The rise of the HR consultant

A survey released this week by a wellbeing agency reveals a worrying trend within the HR landscape with the suggestion that around half of the UK’s HR managers have either quit or have seriously considered doing so in the last two years.

Given careers website Career Smart estimated in 2020 that there were somewhere in the region of 170,000 HR specialists working in HR management roles in the UK in 2019, that’s a lot of people who have become so disillusioned with their work or working conditions that they consider leaving employment to be a serious solution.

According to the report from Wellbeing Partners, who surveyed 200 HR managers, the primary cause of this exodus – whether actual or potential – is stress and burn out.

In short, according to those on the frontline of HR service delivery, senior HR professionals have spent so much of their time during the pandemic dealing with the mental health and stress impact of remote working and lockdown that their own psychological wellbeing has taken a back seat.

This naturally begs the question of why firms haven’t taken more care to safeguard the wellbeing of their HR teams when employee wellbeing has been such a big ticket item on the corporate agenda for the last two years.

The fact is we will probably never know, beyond the fact that HR is generally resoundingly good at considering the wellbeing of the workforce but notoriously poor at including themselves within that community.

Perhaps, for business, the more pressing question is how, in the face of a diminishing pool of HR expertise, organisations can ensure business continuity and safeguard business as usual activity.

The likelihood, of course, is that many of those fleeing HR managers and directors will have been among the estimated 16 million people who have come up with 35 million entrepreneurial business ideas over the last 48 months.

In short, they’ve set up a consultancy at their kitchen table having decided that if they’re going to be the go-between dealing with the stress and burn out of their leadership teams and the people who work with them, they may as well do it on their own terms.

The rise of the HR consultant is not a coincidence, not least because the demand for the services of external HR specialists has never been higher.

For businesses, working with an HR consultant represents a cost saving: no on-costs in the form of NI and pension contributions, no sick pay, no paid leave and a flexible cost structure that allows them to eat at an HR buffet, taking only the services they need – and only when they need them.

For the consultant, there are other benefits. Largely they come to work with organisations with few preconceptions, little baggage and a lot of enthusiasm. This is good for the organisation, which gets the benefit of clear-sighted objectivity, and good for the consultant who can make an immediate impact for the better.

Gone are the office politics that so beleaguer HR teams who often feel under pressure to reach the conclusions and recommendations they know their bosses would prefer to hear rather than those their bosses need to hear.

What is left is an unencumbered transactional relationship that generally encourages and usually produces straightforward, plain-speaking advice and guidance that is almost always in the best interests of both management and staff.

I have written before that too often businesses treat their HR function as a cost centre rather than seeing it for what it really is – a profit centre, or at least a cost-saving centre.

Those are not necessarily efficiencies that are derived from cuts or restructuring, though in lots of cases this may also be necessary, but rather through increased productivity, better engagement, and more effective talent retention.

So, for those organisations that either don’t have an HR function or believe their existing HR teams could benefit from a bit of external thinking and objectivity, the HR consultant might just be the strategic answer that can help them reach the next stage of growth or development. 

If you’d like to find out more about how Constantia Consulting can help your business to become more efficient and better engaged, please get in touch for an informal chat.