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Is HR really necessary ?
Thinking differently about support functions
My colleagues and I had an interesting conversation about HR the other day.
We work in a self-organised business, and we don’t have a dedicated HR person for a 30 person team.
Typically, self-organised businesses tend to rely on fully empowered employees to make key decisions and perform functions that would traditionally be the remit of so-called support functions.
HR is a very good example.
Functions typically filled by HR are taken on by the team.
Take hiring as an example. The hiring process is fully owned by the team needing to fill the role.
Job descriptions are written and published (sometimes with outside expert help), and the entire interview process is managed by the team members who will actually be interacting with the new role once the hiring is done.
This makes complete sense because there is less of a tendency to ‘sell’ a role if the team members are the ones controlling the hiring process : there will be more of a focus on finding the right fit rather than ‘just’ try to fill a position to hit certain hiring metrics.
The hiring process might take longer, but sometimes that’s a good thing because the intent here is to not just to fill a…
