HR's Work in a Darker World - Between The Lines

Workforce, Nov, 2001 by Carroll Lachnit

For the luckiest of us, the world today looks the same as it always did: the freeways are jammed, baseball is wrapping up its season, and the rush toward Christmas is on.

But everything has changed. How we think. How we talk. How we open the mail. "How are you?" has taken on a different meaning. We see through a different lens now, looking at a world like the one we knew, but not:

* A publisher's press release asked editors to note that a forthcoming book, already circulated in proofs for review, had a new title and chapter heading. The study of international business executives would no longer be called Frequent Flyers. The chapter on how things go wrong would not be called "Crash Landings." Innocent words when written months and months ago, but sad and chilling now.

* Another author submitted an article on corporate culture, using a common enough metaphor: a company built without a plan is like a skyscraper constructed on swampland. It would sink under its own weight. The author's publicist pulled the piece, and submitted one with a different, less evocative image.

* I e-mailed a friend in Maryland to let him know that I would be visiting Washington, D.C., and mentioned that I'd be "bombing around the city," visiting various sights. I hit the "send" key before I realized what I'd written. In case the FBI's e-mail monitoring already had kicked in, I wrote back to explain that I'll visit the capital without explosives, anthrax spores, or box cutter.

This post-September 11 world is very much HR's terrain, remade by events it never could have anticipated. It has a huge role to play in how companies will respond and recover. Patrick J. Kiger's story on how Aon Corporation dealt with the crisis, using communication to keep its company together, applies to all organizations, not just those caught up in an apocalypse. Whether it wants to or not, HR has a peacekeeping mission now. There will be dissent, and friction, and suspicion in many workplaces. As Monica Ballard's story shows, HR can't permit that to fester into discrimination based on beards, accents, or head scarves.

Eilene Zimmerman's article on the devastating effects of bone-deep layoffs offers strong counterarguments for any HR professional presented with a knee-jerk order to cut, cut, and cut some more. Samuel Greengard's story on how to keep track of employees' skills was commissioned long before September, but it has particular relevance now.

Finally, although some words have gone sour in this darker world, some have new, burnished life. One poem has been cited again and again since September 11: W. H. Auden's September 1, 1939, written in Manhattan in reaction to Hitler's invasion of Poland. Its resonance with September 11 is almost mystical, and although Auden repudiated the poem later in his life, it has been resurrected, and it might offer some solace today. Here are the final lines of the piece (which can be read in full at www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1391):

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.