Let me take you back to 1981, when I walked into the Copper Refinery with a fresh set of clothes and even fresher ideas about modernising HR. Here’s a laugh for you – I was hired by the GM and only met the Personnel Manager on my first day! Talk about an interesting way to start a new role.
Picture this: I walk into the HR department and what do I see? Massive foolscap ledger cards everywhere, stuffed with employee data, and enormous employee paper files that looked like they weighed as much as a small car. Being the only degree-qualified HR person there, I must have looked like an alien from the future talking about modern HR processes!
It’s funny to think about now – these days, you’re practically considered a dinosaur if you’re not using Workday or some fancy HRIS system. But back then, just suggesting we might computerise some of these records was revolutionary stuff.
Here’s the kicker – this wasn’t some small operation. MIM Holdings (who owned Copper Refineries) was actually Australia’s largest company by market capitalisation at the time. There I was, this young HR professional, flying back and forth to Mount Isa, working with their incredibly professional HR/IR team, trying to drag the HR processes at the into the modern era.
Sometimes when I’m watching younger colleagues effortlessly navigate complex HR systems today, I think back to those enormous paper files and smile. If only they knew that their sophisticated workforce analytics once lived in handwritten ledger cards that could give you a paper cut just by looking at them!
You know what’s really interesting? Despite all the technological changes, some things haven’t changed at all – it’s still about understanding people, just with better tools to help us do it. Though I have to admit, I don’t miss those paper cuts!
