SHRM26 Debrief · Modern Employee Experience · #1551
The Heart of the Matter - Why the Work of HR Matters
with Steve Browne
"Your job is not to do HR. Your job is to make your company better through its people."
What it was about
HR has become soft, rule-bound, and disconnected from the people it exists to serve; the job of HR is not to "do HR" but to take care of individual people, one at a time, which in turn makes the company better.
By the numbers
1% turnover
LaRosa's employee turnover rate, attributed to flexible/no set-schedule policies
47 years
Tenure of retiring employee Julie before she retired at 65
Key notes
- Learn people's names and something personal about them. It's a basic, learnable skill: repeat the name, ask a question, repeat it again. If you can't be bothered to do it, you're in the wrong profession.
- Stop writing one-size-fits-all policies; take care of each person individually and the whole will take care of itself, because you can never actually manage 'the whole.'
- Have real, direct conversations with people instead of talking about them in the hallway. Hard conversations aren't hard if you already have a relationship with the person.
The contrarian takeBeing a 'people person' is meaningless and shallow: like skipping a stone across a lake, it has no depth. Real care requires individual relationships and vulnerability, not a generic self-label. He also argues 'a seat at the table' is an outdated, physical-furniture metaphor: HR should already be strategic every day, not seeking permission to be included.
Take this back Monday
Do this for your team
Learn one personal detail about each direct report you don't already know — start with your frontline or lowest-status employee.
Say this in your next leadership meeting
Our job in HR isn't to do HR — it's to make this company better by taking care of our people one at a time.
Watch out for
- Introducing yourself only by your job title/function ('Hi, I'm in HR') instead of as a person — it signals you've stopped being human at work.
- Writing sweeping, one-size-fits-all policies and procedures that no one reads and that don't fit individuals.
- Talking about problem employees in hallways/complaint sessions instead of having direct conversations with them.
Fun fact · Steve Browne
Steve Browne runs a global HR network reaching 14,000+ HR and business professionals weekly and has authored three books.
If this landed, see these
↳ Go deeperPurpose-Driven Retention: Merging Human Motivation and Business StrategyTurns 'care for people one at a time' into a testable formula: purpose, people, path.⇄ The counterpointEmployee Experience & Technology: How Self-Service Portals, Mobile Apps, & Digital Tools Are Changing ExpectationsTests how far 'individual conversations over policy' survives once employees expect app-like self-service.✦ The unexpected oneBuilding an AI-Enabled Recruiting TeamEven with AI running recruiting, the name-learning, individual-attention argument still has to hold.