An article in HR today interviews Sainsbury’s new HR director. Except she is not quite. Director of HR was the title of the outgoing HR boss. They have taken the opportunity to move HR under a wider umbrella so they now have a customer service and colleague director who, in the article, extols the virtues of bringing together “customer service, PR/corporate communications, CSR, sponsorship and people”.
Putting aside my anathema of referring to staff as colleagues* and the personnel/HR function as a ‘people’ department**, I am noticing an increasing trend for HR to be subsumed into a wider top-level function. Moving it into a marketing-focussed function is somewhat unusual, though perhaps more logical in this sector than some others. Mostly I find HR reports through to someone with a finance-linked role; a finance and administration director or a chief operating officer. Or even at a more modest level HR reporting in to an administration head one down from board level.
The advantages are that HR is managed by someone with a more business-focused background than is typical of many who have followed a purely HR career and that there is one less person for the Chief Executive to manage. I am less convinced of the benefit claimed in the article for the new Sainsbury’s arrangement “of bringing HR and marketing closer together”. That may be true but presumably it makes HR correspondingly less close to distribution and finance. Either way the CIPD’s long-established campaign for HR to be at the top table is looking a little wobbly if they mean that the person concerned should be a qualified HR professional.
* – does not make sense to the general public and looses the opportunity to distinguish between those you actually work with and other company employees you never ever meet.
** – twee and patronising.
