Your take on HR

We had our first lecture for HR, Human Resource and Behavioral Sciences to be precise. The professor who came up to take the class is an industry veteran, with around three dozen years of work experience. He has worked for small Indian family businesses, as well as in big modern firms. No-brainer that we were to be showered by his wisdom. 

He asked two basic questions in front of the class:

1.      How do you define the HR as a department, to a layman?

2.      What is special about HR, that we need a separate department?

We had a hard time ahead. Starting from "managing human resources", the junta fought to satisfy him. But no way! At the end, he described the HR function in a manner most unexpected.

He explained that the work of the HR function is the same as that of a mother while bringing up her child: Feeding, nurturing, developing, correcting, counseling, etc. He emphasized a lot on this mother-child relational aspect.

But I think differently. I believe that the HR is just the facilitator of the management policies. It is just a "facilitator", not an organization as a whole. At the end of the day, the line managers are those who make or break the company's culture. The problem in comparing it with mother-child relation is that the employees begin to think as if the HR department is "responsible" for "all" their problems. So if a boss doesn't treat a subordinate well, the subordinate will think that the HR department is not working. As employees, we forget to think that we need to bring the issues in front of the HR people, before they can help. In my case, when my HR manager came to know about some issues between me and my colleague, he called us and counseled us. But it can't happen every time. Of course at the end of every year there are performance reviews, where the problems in the organization get reflected. But I have noticed that the employees "expect" a lot from the HR department, and the main reason behind that expectation is that they perceive the department in line with the "mother-child" relationships. What is your take? Do you think that the mother-child model for the HR function is OK? If yes, to what extent? 

Now is the time to open up the text-books.