People Services ?

I know I'm being particularly radical with this suggestion, but here goes anyway:

How about 'Personnel'? ;-)

Seriously, why doesn't the term Human Resources fit the business? Especially as everyone knows what that means. Is it because they don't like referring to employees as a resource?

I've never been totally clear on what is really meant by 'culture' so how about People Operations?

Are other departments such as Finance thinking of changing their names as well?

Agreeing with the general consensus here, why the need for this change, and why really culture? That name is going to be the new dislike if that is the reason for rebranding. Like not so long ago people were told not to use racial slurs to refer to someone, so instead they used Mondays. Because nobody likes Mondays. Well except me, but I don't have much going right now. ;-)

we use People Operations and everyone seems to know what it means. We find it helps the culture expectation that we focus on the human/people element not the person being a resource.

In reply to Gemma:

I'm People Operations Manager at my job too, do always have to tell people that it's HR though ha!

Hi Rebecca,

A previous thread you might like to read on this...

 Changing from HR to People 

I am sure all these names are well intentioned, but I do think the exercise is largely pointless. Welfare, personnel, Human Resources, People, what we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet

We are known by what we do and the impact we have not what our function is called. And as has been mentioned many will still us ethe old name for years to come.

In my career I have been in a Personnel Officer (old I know), a HR Director and a People & Culture Director and I can honestly say the title made no difference to the approach to role

Hi Rebecca,
In my organisation, I am Director of People, with responsibility across volunteers and staff. The departments that report to me are HR, Volunteering and Safeguarding with titles linked to these. Not sure whether that helps or not, but People is often used in the third sector for similar roles.

In reply to Gemma:

At our local council (I'm also a councillor) we have a Head of People Services.
At CIPD we have a People and Transformation Director as the postholder is responsible for OD and 'transformation', as well as leading our people function.

I see The People Team being used, I was back at Uni at Xmas for an event and my old lecturer was saying that the use of the name HR was trying to be phased out because describing humans as resources isn't very human

Thank you everyone for your responses :) so interesting to hear different view points!

In reply to Rebecca:

This is a case of the emperors new clothes.
As an ex ‘shop floor’ employee of many years I don’t think that changing the name would change you, the department or the employees’ view of the department.

the term 'HR' just doesn't suit the business

but

when I talk about the term people & culture, I always need to explain it is in fact HR

Part of the problem, when people set about re-inventing this particular wheel, is that little consideration is given to how and why the term "Human Resources" came about. It has undeniably become associated with some of the worst aspects of modern employment: tedious mandatory training courses, po-faced sermonizing about equality and inclusion, slightly desperate attempts to engender a concept of "fun", ruthless dismissals and more.

So when excitable leaders of "highly innovative" start-ups and similar see the term "HR" they come to the predictable conclusion that they have to do things differently and that the obvious place to start is to "not treat humans as resources".

To which I like blow a big, fat raspberry.

The whole reason why the old "Personnel" function evolved (via Industrial Relations) to Human Resources was precisely out of a compelling business need to understand how to treat humans as a resource distinct from all others. It is treating humans as a distinct, unique resource that operates differently and has different needs from other resources (like money, intellectual property, raw materials, parts, transport, warehousing, office space etc).

If an innovative company wants to do human resources differently then the answer is not to re-brand, but to *embrace* that human resources isn't about treating humans as resources, but about treating their resources as humans.