Pity HR. From hybrid work to quiet quitting, there are few current management preoccupations that do not end up becoming the human resources team’s problem.
“Human capital” is this decade’s business buzzword; a rebranding of the “our people are our greatest asset” cliché for an age when financial capital has been easier to come by than skilled labour.
If tight employment markets have made HR’s basic tasks of recruitment and retention more challenging, its job has been complicated further by the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, which forced organisations to confront how little they had really valued some of their supposed assets.