This is the season of hope and joy—unless you work in HR.

Or to put it another way, are there no end to the number of surveys, studies and published reports that seem to be full of bad news for people in the human resource profession?

The latest one comes this week from Deloitte Consulting, and it is titled “HR Transformation Survey: A Case for Business Driven HR.” It would be unfair to say that the report bashes HR, because that was clearly not the intent of the Deloitte survey of HR and business leaders from 150 global companies. The participating companies are large–they have more than $2 billion in revenue—and all are Deloitte Consulting clients.
But, the findings seem to touch on a lot of the troubling trends I’ve written about here in the past.

For example, the press release touting the survey says that “more than 84 percent of 150 global companies surveyed in a new Deloitte Consulting LLP study say they are revamping their HR functions, but many are missing an opportunity to build long-term value and make HR an integral part of the company’s business strategy.”

It goes on to say, “In fact, the survey results found that revamping HR is still mostly about savings, systems and processes, despite rising demands from the C-suite for the HR function to support overall business objectives to meet the challenges of an increasingly competitive business environment.”

“We believe companies lose out on the true value-add when HR improvements focus almost exclusively on improving HR operations,” says Robin Lissak, principal in Deloitte Consulting’s Human Capital Service Area and director of the survey. “That’s merely a solution in a vacuum—not a long-term strategy that will have a significant impact on the bottom line and help a company achieve its business goals.”

According to the survey, “the key drivers behind HR improvements continue to be cost savings or efficiency (85 percent) and effectiveness of service (75 percent). Only one-third of survey respondents cite building HR capability as a driver … and even fewer (30 percent) responded that they were making improvements to free HR to undertake a more strategic role.

“More promising, the survey results show that some respondents are moving toward business-HR alignment and are identifying a number of key business issues that are driving future HR improvements—training the next generation of leaders (40 percent); building and managing a global workforce (33 percent); mergers and acquisitions (31 percent); and an aging workforce (27 percent). However, only 40 percent of respondents have structured processes for future HR planning. This is clearly an area that needs improvement as HR will likely find it difficult to support business strategy without a formal mechanism to solidify this alignment.”

The study also found that outsourcing administrative duties is one strategy many companies are still using to improve their HR functions while retaining HR’s strategic capabilities in house. Approximately 40 percent of surveyed companies that are transforming HR “have already outsourced or plan to outsource some routine, administrative operations.” It adds, however, that, “Surprising to us, some companies are now looking to outsource more strategic HR activities, such as training & development (42 percent), recruiting and staffing (36 percent), compliance (36 percent), talent management (27 percent) and global mobility (21 percent).”

I get just as tired writing this stuff as you probably do reading it, but why is it that year after year, survey after survey seems to find the same thing—that HR is too focused on procedure and not enough on high-level activities that add value to the organization? One reader seemed to say it all when he responded to my last blog post on this subject by writing: “HR professionals need to find the means and the spine to make their contributions difficult to live without. And this doesn’t come from getting an ‘A+’ in compliance—unless of course that’s your only responsibility. Open your eyes, get in the fray, don’t be afraid to muscle in and if you get your nose bloodied, take note of how and why that happened (and who did it), and stay in the game. That’s what they (the bosses and customers) want—an HR function that gets on the field and competes.” Not one, as the writer said, “passing out towels on the bench.”

I hate that I come off sounding like a dinosaur whenever I say this, but I’ve been around long enough to see more than my share of dumb workplace trends. Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, they seem to come and go with an eerily predictable degree of regularity.

One particularly idiotic trend that popped up at a large metropolitan newspaper I was working at was something called the “newsroom without walls.” Without going into the details, suffice it to say that the experiment didn’t work very well because it only succeeded in replacing an imperfect, flexible and familiar workplace structure for an imperfect, inflexible and unfamiliar structure that made many managers crazy and drove worker stress levels through the roof.

Change is healthy and needed in the workplace, but too often I’ve seen change injected into a workforce structure simply because someone decided a change was needed. Sometimes the change is welcome and good, but other times, it simply amounts to rearranging the deck chairs and comes off as change for the sake of change.

California’s Silicon Valley is often ground zero for a lot of creative workplace initiatives, and here’s another new trend to come from the Left Coast—the wall-less workplace. A story this week in the San Jose Mercury-News reported that big companies like Cisco and Intel are “casting aside the cubicle culture that has thrived in the United States since the late 1960s. In its place, the company is embracing a new workplace design that saves space and money, and encourages collaboration among co-workers.”

