The "Human" in Human Performance Improvement Does Not Mean Human Resources

Guest Column | Originally Published on September 9, 2026 | Published with permission

Let's clear up a misconception that has followed Human Performance Improvement for years: HPI and HOP are not Human Resources programs.

The word "human" recognizes that people are part of complex work systems. It does not mean human performance is about personnel management, employee engagement, or fixing workers. HPI and HOP are operational disciplines for understanding how work actually gets done, what conditions shape performance, and how organizations build better systems around the people doing the work.

Some of the confusion has historical roots.

Years ago, the American Society for Training and Development (now the Association for Talent Development) adopted the term Human Performance Improvement within the training and talent-development profession. Its publications offered an HPI model and guidance for transforming training departments into HPI functions.

That model actually reached beyond training. But placing HPI inside the talent-development community created an association with HR that persists today.

Operational HPI, as it evolved across nuclear operations, aviation, energy, and other high-risk industries, has a different professional home and a different purpose. Its focus is not the employment relationship. Its focus is the relationship between people and the systems in which they work.

The central question is not "How do we improve the employee?"

It is "What conditions shape how people perform?"

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People do not work in isolation. Their decisions and actions are shaped by procedures, equipment, training, supervision, work planning, competing priorities, time pressure, organizational structure, available information, and how risk is understood and managed.

When something goes wrong, a traditional personnel lens asks whether the individual was trained, qualified, motivated, or held accountable. Those can be legitimate questions, but they are not sufficient on their own.

HOP asks broader ones:

• What made the action reasonable at the time?

• What conditions influenced the decision?

• How did the work differ from the way it was imagined?

• What defenses failed or were missing?

• What can the organization learn and improve?

This distinction matters because where HOP sits often determines how it gets used.

Housed inside HR, HOP tends to collapse into engagement surveys, culture campaigns, training initiatives, or efforts to strengthen individual accountability. Those activities have their place, but they are not the discipline.

HOP is an organizational and operational performance framework. It helps organizations understand work as it is actually performed, anticipate error, manage operational variability, strengthen defenses, learn from everyday success, and improve the conditions that support mission performance.

HR can be an important partner, especially when learning surfaces issues involving staffing, training, leadership development, or accountability. But partnership is not ownership. HOP belongs wherever work is planned, directed, performed, and improved: it requires workers, operational leaders, engineers, safety professionals, program managers, and senior executives. It cannot be delegated to a support function, because the conditions that shape performance are created across the whole organization.

This is also why the shift from HPI to HOP matters.

HPI was sometimes read as "improve the human." HOP makes the organizational dimension explicit, recognizing that performance emerges from the interaction of people, technology, organizational systems, and the operating environment.

The "H" does not stand for Human Resources. It is a reminder that people are part of the system. The "O" is a reminder that the organization creates many of the conditions in which people succeed, struggle, adapt, and sometimes fail.

HOP is not about fixing people. It is about building organizations in which people can succeed.