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This Just In…
Ask the Professor: PR under the HR umbrella — a disturbing trend?
February 26, 2008
The following Ask the Professor column appears in the March issue of PR Tactics.
Chrysler recently put public relations under human resources. My company did that last year, and I resigned. Is this a trend? Does it make sense? And am I the only one upset by this structure?
This is a hot button issue for many practitioners, and the button was pushed when Chrysler, a newsworthy company in a newsworthy industry, changed its organization so that public relations reports to human resources.
For most PR departments, reporting to human resources represents at least a one-line drop on the organizational chart, going from a peer to a subservient relationship with human resources. So bruised egos play a part in some of the objections being aired on PR blogs, but there are also legitimate concerns.
Tim Yost, PR director of AlixPartners, LLP, a financial advisory firm based in Southfield, Mich., suggests, “It’s not logical to take a discipline responsible for dealing with a myriad of publics and put it under a discipline that deals with one public.” Mike Porter, president of Sopra Voce Public Relations, Bloomington, Minn., says human resources “generally is a poor place to house public relations. HR people rarely understand the marketing ramifications of various stakeholder perceptions.” Porter adds, however, that despite Chrysler, “I haven’t seen enough evidence to call it a trend.”
Chrysler will regret its move, predicts one high-level recruiter, who asked not to be named because he recruits executives for both functions. “By training, the human resource function is more contemplative. It is not accustomed to leading efforts on crises or spotting dangers in the external environment.” In today’s 24/7 world, he adds, “hesitancy can prove fatal.”
Gary Rich agrees. “PR under HR might work if you don’t have the opportunity to get into trouble. PR needs to be able to act quickly and independently regardless of where it reports” when dealing with volatile issues.
Rich, whose background is in human resources, oversaw both functions as a vice president of Reader’s Digest, Inc. Now he is principal of Rich Leadership, an executive training firm based in South Salem, N.Y.
“HR has been growing because the nature of work has changed,” he says. “People now are thought workers. Managing them is more important and complex, so CEOs tend to lean more on HR. Plus, companies are streamlining, which means things get moved under an umbrella; increasingly, HR is holding that umbrella.”
Historically, HR departments operated pretty much anonymously, handling administrative work, important but hardly headline grabbing. That has changed. HR issues have become public issues, such as sexual harassment, downsizing, diversity and health care. Public relations has too often opted to provide technical assistance to human resources instead of fighting for a managerial role on those issues.
Tim O’Brien, APR,principal of O’Brien Communications, Pittsburgh, feels, “If the CEO relies on the head of HR for insights on matters that go beyond the realm of HR, he may then formalize this approach and have communications report through HR.
“It’s hard to say if this is a trend or that the organizational structure by itself is important,” says O’Brien, who is also a frequent contributor to Tactics. Some organizations “simply don’t have a high enough regard for public relations and hire individuals who are, at best, middle managers.”
The key, then, is for PR practitioners to assert themselves as strategic managers, to sell their function as a senior-level responsibility and, of course, display the abilities to back it all up because, in the end, the caliber of the people determines whether they get a seat at the decision-making table.
For instance, O’Brien notes, “I’ve known at least three communications professionals who rose to the point where HR reported to them.”
John Guiniven, Ph.D., APR, Fellow PRSA, is an associate professor of public relations at Elon University in North Carolina. Guiniven spent 25 years as a corporate PR executive, including time at International Paper and Chrysler, before going into teaching. He can be reached at jguiniven@elon.edu.
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Comments
Dan Hope says:
Chrysler has definitely made a huge mistake that will come back to haunt them. The reasoning - or lack thereof - is simple. Chrysler was recently bought by an investment firm who appears not to understand the function of public relations at all. The author of this article is spot on. HR people do not understand PR, and cannot react with appropriate strategy or timely decision making in the kinds of crises that PR professionals are trained to handle. Chrysler's new owners also may not understand the auto industry as they should, which does not bode well for this automaker's future.
Jim Haynes, APR, Fellow PRSA says:
May 23, 2008 From http://www.prsa.org/supportfiles/news/viewNews.cfm?pNewsID=842347367: "The Strategic Public Relations Center of the USC Annenberg School for Communication released today its fifth study of generally accepted practices in public relations." Reporting relationships "This year’s findings also confirmed the conclusion of previous GAP surveys on the direct correlation that reporting relationships have on PR budgets and reputation inside the organization. Communications organizations that report directly to the C-Suite — either the chairperson of the organization, the chief executive or the chief operating officer — consistently enjoy higher budgets relative to organizational gross revenues, greater control of the enterprise’s broader communication activities and an influential place at the table for the most important strategic and directional deliberations of senior management."
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