
Trends Shaping the Future of HR in 2017 - LenaTech
http://cactushr.com/blog/2016/12/26/hr-trends-shaping-the-future-of-hr-in-2017/
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trhway
>we are seeing an increasingly damaging trend – people are still “chasing”
more money.

that viewpoint basically summarizes all this HR development.

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forbin_meet_hal
I fear for the folks coming into the workplace who think that HR exists to be
their advocate.

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Clubber
Agreed. For people who don't know, HR is't like "Internal Affairs" like you
see in movies, they are employed by the company to do a few things:

1\. Create benefit plans. 2\. Keep the employer from getting sued.

#2 is particularly important. They are very risk averse, so they will take the
quickest path to safety. Post something on social media that someone could
take out of context or misinterpret? Fired. Shortest path. Criticize the
company or your boss in some way? Fired. Shortest path. Say something
overheard by someone else that might offend them? Fired. Shortest path. A
potential hire says something odd to the HR manager during an interview?
Denied, to risky.

Something funny, at a company I worked for years ago, HR created a
questionnaire to gauge morale in the company compared to other software
companies. Every department was well below the average (meaning low morale)
except the HR department which was well above.

Beware.

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tinbucket
I couldn't agree more with your comment. I've seen too many people fall into
the trap of believing that the HR department is there to protect them, only to
find out much too late that the reality is as you described.

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dasmoth
Ctrl-F "team"...

Actually, fewer matches than I might have guessed, but even so there seems to
be a great deal here about teams and interactions and very little about
letting smart individuals get on with things in private spaces.

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trhway
we've just seen it in the hardware - horizontal scaling, a huge number of well
connected commodity elements beat standalone super-servers for most practical
purposes and metrics. So, now we going to do that with human "wetware" too,
and HR glamorizes itself as Kubernetes (with original system suitably called
Borg at Google) in that brave new world.

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cle
> So, now we suppose that would work for human "wetware" too

Why do you think it wouldn't?

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dasmoth
It's not out of the question that they might. Although there's a
countervailing view that humans motivated by passion perform better -- perhaps
dramatically better -- than those who feel like cogs in a machine.

Either way, it's an important issue for people who hope to find a working
environment where they feel satisfied (which, to be clear, might for different
people mean a preference for teamwork, solo-work, or perhaps some of each).

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cle
> Although there's a countervailing view that humans motivated by passion
> perform better -- perhaps dramatically better -- than those who feel like
> cogs in a machine.

I'm not sure that matters much. If it delivers more to the bottom line to
treat people like cogs so that the org is more scalable, then that's probably
what will happen.

In modern distributed systems, we've de-emphasized vertical scalability (in
our analogy, an individual's motivation and performance) to improve horizontal
scalability, fault tolerance, flexibility, etc. It sucks to admit, but if your
organization needs those kind of scaling characteristics, then treating your
employees like cogs may be the most profitable organizational structure.

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chewyshine
Interesting. Most of the "trends" have made similar lists for years (e.g.,
teams). However, #8 on working together with a greater sense of purpose seems
to capture the current zeitgeist pretty well.

