By Jan van der Hoop
Life is a funny thing. If you hang around long enough you get to see old things come back as emerging trends. At 47, I have seen wide neckties, the Beetle and the Mini Cooper all peak, die and return from the dead. At least one of them should have been left for dead.
I’m also one of the few HR guys my age who can claim to have been in the HR game since the 1970’s (I squeaked in thanks to a summer internship in the ‘Personnel’ department back in ‘79 before the function’s rebranding)… and while I’ve seen my share of fads come and go, the thing that astonishes and disappoints me is how little we’ve managed to gain control over HR’s perennial challenges.
Turnover, loyalty, training, scarcity of the ‘right’ kind of talent, wage demands, staffing challenges and requirements to innovate and boost productivity were all issues then as now. Pick up a forty year old HR Journal and compare the article headlines to last month’s edition… you’d think we were stuck in a doom loop.
Maybe we are.
Or maybe we just don’t do a very good job of carrying tried and true business practices along with us as we lurch from fad to fad.
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