HR balancing act - business partner / employee advocate

Thank you Peter! I am so pleased to hear that you considering yourself a pluralist. I share the views of this group as well and kind of bothered me that according to John Storey HR has/should have the views of unitarism (It could be my misconception though). That’s why I posted my initial question to see how the HR community sees this.
You made my day and thank you for the book recommendation! :-)

Back in 1978 I remember Sander Merideen of the LSE using the term unitarist to contrast it with the pluralistic approach the he espoused in his Industrial Relations classes . He described pluralism as seeking a win/win where ideally the overall gain was greater than the sum of the parts - as opposed to a zero sum game where it was obligatory to have a “loser” in the outcome. He also considered that the unitarist position was typically held by people whose strategic vision was blinded by myopic short term power play.

Hi Karin

While an HR professional will advocate for employees on occasion, we are not Employee Advocates.

I realise that your question acknowledges that HR roles are multi-facetted, but there is something about the way the question is phrased that has made me react exactly as Keith and David have.

I think it is because misunderstandings about the role of HR crop up in these forums from time to time: a belief that it is HR's role to be neutral, or that we are some kind of variation on a TU rep or social worker funded by the business or that we are Employee Advocates. We aren't. Anyone who characterises HR in any of these ways has fundamentally misunderstood what HR is for, what HR people do and the nature of the employment relationship. Having encountered these misconceptions in the past, it may be that I am now hyper-vigilant and am overreacting to your question. But I'm not the only one.

There can appear to be a balancing act in that sometimes for the good of the organisation we champion the rights of an employee. When you see that occurring, it is just us monitoring and managing the people system of the organisation, doing our jobs as part of the management team, fulfilling our duty to our employer.

That makes it sound as if there is no moral dimension to our work and of course there is. There is a moral dimension to every job in every function. I also get very cross when people try to characterise HR as the conscience of the organisation (which you haven't). This is highly dangerous. If HR is the conscience, then every other function is absolved of their moral responsibility. It's another one of those myths which has accreted around HR and which needs to be challenged vigorously.

What Elizabeth said! Elizabeth also posted on a different question that HR isn't a theoretical practice but actually exists in nuanced organisations. Would my colleagues in my business react well to my theorising about whether I was a pluralist or unitarian? Without a shadow of doubt they wouldn't!

The theoretician/academic will talk about pluralism. The businessman (this includes HR) will talk about aligning the interests of diverse stakeholders. Less cryptic and intellectual but more specific and easily understood outside of academic circles.

Thank you Elizabeth.

My question did not intend to upset anyone.
It was the curiosity of a “novice” who thought this was a forum where dilemmas such as this could be honestly shared and discussed, without inflicting any pain on either sides. Perhaps I was wrong. On the other hand I cannot be held accountable for what other people posted here before me.

Among others D Ulrich and W Brockbank use the term Employee Advocate in their book “The HR value proposition”, P.200., where Employee Advocate is one of the 5 roles a HR professional supposed to have.

Maybe scholars like above could be held as culprits for the fact that these “misconceptions” crop up from time to time.

I am not sure how to interpret the CIPD’s mission statement of “Championing better work and working lives” then either. Maybe you can shed a light on it for me.

As you rightly said, HR is not and should not be the conscience of an organisation. From a customer’s perspective if I compare HR with the marketing department then the latter needs to learn a lot from HR.

I often say I am the least academic, academic at the University but still got roped in to teach SHRM. It was a learning experience!.

You raise some good questions Karin and I’ll try to bring part of the answer. Back in 2005 (I think) I shared a stage at the Hay European Convention in Rome with Dave Ulrich, Tom McMullen and a couple of other people. A speaker failed to turn up and as speakers who were already in situ we agreed to improvise a sofa debate on innovation and the future of HR - a fun exercise, as you can imagine. During the exchanges Dave received your question about the “employee champion” role. He answered that he considered the HR value proposition to be a permanent work in progress, certainly not a normative statement of how HR should work. He clarified that the overall HR role was, in his view, to extract the maximum added value from the human element in the corporate equation via the different roles; that none of the boxes took absolute precedence, since the specific context of each company is different, and that permanent adaptation was necessary for any strategic approach to remain valid (my “context is king” hobby-horse). In other words employee champion is an approach with limits, and not an end in itself that supersedes the need for a company to survive by making a profit. Dave’s later books clearly show how his ideas evolved over the years as both his research at MIT and his consultancy work moved forward.
I think much of the same can be said of the CIPD’s mission statement - but I can’t claim to be a spokesman......

Thank you Ray! This is very helpful.