Early on in my career I experience some of what you speaking about. No respect for HR, Human Resources not being valued etc. I am entering my 16th year working in Human Resources management and have for the past 10+ years have earned respect. Here is how I gain respect and this has worked in a number of organizations.
Steps for HR Respect
1) First understand the role of Human Resources Management. HR is about maximizing the productivity and potential of the human assets of an organization. HR is not there to police rules and policies.
2) We need to understand the businesses that we support and solve problems. For example I went to work for an BPO organization and spent time understanding the business model, you know, how do they satisfy their clients and how do we make money. By understanding the business, I was able to identify problems the management team was having. For example they had issues with lack of leadership candidates, recruiting issues, training issues and employee attrition issues. I worked with the HR team to develop a strategy to address each issue. We eliminated the favourtism issues through changes in our selection process as well as communicating changes to the staff, we developed a recruiting strategy that increased applicant flow by over 100%, we changed the training in the sales areas to include more role playing that helped increase sales by over 20% at the site and finally we reduced attrition by over 30%.
3) Communicate. We explained to the business leaders what we were going to do and how it would impact their business. At first this was met with a lot of skepticism, but as we provided regular updates with our progress the skepticism decreased. We also started getting invited to more and more senior management meetings and were sought out for our advice on almost all major decisions.
4) Sell what you have accomplished. Make sure the business leaders understand the value HR is contributing to the organization.
I have been following this process for the past 10+ years and it has worked great for me and the teams that reported to me.
Andrew Noel
Employee Engagement Surveys