A team from the UCLouvain Louvain School Management has published a white paper on human resources management in the non-profit sector. These poorly known jobs are at the forefront of understanding current and future transformations of work.
Human resources managers (HRMs) have a huge impact on the lives of an organisation’s workers.1 ‘And they carry heavy responsibilities, as demonstrated by the France Telecom trial’,2 says Laurent Taskin, a professor at the Louvain School of Management. ‘However, the profession and the challenges faced by the people who practice it are unknown and/or misunderstood, especially because the profession is still being professionalised. At the university, for example, the master's degree in human resources management has existed only since 2007.
To better understand the profession, Prof. Taskin and his team have twice brought together a panel of approximately 30 public and non-commercial sector HRMs. What are the particulars of their job? What challenges do they face? What skills and are required to do the job well and give it meaning? The team’s survey results were published as a white paper.
Three major challenges
Currently, public and non-commercial sector human resources directors (HRDs) face three major challenges in the exercise of their profession:
- Digitisation and robotisation. How will new technologies transform or even replace certain tasks previously performed by humans? This question torments many HRDs. ‘Their challenge is to ensure the humanisation of work’, Prof. Taskin says. ‘Because when technologies threaten to replace humans, workers become all the more insistent on their humanity and have greater expectations of being treated humanely.’
- Financialisation of management, which consists of reducing human labour to financial indicators via quantified objectives, charts, reports, etc. This performance ‘philosophy’ comes from the private sector and has been imposed gradually on the public and non-profit sector. ‘This vision results in an abstraction of work and its quality’, Prof. Taskin explains. ‘In a hospital, for example, the financialisation of management translates into the number of patients a nurse must see during the day, the number of actions that must be performed, figures that don’t account for the quality of care provided ... But this aspect is fundamental to correctly evaluating the work.’
- Loss of work centrality. As a value, ‘work’ occupies less and less space in the lives of individuals, to the benefit of other values: family, friends, hobbies, etc. Several phenomena reflect this: the growing concern to balance private and professional life, the constant reduction of contractual working time,3 pilot experiments on the four-day week or universal allowance, etc. ‘The challenge for HRDs is therefore to make work attractive, especially by proposing a personalised career plan to each worker.’
Human as resource
Most public and non-profit HRDs don’t like the name of their profession. ‘In human resources management, the human is considered a resource to exploit,’ Prof. Taskin says. ‘In the medium and long term, this conception of work is counterproductive because it destroys more value than it produces. It creates pain and exhausts and discourages people, as demonstrated by the growing number of burn-outs, for example. An alternative is possible: human management.’
What is human management?
More than a slogan, human management is a model that emphasises the human, reflexive and collaborative dimension of management. ‘You have to dare to question your concept of human, to involve stakeholders, to focus on expertise and work and to aim for recognition at work’, Prof. Taskin says. ‘In a hospital, for example, it's about providing the best possible care. To do this, human management consists of bringing together workers – who are well placed to know the field’s realities – and think about ways to improve the quality of care. In this context, the goal of human management is the recognition of work in its subjective, objective and collective dimensions. It’s there to identify and value expertise and help workers to develop or enhance it. In this sense, human management serves the professions and people an organisation needs to fulfil its missions.’
Candice Leblanc
(1) ‘Organisation’ in the sense of company, institution or administration. (2) The France Telecom trial opened on 7 May 2019. Senior management is accused morally harassing all staff in 2008-09, which could have caused a wave of suicides (35 employees) and depression. (3) Over one century, the average annual working time of an employee in Belgium was almost halved: from 2,701 hours in 1911 to 1,387 hours in 2014.
A glance at Laurent Taskin's bio
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Laurent Taskin has been a professor at the Louvain School of Management since 2007. A recognised expert in issues related to the transformation of work, organisations and management, he participates in the implementation of human and responsible management in organisations. He holds a master's degree in applied economics, a DEA in management sciences and a PhD in economics and management from UCLouvain. Editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Work Innovation and ‘laboRH’ chair in human management and work transformation, he is or has been visiting professor at several foreign universities, including the University of Warwick (UK), UQAM and Laval University (Canada), City University of London (UK). |