Why has that bogeyman been hanging around HR people for so long?
It’s a red herring. HR people have had a seat at the table for a really long time. It was language that was used 10, 15 years ago that no longer applies. Our members are innovative. They’re strategic, they’re smart. They are solving the people management and business management issues in their organizations every day. When you think about the current economy, certainly more people than anyone would have guessed or wanted have lost their jobs. But we’re seeing strategies about protecting and gauging talent that have actually saved jobs because HR is at the table. How so? [There were things] that didn’t happen in the 2000 downturn or the 1990s. We’ve been hearing about the creative use of furloughs. SHRM — like every other organization — has been impacted from a revenue perspective in this downturn. We made a commitment early on that laying people off would be the last tactic we would use to respond to the less-than-budgeted revenue in 2009. And we have stayed with that. We’ve done painf
