Imagine a workplace where every rule fits every employee like a tailor-made suit. Sounds ideal, right? But real employees don’t come in standard sizes or fit neatly into predefined boxes.
The workforce is highly heterogeneous. People come from different backgrounds, experiences, ages, etc. It is practically impossible for HR to figure out which factor may influence an employee to make decisions.
They face personal emergencies, career aspirations, mental health struggles, and life complexities that a policy handbook can’t anticipate. HR’s real challenge today isn’t just drafting policies; it’s bridging the gap between the ideal and the human, making rules flexible, empathetic, and practical.
The world of HR has long recognised this gap. A Research Gate paper shows that how policies are experienced on the ground often differs from how they were intended on paper. Employees form idiosyncratic perceptions of HR actions that shape motivation, trust, and engagement more than the formal policy language itself.
So aren’t HR policies meant to achieve consistency?
They definitely are. An ET HRWorld story suggests that in many organisations, the most consistent HR practices are those with a clear structure. For example, statutory leave entitlements, payroll processing, compliance with labour law, and the cadence of performance appraisals.
These areas are easier to understand because they rely on hard rules and external regulations; deviation is risky, if not illegal. However, performance appraisal cycles and compensation schedules, for instance, exist not only to guide managers but also to ensure parity across teams, which is a baseline fairness that’s measurable and auditable.
Then what is the solution?
The HR teams working to build a future-ready workforce are clever enough to know the fact that the age-old rules and regulations don’t work in modern workplaces. They design workplace policies accordingly. For example, a young fresher joining a new company would react to strict times differently from a GenZ. In the current workforce, the fresher of 1982 and a GenZ coexist in different positions and with different experiences. So, HR has to be smart enough to tackle such diverse age groups.
To build such a workforce, instead, the HR will aim for policies that are flexible and built around real scenarios. This starts with listening before writing.
Progressive HR leaders gather employee feedback through surveys, focus groups, and digital comment tools to understand how existing rules meet or miss real needs.
This approach mirrors what employee experience design (EXD) advocates, intentionally engineering every touchpoint of the employee journey to create emotional satisfaction and alignment with organisational goals.
What are the key challenges in framing such policies?
With GenZs in the workforce, it is challenging to frame HR policies. Why? Because they look at things differently than any other generation.
Once in an interaction with ThePeoplesBoard, Smiti Bhat Deorah, co-founder and COO of AdvantageClub.ai, said that GenZs have clearly established their needs. They prioritise appreciation.
Last year, a video went viral on the internet, which showed a GenZ girl logging out of the office on time and refusing to work extra hours to prioritise mental health and work-life balance. In the video, she was seen advocating for other priorities in life, which she “earns money for”.
Under such circumstances, one of the most persistent challenges is balancing consistency with contextual flexibility. When HR studios try to build flexibility into the core of their policies, they must also ensure that such flexibility doesn’t undermine fairness or legal compliance.
Finding that balance between standardisation and personalisation is notoriously difficult. In cases like these, the greatest tension arises precisely because flexible approaches can inadvertently lead to perceptions of inequality or arbitrariness if managers apply them unevenly or without clear guardrails.
Let’s take a look at some more significant challenges:
Communication gaps: Even the most thoughtfully framed policies can fail if employees and managers aren’t brought into the process early on.
People often resist changes perceived as adding workload, complexity, or uncertainty to their routines. Clear, ongoing communication, not just a one-time announcement, is essential to reduce resistance, help people understand the ‘why’ behind new rules, and secure buy-in across levels of the organisation.
Legal framework: Another challenge is to keep policies aligned with rapidly changing legal, economic, and work trends. Labour laws and industry standards evolve constantly, and internal HR rules must keep up, or risk noncompliance, reputational damage, or outdated practices.
For example, the recent reforms in the Indian Labour Code now require all employers to rework their existing policies, while ensuring that it is easy for employees to follow up.
Policies that rely on new technology – These are the ones that bring their own set of challenges. While automation and analytics are adopted for efficiency and bias reduction, they can also reduce the human elements of fairness and empathy that employees value.
How to overcome the challenges?
There is a famous saying that “every problem comes with a solution”. Let’s take a look at how these challenges can be solved:
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- Building policies with ease: Instead of dictating and declaring the policies to the workforce, it is good to have a communicative approach, such as surveying to sense the pulse of the people whom the policies will encompass. It is also important to ensure that employees across all levels of the pyramid are included. This will boost the feeling of co-creation instead of policies being imposed.
- Using references: Referring to real-world cases is never an outdated thing to do. It is never bad to study the companies which have a higher rating in terms of employer branding
- Use data without overriding the human context: These days, data is the new currency. HR is not an exception. However, as HR deals with people, the effectiveness of human intervention and empathy goes a long way. Dashboards don’t record emotions.
Looking forward
On paper, HR policies will always look picture perfect, no matter how much HR evolves with time. It goes without saying that policies need structure, clarity, and a sense of order to function at scale.
But unfortunately, HR policies succeed not on paper, but on everyday application. And that’s the real challenge. When a manager has to make a judgment call, or an employee needs flexibility without fear or when life doesn’t wait for approvals. The pandemic showed us the irreplaceable aspect of human judgement in HR. That period brought about major changes in the structure and the way people look at HR and the way HR manages talent, irrespective of industry.
To conclude, employees look up to HR during any crisis, whether professional or personal. They expect them to be reasonable, empathetic, and adaptable. Organisations that understand this and continuously revisit their policies through dialogue, feedback, and lived experience are the ones that build trust, not just compliance.
