Most leadership teams carry an assumption about HR: that, due to the department’s people-focused nature, a certain amount of inefficiency just comes with the territory. Onboarding takes a few weeks to fully settle. Leave requests sit in someone’s inbox for a few days. Offboarding has some loose ends. None of it gets flagged as a problem, because none of it gets assumed as fixable. It’s simply accepted as the way people processes are expected to work.

That assumption rarely gets applied to, say, finance closing the books or engineering shipping a release, though. Those functions are held to the standard that their processes should run tightly. When they don’t, it’s treated as a solvable operational issue. HR gets held to a different standard, one where a certain amount of friction is assumed to be inherent to working with people rather than a sign that the underlying process needs attention. It’s a generous assumption on one hand (because HR departments are given more grace than other departments), but a limiting one on the other (because it caps how much operational credibility HR is ever expected to earn).

The truth about how HR works today

The assumption holds up because HR’s inefficiencies can be hard to spot. They’re distributed across IT, hiring managers, legal, and finance, with each doing their own piece competently, on their own timeline. No single department looks inefficient. The organization does, but only from the new hire or the employee’s vantage point, which is rarely the vantage point leadership is looking from. And because, especially when it comes to hiring, delays can be blamed on people who aren’t yet part of the organization, inefficiency starts to look less like a process problem and more like a fact of life.

It isn’t one. The friction people associate with HR work has never come from the nature of the work itself: Reviewing paperwork, provisioning access, and routing an approval are not inherently slow tasks. It comes from the absence of anything coordinating those tasks across the departments that own them. Each task moving on its own timeline is what creates the delay, not the difficulty of the task itself.

HR inefficiency is a structural gap, and structural gaps are fixable.

Orchestration challenges the assumptions about how HR works

Orchestration, a practice that integrates technology, processes, and human expertise to optimize workflows and decision-making, is a strategic gamechanger for how HR operates. It excels at coordinating departmental work, and its absence is what’s been mistaken for HR simply being slow.

Once an organization sees its own HR processes orchestrated, or being run as one connected sequence rather than a set of separate department efforts, the assumptions about built-in inefficiency become harder to hold onto. Leadership starts to expect the same thing from HR that it expects from any other core function: Processes it can see clearly, explain confidently, and trust to run at scale without someone manually holding it together. That expectation is the difference between HR being a function the organization accommodates for and a function it relies on.

It also changes what HR gets asked to be responsible for next. A function that has demonstrated it can run its operational core earns the standing to take on more strategic work, more investment, more say in how the business grows. A function still perceived as inherently a little too slow and a little manual rarely gets asked for either.

The opportunity in front of your HR department

You can’t reset such a deep-seated assumption by just better automating individual tasks, because faster individual steps still retain the coordination gap, and the coordination gap is what led to the old assumptions about HR in the first place.

You can, however, reset them through orchestration. Give HR’s cross-departmental processes the structure to run as genuinely connected sequences, visible from end to end, rather than a collection of tasks each department completes on its own, and the case that HR’s inefficiency was inevitable stops holding up.

The Nintex platform allows your organization to easily orchestrate HR’s cross-departmental processes and elevate the department’s visibility, level of respect, and level of responsibility, for the benefit of every department involved.

Could your HR department be held to a higher standard? We think so. And we’re happy to walk you through what that could look like.