MHRM 6101 Week 1 HR Belief Discussion Post Example

Week 1 Discussion: What I Believe About Human Resources

"HR Does the Paperwork After the Decision": Putting a Belief From the Loading Dock on Record and Testing It Against Becker's Idea of Workers as an Investment

Here is what I believe about human resources, stated as bluntly as I would have said it five years ago: HR is the department that does the paperwork after managers have already decided. In my experience, a manager chose whom to hire, and HR sent the offer letter; a manager decided someone had to go, and HR scheduled the exit meeting and collected the badge. If I am honest, I came into this program half expecting to learn better ways of doing the paperwork.

Where It Came From

That belief comes from one place. For four years I worked at a regional distribution warehouse, first on the loading dock and then as a shift lead. I saw HR perhaps twice a year in person. When our dock lost three loaders in a month, the shift manager posted the jobs, ran the interviews in the break room and told HR the names afterward. I want to be clear that this is experience, not evidence. It is one employer, seen from the dock, during a period when that company was growing quickly and probably had a stretched HR team. A loader at a different firm, or an HR generalist at the same one, might describe the function in completely different terms.

Testing It Against Becker

This week's reading introduced human capital theory (Becker, 1993), and one idea in it unsettles my belief. Becker (1993) treated the skills and knowledge workers carry as capital, something a firm can invest in and earn a return on, much like equipment. The theory also separates general skills, useful at any employer, from firm-specific skills that are worth more at the employer where they were learned. If workers are an investment, then someone has to decide how much to invest, in whom and when, and that is a decision, not paperwork.

Looking back at the warehouse with that lens, I can see decisions that were made by default. Nobody decided how long a new loader should train before working the dock alone; it was whatever the shift could spare. Nobody decided whether to keep experienced reach-truck drivers by paying them more than the agency rate; they left for a competitor down the road that did. Those were human capital decisions. HR was absent from them, and the warehouse paid for that absence in mistakes and turnover. So my belief may be accurate as a description of what HR did at one employer while being wrong about what HR is for.

Dessler (2020) describes HR as responsible for acquiring, training, appraising and compensating employees. That list makes the paperwork sound like the visible tail end of work that should start much earlier. Ulrich (1997) goes further, arguing that HR should be judged by what it delivers to the business, not by the activities it performs.

An Open Question

What I cannot yet answer is why HR at my old warehouse stayed at the end of the process. Was it that managers kept it there, that HR lacked the staff to be anywhere else or that nobody had asked it to measure the cost of turnover? I would be curious whether classmates who have worked inside HR noticed this pattern from their desks, and what it took to change it.

References

Becker, G. S. (1993). Human capital: A theoretical and empirical analysis, with special reference to education (3rd ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Dessler, G. (2020). Human resource management (16th ed.). Pearson.

Ulrich, D. (1997). Human resource champions: The next agenda for adding value and delivering results. Harvard Business School Press.