The human resources reckoning

Financial Times

The area of wellbeing exposes some of HR’s weaknesses. “Many HR teams pay for services from a variety of vendors that aren’t bringing positive effects,” says William Fleming, research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre. Last year, he found that programmes and apps to sooth stress and teach mindfulness made no difference.

The problem, he notes, is that many HR departments are stuck between having too little and too much influence. This may become more of an issue in the coming years, as AI begins to play a bigger role in the workplace, taking on more of the tasks people do.

“We recommend organisational change and improving job quality,” Fleming says. “How many HR managers decide how many hours people work, how much autonomy people are given in their team, how many staff are assigned to tasks, how technology is introduced? These are the types of things that really drive wellbeing at work. Yet they can fall outside the remit of HR and instead [are] based on executive decisions or line manager discretion.”