The Sacred Cow and HR Technology

The single most influential book I read in college was from my Sociology 101 class.

The book was 'Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture' by Marvin Harris.

 

From the summary on Amazon:

This book challenges those who argue that we can change the world by changing the way people think. Harris shows that no matter how bizarre a people's behavior may seem, it always stems from concrete social and economic conditions.

The most memorable passage, I recall, was the observation that if a starving Hindu farmer relented, and slaughtered the family cow, that while he would temporarily improve his family's hunger and other conditions, he would almost be certainly sealing his doom, since the cow (when alive) provided so much more than a few cuts of beef (most importantly the potential to breed and produce another cow).

Over time, the sacred cow metaphor has come to stand for unquestioning adherence to an organization or ideology or process.  Something that is so entrenched in mindset, that it sort of perpetuates on and on, whether or not it still makes sense or adds value.

 How does the sacred cow analogy tie back to HR and in particular HR Technology? 

Well, do you post every one of your job ads in the exact same manner and on the exact same job sites?

Do you continue to have employees provide feedback and questions on HR programs to a single 'general' e-mail address, viewable by only internal HR staff?

When pursuing technology projects to increase automation and improve efficiency, are you really just taking a old, long paper form and 'webifying' it?

These are some of the most challenging economic times in memory, can you afford to cling to your own Sacred Cows, or do you need to think about and explore opportunities for improvement.

I am running an experiment right now, designed to help show how changing things up from the standard is a good and necessary idea - this is a link to one of our open engineering jobs, the job has been open for a while, and for whatever reason we can't get it filled.  Take a look, pass it along, lets see if 'advertising' the opening in non-traditional ways leads to a better result than the same old methods we have been using forever - Engineering Job.