for DEI “must be rooted in and integral to business goals”.
The debate is obviously different in the US, not least because of a 2023 supreme court ruling against race-based affirmative action in college admission programmes that sent a chill through corporate legal teams.
In the wake of that ruling, Taylor’s organisation stunned many of its own members by announcing it was ditching the “equity” from its own DEI policy and would henceforth focus on inclusion and diversity.
Ultimately, all this underlines the fact that working in HR is not for wimps. It probably never has been and it is certainly far from perfect. But as its remit expands to ever greater levels, the profession is reaching a point where it is unusually prone to attack from employees and employers alike.
It’s worth remembering that this is happening just as AI’s expected effect on jobs makes thoughtful workplace management more important than ever. Like so much else in modern corporate life, I’m sure a robot could do a lot of HR work, but give me a human any day.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
