I’d love to hear you explain your thinking on this topic a bit more – looking forward to your reply!

@Michael – I don’t neccessarily have a problem with HR handling policies. I just think in many companies, policies are a bulk of what HR does, mostly because many companies have far too many. Do you really need a policy dictating how your employees dress? If they’re not smart enough to understand what’s work appropriate with a policy “forcing” them to dress that way, maybe you need to revisit your recruiting practices (not saying you specifically, but in the general sense).

Same thing goes for employees who act like children. Some ER issues are to be expected, no doubt. But on the whole, if you have employees who are continually unable to interact like grown-ups, I don’t care how good their numbers are, they need to go. And again, I would revisit how you’re sourcing and selecting people if this is a common thing.

When I say outsource everything else, I guess I’m thinking more along the lines of benefits administration (not plan development, but processing, etc.), new hire paperwork and records retention.

Another great solution I’ve seen kicked around is to split HR into two functions: Strategic and operational. Operational handles all the boring crap like benefits and records, while strategic would do all the stuff I mention in the article. Of course, I feel like if your money is going to people outside the company, you more tightly would evaluate how you’re allocating it. And it’s too easy when paying people internally to go, “you know, this is HR’s job,” and then we become paper-pushers again because there’s too much of that stuff to do the value-added strategy development.

Thoughts?

@Dan – Great addition! I’m with on you the Leadership Development area. I guess in my head I’d lump that into Training, but if you want to call it out as a separate function, that works too.

Great comments so far – thanks everyone!