Rethinking Human Resources to Rethink the Enterprise

The crisis is not only about budget. Too often, HR has remained anchored to three assumptions that no longer hold today. Lucy Adams sums them up in the EACH (Employees as Adults, Customers, Human Beings) model, the opposite of how HR traditionally works.

The first is centralisation. Processes, policies, flows, authorisations: all designed in a top-down logic that assumes that the centre knows much more than the periphery. In a complex world, this produces rigidity and above all alienates people, who perceive HR as a filter, not an enabler.

The second is infantilisation. Too many HR processes are thought of as if people were children to be controlled. The 'I'll tell you what you can and cannot do' approach is the very negation of autonomy, what all research points to as the main lever of occupational well-being.

The third is homogeneity. The temptation of 'one size fits all' is strong: it simplifies management, reduces exceptions, gives the illusion of fairness. But in a complex organisation, total standardisation prevents the real needs from being met, crushes differences and generates frustration.

Coming out of this crisis does not require instant revolutions, but a change of posture.

The first step is listening, the real one: not the annual survey, not the quarterly meeting with the CEO, but the daily work of being present in the places of the organisation. HR must go back to being a sensor of the internal climate. You have to see how people really work, understand what frustrates people, catch weak signals before they become structural problems; develop a kind of sensitivity to organisational dynamics and deep emotions, between the lines of the system, to understand 'where the organisation itself wants to go' over time.

Then comes co-design: processes can no longer be designed within a function and rolled out to the rest of the company. They must arise from mixed tables, where HR, business and people work together. Not out of formality, but because complexity requires different voices around the table.

Finally, the decentralisation of levers: training budgets distributed to teams, widespread decision-making autonomy, light processes. HR becomes an internal advisory function: it intervenes where required, demonstrates value every day, it is not the bottleneck through which everything passes.

The first rule of the Agile approach is to accept that no process is definitive: everything is a prototype. You design a solution, deploy it, observe it, modify it. One does not look for the 'perfect solution', because it does not exist. The only possible stability lies in the ability to iterate.

The second rule is to abandon the obsession with 'the same for everyone'. Agile HR works by clusters, by needs, by contexts, giving everyone the same opportunities, but not necessarily the same content.

Finally, agility means freeing the organisation from unnecessarily prescriptive processes. A simple example: rigid limits on spending or holidays. In companies they often create distorted behaviour, leading people to spend 'up to the ceiling' just because there is a ceiling. A system based on accountability and transparency works better than the proliferation of constraints.

Artificial intelligence can represent an important opportunity, but only if interpreted correctly. It is not a question of using AI as a tool for surveillance or mechanical automation, but as a lever to increase the HR function's ability to personalise, to read cultural phenomena, to support large-scale development paths. AI can lighten the operational burden and give back time for what no technology replaces: interpretation, relationship, meaning-making. It does, however, require a work of ethical oversight: transparency on algorithms, attention to the drifts of dehumanisation, the ability to keep the human as the reference of every decision. For Matteo Sola, it is necessary to ask whether organisational structures work for the human being or apart from the human, and the answer may not be obvious.

The HR that survives is not the one that controls, but the one that enables. It is not the cost centre that signs procedures, but the competence centre that helps the organisation build processes consistent with its identity. It is not the last link in the decision-making chain, but the place where the quality of relationships is cultivated, the care of contexts, the ability to read what is changing.

If there is one question that unites all the reflections in this column, it is the same question that runs through Matteo Sola's vision: what kind of employer do we want to be in the next ten years?

If the answer is not rhetoric, then rethinking HR becomes a strategic necessity. Not to make it more efficient, but to return it to its role as the invisible architecture that supports the most fragile and most powerful part of the company: its humanity.

*AI & Organisational Strategist