If HR Was Invented Today, Would We Design It The Same Way?

A genuine thought experiment:
What if HR didn’t report to leadership at all?
What if it reported to employees instead?

Not as a popularity contest. Not as a grievance machine.
But as a structural shift in accountability.

I’ve written a short piece exploring why this question matters now, what it reveals about trust and legitimacy at work, and what any serious HR redesign effort would need to work.

I'm curious to hear your take. Would this strengthen the system, or break it?

What Comes After HR as We Know It? Imagining the Alternative

HR was designed for a different world.

A world of hierarchy, predictability, long careers in single organisations, and a largely unquestioned belief that institutions knew best. In that context, HR’s role made sense. It balanced risk, compliance, and people management on behalf of the organisation.

That world has gone. Yet, HR, in many organisations, has not caught up.

This is not a personal critique of HR professionals. It is a structural assessment driven by the mounting evidence that something is misfiring and should no longer be ignored.

• Trust in institutions is declining across societies, and workplaces are no exception.

• Engagement scores remain stubbornly flat despite decades of initiatives.

• Burnout, stress-related absence, and attrition continue to rise even as ‘wellbeing strategies’ proliferate.

• Employees routinely report that they do not feel heard, protected, or treated fairly, particularly when pressure increases.

• Employees increasingly use external platforms to raise concerns, rather than through internal channels.

HR often sits uncomfortably at the centre of this tension.

In theory, it exists to support people. In practice, it frequently reports into power structures that prioritise short-term performance, legal protection, or cost control. The result is a credibility gap. HR becomes the translator of decisions rather than the shaper of conditions. The messenger rather than the advocate. Over time, people stop engaging in something that feels illegitimate.

What if HR’s problem is not capability, but accountability?

So, here is a deliberately provocative thought experiment.

What if HR did not report to leadership at all?

What if, instead, it reported to employees?

Not as a democracy-by-survey. Not as a popularity contest. But in accountability terms.

Imagine HR being measured primarily by the people it exists to serve. Measures could include:

• whether employees believe it improves fairness, voice, workload design, and psychological safety

• whether it surfaces and mitigates risk early and completely, rather than reacting after harm occurs

• whether it strengthens the conditions for sustained performance, not just compliance

This is not as radical as it sounds.

Organisations have experimented for decades with alternative models of power, feedback, and accountability. Companies like NextJump have built cultures around extreme transparency and peer accountability. Others, from Buurtzorg to Haier, have decentralised decision-making and pushed authority closer to the work itself. None of these models are perfect. That is not the point. The point is that rethinking people systems is not new. It is simply not mainstream.

Of course, this idea carries risks.

Short-termism. Role confusion. The temptation to turn HR into a grievance tribunal or a campaigning function. These are real concerns.

But every system has risks, including the one we are currently running. And it is worth asking whether a model that many employees no longer trust remains the safest option.

Why does this question matter now?

Power of all kinds is under scrutiny. Authority is no longer assumed to be legitimate simply because it exists.

Once people see rules being bent, ignored, or selectively applied in other arenas, they start testing them everywhere. At that point, compliance becomes conditional, silence becomes strategic, trust becomes fragile. The hard truth, we are already there.

If that is not the intention, and I assume it isn’t, then we must ask: should HR remain what it has been, or should it become something else entirely?

Questions like this, when handled with openness, curiosity, and intent, become an invitation to imagine.

If HR were invented today, in this moment, with what we now know about human sustainability, trust, and performance under pressure, and the world we operate in, would we really design it the same way?

What do you think? Join the conversation and share your expertise in the comments.

A Practical Note (For Anyone Actually Trying to Fix This)

Most HR redesign conversations fail for one simple reason: they are built on assumptions, and on data that is often misleading or misinterpreted. That is why so many organisations feel stuck. They build a strategy around what the engagement survey appeared to reveal, and yet nothing materially improves.

Before restructuring accountability, redefining HR’s role, or changing how people systems operate, organisations need a clear view of where strain is sitting, what is driving it, and what is (often unintentionally) being normalised inside the culture. That cannot be achieved through sentiment capture alone.

That is where WellWise helps. The WellWise People Risk Diagnostic identifies psychosocial risk, hotspots across teams and functions, and the cultural and structural pressure points that quietly drive burnout, conflict, attrition, and performance decline. It is aligned with global best practice (including ISO 45003), and designed to surface the real drivers of employee experience and organisational friction.

This is not another engagement survey. It is an early-detection approach that gives leaders evidence they can act on, fast.

WellWise can also support leadership assessment through trusted partners, helping organisations understand leadership strengths, traits, and behavioural patterns, and where these may need to be optimised, de-risked, or better supported across the organisation. This can be used with existing leaders and teams, or as part of recruitment and selection.

If your organisation is rethinking HR and you would value an independent view of where strain is building, reach out for short overview of the diagnostic and how it works.Bobbi’s profile

linkedin.com/in/bobbihartshorne

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