HR is not the problem. But the old HR paradigm might be.

Every few months, an article appears declaring that HR has become bloated, bureaucratic, overreaching or bad for business.

The latest version asks whether HR’s expansion has strangled British business. It draws a line between the growth of the people profession and the UK’s productivity problem, then leaves the reader to join the dots.

It is a tempting story.

It is also far too simple.

Since 2010, the UK has lived through austerity, Brexit, political instability, a pandemic, war, inflation, a cost-of-living crisis and huge shifts in how people relate to work. To point at HR and say, “That’s the problem” is neat. It is clickable. It is satisfying for anyone who has ever sat through bad mandatory training or had a poor experience with a people process.

But it misses the bigger question.

Not whether HR is useful.

Whether HR can prove the value it creates.

Because being offended by criticism is not enough. The profession needs a better answer than: “We manage risk. We ensure compliance. We stop things going wrong.”

All of those things matter. But they are not enough to earn influence in a business that is under pressure to perform.

HR does not need to defend the old paradigm.

It needs to change it.

The trap of defending HR with the wrong argument

When HR is criticised, the response often defaults to risk.

We protect the business.
We manage tribunals.
We interpret legislation.
We keep people safe.
We make sure the organisation does not end up in trouble.

That work is necessary. Nobody serious should pretend otherwise.

But when the profession only defends itself through the language of risk, it risks reducing itself to an internal insurance policy. Valuable at the point of crisis. Resented the rest of the time.

That is the trap.

Because if HR is only seen as the function that says no, slows things down, writes policies and runs compliance training, then criticism becomes easy. The profession gets framed as a brake on productivity rather than a driver of performance.

And the uncomfortable truth is this: sometimes HR has helped create that perception.

Not because people in HR do not care. Often, they care deeply. But care without commercial clarity is easy to dismiss.

The future of HR cannot be built on proving that things might have gone worse without it. It has to show how things get better because of it.

Compliance is not culture change

One of the biggest tensions in the episode was around mandatory training.

Anti-harassment. Anti-racism. Modern slavery. Unconscious bias. Allyship. Compliance.

These topics are not “guff”. They matter. They matter legally, morally and commercially.

But too often, organisations treat training as proof that something has changed.

Someone completes an e-learning module.
They sign a policy.
They attend a workshop.
A box gets ticked.

And then everyone pretends the risk has been managed.

That is not culture change. That is evidence of exposure.

If the goal is to prevent harm, shift behaviour, improve decision-making or build inclusion, we need to be honest about whether the methods being used are capable of doing that.

Outside work, nobody seriously believes you change deep human behaviour with a policy update and a slide deck. Yet inside work, that is often treated as “all reasonable steps”.

Reasonable, perhaps.

Transformational, no.

This is where HR has to get braver. Not by abandoning compliance, but by refusing to confuse compliance with impact.

Less tick-box. More behaviour change.
Less optics. More evidence.
Less “we delivered the training”. More “here is what changed because of it”.

Commerciality is not the enemy of humanity

There is a persistent fear in some parts of the people profession that talking commercially means becoming less human.

It does not.

Commerciality and humanity are not opposing forces. At their best, they strengthen each other.

People do better work in systems that are fair, clear, energising and human. Businesses perform better when people are trusted, capable, motivated and aligned to the work that matters. Customers feel the difference when employees are engaged in something more meaningful than survival.

That is the balance.

The issue is not that HR talks about people. It should. The issue is that HR often struggles to translate people outcomes into the language the rest of the business uses.

A CEO may care about engagement. But they are accountable for growth, margin, customer value, investor confidence, productivity and resilience.

A CFO may care about retention. But they will ask what attrition costs, what capability gaps slow down delivery, and whether investment in people activity produces measurable return.

A COO may care about culture. But they will want to know whether culture improves speed, quality, collaboration and execution.

So the question is not: “How do we make leaders care about HR metrics?”

It is: “How do we connect people activity to the outcomes the business already cares about?”

That is where the paradigm shifts.

HR needs better evidence, not louder defence

The profession has spent years repeating a familiar belief:

If people are happier, they will be more productive.

There is truth in that. But belief alone will not move the board.

If HR wants investment, influence and credibility, it needs to prove its impact with more imagination and discipline.

That means going beyond the traditional dashboard of engagement, attrition, retention and satisfaction. Useful signals, yes. But not the full story.

The richer questions are:

What is slowing people down?
Where is capability constraining growth?
Which moments in the employee experience create or destroy customer value?
How does leadership behaviour affect execution?
What does poor culture cost in time, quality, trust or revenue?
Where does learning reduce waste, rework or risk?
How does inclusion improve decision-making and innovation?

This is not about turning humans into units on a spreadsheet.

It is about proving that human systems are business systems.

And that requires HR to work beyond HR. With data teams. Finance teams. Operations teams. Customer teams. Marketing teams. The people profession cannot solve this from inside its own silo.

That may be one of the biggest shifts required.

HR thinking cannot only be about how HR measures HR better. It has to connect human value to enterprise value.

The profession also needs more diversity of thought

The episode also touched on something important: HR’s reputation is shaped by who is in the profession, who gets heard, and how the function has historically been perceived.

HR has roots in welfare, personnel and administration. It has also long been a profession dominated by women. That matters.

Some of the dismissal of HR as “soft”, “fluffy” or secondary to “real business” is hard to separate from wider patterns of sexism and the undervaluing of care-based, relational and people-centred work.

But acknowledging that does not remove the need for change. It makes the need for change more urgent.

HR needs more diversity. Not just gender diversity, but diversity of background, experience, discipline, class, ethnicity, neurotype and commercial perspective.

It needs people who have worked in operations, sales, marketing, data, finance, product and frontline roles. It needs people who understand employment law and people who understand customer value. It needs people who can hold ambiguity, challenge convention and design better systems.

Because if everyone has been trained to see the work in the same way, the function will keep producing the same answers.

And the same answers are not enough.

The real risk is irrelevance

There is a reason these articles keep landing.

They hit a nerve.

Not because HR is pointless, but because too many people have experienced HR as procedural rather than powerful. As something done to them, not with them. As a function that appears in moments of friction, not as a partner in better work.

That is the real reputational problem.

And it will not be solved by telling critics they do not understand.

It will be solved by building people functions that are impossible to dismiss.

Functions that reduce friction.
Accelerate capability.
Improve decision-making.
Protect dignity.
Strengthen leadership.
Increase trust.
Support growth.
Prove their value.

This is the shift from transactional HR to relational HR.

Not HR as a service desk for policies and problems.

HR as the operating system for shared value between employer, employee and customer.

Less defence. More proof.

The people profession does not need to become less human to be taken seriously.

It needs to become more commercially fluent.

It does not need to abandon care.

It needs to show how care creates resilience, performance and trust.

It does not need to stop managing risk.

It needs to stop letting risk management become its whole identity.

The old HR paradigm is reactive, defensive and transactional. It waits to be challenged, then explains why it matters.

The new paradigm is relational, evidence-led and commercially alive. It designs systems where people and performance fuel each other.

So no, HR is not strangling British business.

But HR that cannot demonstrate its value will keep being treated as expendable.

The opportunity now is not to win the argument in the comments section.

It is to build a better model of work.

One where humanity is not a cost to manage, but a source of commercial strength.

One where balance is not a slogan, but a system.

And one where HR no longer has to ask for a seat at the table, because the business can see exactly what it brings when it gets there.