HR in mining often just…happens. HR departments tend to grow around operational needs and emerging demands rather than by deliberate design.
When HR isn’t designed intentionally, inefficiencies develop as the business scales. For example, recruitment loses pace with vacancies, leaders lose time to administration, and inconsistencies creep into pay and onboarding.
According to Jon Wilson, Director of 3Pillars Asia Pacific, this is a common challenge.
“Many mining leaders end up treating HR as an administrative arm of the business,” he explains, “rather than taking a deliberate approach to determine what they actually need from the function.”
Deliberate design can shift your HR function from a transactional admin team to a strategic business arm. One that purposefully supports the productivity and growth of your company.
The hidden cost of an administrative HR approach
At one Australian mine we worked with, the previous leadership saw HR’s purpose as “taking care of employment obligations and keeping us compliant.”
“They didn’t want HR interfering with leaders being able to get on with their work,” says Jon, who provides HR consulting to Globe 24-7 to improve the HR function in mining companies. “So everything was manual. It took leaders a long time to get even the simplest things done. To recruit, to agree to a salary, or to move a team member to a position they were more suited to, because there was no standardisation in remuneration. And there was no consistent experience for employees coming on board.”
Their HR department was responding to one-off requests rather than building systems to support scale and consistency. The business had grown, but HR hadn’t evolved with it. As a result, there was no consistent onboarding experience and a surprisingly high turnover among new employees.
In another example, one company had made a deliberate commitment to local employment. “It was the right thing to do socially,” Jon explains, “but it meant a lower average skills base across the workforce. And because HR hadn’t been built with the systems or processes to support that uplift, you ended up with both a less experienced workforce and less infrastructure to help them succeed. A double whammy.”
Deliberate design works in practice
Most CEOs recognise the inefficiencies plaguing their HR functions. The delays, frustrations, and operational bottlenecks. Yet few have actually stepped back to define what a truly fit-for-purpose HR function should look like.
“It’s about understanding what the business needs and what the HR team has been set up to do,” says Jon.
His approach involves talking to both leaders and HR teams, to uncover what each is being asked to deliver, what’s working, and what’s not. The goal is to expose the critical gaps between business needs and reality.
This process typically reveals three fundamental gaps:
- The Business Gap: The disconnect between what leaders need and what HR currently delivers.
- The Capability Gap: The mismatch between what HR is being asked to do and what it can actually accomplish, given its existing systems, resources, and skills.
- The Future Gap: How the business is changing, e.g., through growth, diversification, mine life extension, or acquisitions. And any mismatch between today’s HR capability and what will be required in or for the future.
“Once you can see those gaps,” Jon explains, “you can start to make choices about what’s critical today and what you’ll need to prepare for tomorrow.”
The tangible benefits
When designing HR deliberately around your business model, the benefits are almost always tangible.
“If you’re struggling to get your workforce up to capacity because you’ve got no sourcing capability,” Jon explains, “and then you put one in, maybe through a micro-RPO or by bolstering your internal team, suddenly your vacancy rate drops.”
Productivity is another gain. The goal is to give time back to leaders, allowing them to spend more time in the field supporting operations instead of completing forms or chasing HR basics. Every productive hour a manager regains is valuable.
When you redesign HR, it helps reallocate effort to what truly matters. “If HR’s been operating organically, you might find you’re running 20 community or internal events a year. Activities like morning teas, awareness days, things that don’t add up to a strategic outcome,” says Jon. “Once the business sees that, it can reallocate those resources to something that genuinely supports the strategy—including the right type and combination of workforce and community engagement and support.”
Ultimately, you gain confidence. Confidence that HR is working on the right things and is set up to enable the business, beyond compliance.
How external perspective can help
Even the best HR leaders rarely have the time or bandwidth to step back and redesign their own function.
While the head of HR often has that capability, they almost never have the capacity because of daily operational demands, decisions to make, and issues to resolve.
External perspectives can fast-track progress. They give you an objective view of what’s working, where the gaps are, and what options will deliver the biggest operational impact.
“For what might be a modest investment, depending on the size and complexity of the organisation, you can realign the function straight away,” Jon explains. “That’s far quicker and more effective than hoping your internal team can see its own gaps and fix them.”
The CEO takeaway
Your HR team’s function should be designed to support your strategic and operational priorities. Whether that’s improving workforce readiness, freeing up leaders’ time, or strengthening your local employment capability.
Ask yourself:
- Is HR freeing up our leaders or slowing them down?
- Are our people processes enabling workforce development and performance, or creating bottlenecks?
- Is HR aligned with our strategy, or just keeping us compliant?
When you design the right HR framework, you can address all of these things and achieve tangible results. Like faster time-to-fill, fewer vacant roles, and better retention and employee satisfaction. All of which makes the business more productive and helps you hit your bigger goals.
