The HR opportunity: how to make glue work visible before someone automates it away

There's a hotel with a door attendant.

A consultant walks through the lobby, watches him for five minutes, and writes it up: "his job is opening the door." So they replace him with an automatic door and a sensor. Save a couple of thousand a year and everyone is pleased with themselves.

Two years later, the hotel feels different. Colder. Guests don't feel recognized. Little problems that used to get caught at the door now make it all the way to the front desk.

Turns out the door attendant was never just opening doors. They was hailing taxis. Spotting trouble before it started. Remembering that frequent flyer guest by name. Making the place feel five-star in a way no automatic door ever could.

Rory Sutherland calls this the doorman fallacy, from his book Alchemy: you define a role by its most visible task, automate that task, and only later discover how much invisible value walked out the door with the person.

It's a great story. But I don't think it's really a story about doormen. I think it's a story about HR.

HR is standing in the lobby too

Every job description, every competency framework, every role scorecard is, in some sense, an attempt to answer the same question the consultant asked: what does this person actually do?

The uncomfortable truth is that HR is usually the function doing the defining. HR writes the documents that gets pulled out when someone asks, "could this be automated?" And documents, by their nature, capture what's visible and countable — tasks, outputs, KPIs — because that's what fits in a template.

What doesn't fit in a template is the glue work. The quiet word before someone quits. The conflict defused before it became a grievance. The read on a team's mood during a restructure that never once showed up in an engagement score. Nobody asked for that in the job description, so nobody wrote it down — which means nobody can point to it later when a decision about "efficiency" gets made.

That's the risk. HR can become the consultant in the lobby without ever meaning to.

But there's a flip side, and it's the more interesting one: HR also has something the consultant never had — proximity. Performance conversations, exit interviews, engagement data, years of watching how work actually gets done, up close. No other function in the business has that vantage point. Which means HR isn't just at risk of causing the doorman fallacy. HR might be the only function positioned to prevent it.

That's the opportunity. Here's what it actually looks like in practice.

1. Name it before someone else names it wrong

The door attendant never got to describe their own job — the consultant did it for him, in five minutes, from the lobby. The first move is to make sure that doesn't happen by default.

Most organizations already collect fragments of this — in exit interviews, in engagement surveys, sometimes in throwaway comments in a 1:1. But it's usually collected by accident, as a side effect of someone leaving or a survey going out on schedule. The shift is to ask the question on purpose, and regularly: what's the part of this role that isn't in the job description, but would be missed if it disappeared?

You don't need a new system for this. You need to start treating it as a real question, not a nice-to-have follow-up.

2. Translate it — don't just document it

Here's the trap inside the solution: if you try to "capture" glue work by adding it to the job description, it becomes a task. And tasks are exactly what gets automated next. Writing it down isn't the goal — translating it is.

Decision-makers don't act on adjectives. "She's great with people" doesn't survive a budget review. What survives is a consequence. Three resignations that never happened, because someone caught the warning signs in a hallway conversation and acted on them before HR even opened a case file. A client relationship that didn't sour after a bad delivery, because someone made a call nobody asked them to make. A team that didn't fall apart during a restructure, because someone read the room and stepped in before it became a resignation letter.

That's not a soft skill. That's a save. And a save has a cost attached to it — the cost of what would have happened without it. Find that number, even roughly, and the glue work stops sounding like a compliment and starts sounding like a business case.

3. Get proximity into the room

The research behind all of this is telling: people closer to a job tend to see its real complexity more clearly than people looking at it from outside. Which means the practical move isn't just "HR holds the data." It's making sure the people with genuine proximity — team leads, long-tenured staff, the person actually doing the job — are in the room before an AI-adoption or restructuring decision is finalized, not briefed on it afterwards.

HR's leverage here isn't information. It's insistence. Making sure the door attendant gets a seat at the table before someone decides what their job is worth.

The question worth sitting with

If someone came to automate part of your team tomorrow, could you tell them — in terms they'd actually act on — what would be lost?

Or would you find out the way the hotel did?