Kill the HR Speak

The HR profession has managed to create a bewildering array of meaningless terms. When you’re in the realm of HR strategy, it is nearly impossible to read an article or view a PowerPoint that isn’t littered with terms like “business partner,” “seat at the table,” “organizational alignment” or “balanced scorecard.” Every function within the HR profession deserves some level of credit for creating confusion. These terms often emerge when corporate leaders are fed up and want something different, a situation that can lead HR leaders to re-brand the same old approaches and tools under a different name: “talent management” becomes “human capital management,” for example.

Why is the proliferation of HR speak a problem? To begin with, it builds a language wall between us and the rest of the business. If you’ve ever sat with a CEO during executive committee meetings, you’ll note that most executives have a relatively limited vocabulary. It often includes “hard” and easily measurable words like “profit,” “stock price,” “ROI” and “market share.” Executives also use a quantifiable language, one which is primarily made up of numbers and dollars. HR practitioners, in contrast, use in their presentations and conversations “soft” terminology like “emotional intelligence,” “work/life balance” and “empowerment.” These are almost totally devoid of numbers and dollars. And because it so often amounts to Orwellian doublespeak, HR speak causes a great deal of anxiety and confusion among both managers and employees.

Full article here: http://www.workforce.com/section/01/feature/25/37/75/index.html