Not surprisingly, the company that is doing the workplace redesign for Cisco and other organizations thinks this is a swell idea. “It’s a competitive world,” said John Scouffas, principal and designer for Gensler, the San Francisco-based architectural firm that’s been redesigning workplaces. “Collaboration has been shown to spark innovation and speed product to market.”

Yes, collaboration can help drive innovation, but what happens if you need private space to hunker down and just get some work done? As someone who has been involuntarily relocated to a cube from a private office, I find it hard sometimes to do simple things like make a private phone call in my lovely cubicle. I can’t imagine how I’d get much done with no cube at all. I’m not sure the kind of hybrid shared cubicle that Trane is using currently would be much better.

Some workers feel the same way. A follow-up story talked to a number of workers who feel that the wall-less, cube-less office is another one of those workplace trends that may sound good in theory, but in practice doesn’t work quite so well. “I know people all over the place who are working in the new workplaces and they literally hate it,” said project management consultant Marsha Hayes Walker. “Their stress level is up 1,000 times. They no longer have a place to keep anything that belonged to them. People don’t want to be pack rats, but they need certain tools and materials at hand. Not everybody is a programmer with just a computer and a phone.”

The lesson I get from all this is pretty simple: one-size-fits-all solutions don’t work for everyone. The key to any workplace structure is flexibility and sensitivity to the kind of work that’s being done. A cubicle-free environment might work for some people, but others might need some private space to be productive and effective.

Are cubes a thing of the past, or is this just another crazy workplace trend from California? I’d love to hear your thoughts, either in a comment below or in an e-mail to me a jhollon@workforce.com.

Ever wonder what your workforce of the future will be like? Well, here’s a poll that gives you a glimpse of that next workforce generation, and it’s a pretty frightening view.

Today, the latest Junior Achievement/Deloitte Teen Ethics Survey was released, and the findings should be frightening to anyone who is counting on the next generation of workers to drive their organization ahead. Harris Interactive did the actual survey of American teens ages 13-18, and here are a few of the findings:

• 71 percent of teens say they feel fully prepared to make ethical decisions when they enter the workforce.

• 38 percent of that group believe it is sometimes necessary to cheat, plagiarize, lie or even behave violently in order to succeed. In fact, some 23 percent of all teens surveyed think violence toward another person is acceptable on some level. Of those who think so, the justifications for violence include settling an argument (27 percent) and revenge (20 percent).

• 24 percent of all teens surveyed think cheating on a test is acceptable on some level, and more than half of those teens (54 percent) say their personal desire to succeed is the rationale.

• Of the teens who think plagiarism is acceptable on some level, 37 percent think a personal desire to succeed is justification, and that number climbs to 51 percent among the students who feel an overwhelming pressure to succeed.

• 27 percent of all teens surveyed said it’s not fair for an employer to suspend or fire employees for unethical behavior outside of their jobs.

• 57 percent of all teens surveyed believe it is not fair for employers to make hiring or firing decisions based on material they have posted to the Internet, and another 19 percent weren’t sure if it was fair or not.

•  47 percent of teens said it was acceptable on some level to illegally download music without paying for it, but only 5 percent said it was acceptable to steal something from a store.

“The high percentages of teenagers who freely admit that unethical behavior can be justified is alarming,” said David Miller, executive director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture and assistant professor (adjunct) of business ethics, who reviewed the findings and is quoted in today’s press release from Junior Achievement. “It suggests an attitude of ethical relativism and rationalization of whatever actions serve one’s immediate needs and purposes.”

Not surprisingly, the survey also found that despite self-confidence in their own ethical behavior, teens take a pessimistic view of their peers. When asked to evaluate the behavior of a number of groups—business leaders, religious leaders, doctors, lawyers, police officers, teachers, professional athletes and firefighters—teens ranked high school students second to last. In their view, according to the survey, only politicians are more unethical than they are.

I’ve written here before about all the gloom-and-doom talk regarding the potential shortage of workers due to the retirement of the baby-boom generation. Lots of people think this upcoming talent shortage is a given, but I don’t buy it, as I said in “The Talent-Shortage Myth” and again in “The ‘Talent-Shortage Myth,’ Revisited”.

This latest study of teenagers should not only be a glimpse into what we should expect in our future workforce, but a sober realization that maybe having the baby boomers hang around and continue working for a bit longer isn’t such a bad idea.