13 ms·

HR has lost the trust of employees

67 points by ilamont 9y ago

akulbe 9y ago
Call me crazy, but as I've progressed in my career, I learned to be very wary of HR. It became evident to me that while there are multiple things they do, the primary purpose is to shield the company from liability. Not to help you, as is so often the claim.
- SamReidHughes 9y ago
  Obviously. Their job is the same as your job: to make the company lots of money.
  - nathanaldensr 9y ago
    That's not what parent said at all.
- aphextron 9y ago
  Totally agreed. They are basically paralegals, akin to tier 1 support for the company's legal team.
  - iamdave 9y ago
    Paralegals are far far more valuable than tier 1 support, but this depends on the environment, really.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    The average HR person has a lot less knowledge than a para legal. We had one at a meeting at British Telecom address a meeting of or group when asked about this years pay rise seem to think we where all the same blue collar grades as the "engineers" or telecoms linemen and that we where getting the CWU agreed increases. I almost said so we are all getting the Band D increase then (4.6%)
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  > Call me crazy, but [I am] wary of HR That's the entire thesis of the article.
xiphias 9y ago
Blind sounds like a cool app... I'm looking forward from leaks of the most juicy parts of the data, which will definately happen.
erentz 9y ago
HR has never, ever been on the side of helping employees and should never have had employee trust in the first place. They’re there in theory to serve the interests of the company. But increasingly they seem to have become a kind of self serving force of their own that is bad for the companies (though maybe I’ve just been in a streak of bad companies over recent years).
- nathanaldensr 9y ago
  It's hard to know for sure, since usually only bad HR events get reported. However, I certainly agree with your feeling. HR is there purely to be administrators of processes involving people (hiring, firing, etc.) and also as a way to shield executives from a) having to spend time managing said processes, and b) being found culpable when their companies break the law.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    > It's hard to know for sure I'm going to strongly oppose this, with a simple statement to support my claim that HR is decidedly not on the employees side when a conflict arises: Follow the money. Who pays the HR bill? It certainly ain't you. Edited to add: when a conflict arises in response to @Joky
    - yardie 9y ago
      If you expand it out logically. Since all companies make money from providing services and those services are provided by employees then employees are paying the HR bill through the carrying costs of being employees.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
        To continue this line of reasoning: ultimately the customer, or end user, pays the bills. Which is nonsense, of course: Neither I, nor the customers, nor the end users, have the authority to hire HR staff, sign off on their salary payments, or set their working policies.
golemiprague 9y ago
HR became feminised and bloated, like every feminised entity it is going to be bogged with formalities and regulations instead of trying to change or solve any problems. The main use of those bloating departments is to fulfil female hiring quotas. It is just a vehicle to transform money from productive males to females, exactly like in the traditional family model, only without the valuable contribution of the traditional housewife.
ghostcluster 9y ago
HR is frightening because one can be sabatoged by blank slatist idelogical puritans who write stuff like this: > Affirming our commitment to diversity and inclusion—and healthy debate > Googlers, > I’m Danielle, Google’s brand new VP of Diversity, Integrity & Governance. I started just a couple of weeks ago, and I had hoped to take another week or so to get the lay of the land before introducing myself to you all. But given the heated debate we’ve seen over the past few days, I feel compelled to say a few words. > Many of you have read an internal document shared by someone in our engineering organization, expressing views on the natural abilities and characteristics of different genders, as well as whether one can speak freely of these things at Google. And like many of you, I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender. I’m not going to link to it here as it’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages. > Diversity and inclusion are a fundamental part of our values and the culture we continue to cultivate. We are unequivocal in our belief that diversity and inclusion are critical to our success as a company, and we’ll continue to stand for that and be committed to it for the long haul. As Ari Balogh said in his internal G+ post, “Building an open, inclusive environment is core to who we are, and the right thing to do. ‘Nuff said.” > Google has taken a strong stand on this issue, by releasing its demographic data and creating a company wide OKR on diversity and inclusion. Strong stands elicit strong reactions. Changing a culture is hard, and it’s often uncomfortable. But I firmly believe Google is doing the right thing, and that’s why I took this job. > Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions. But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws. > I’ve been in the industry for a long time, and I can tell you that I’ve never worked at a company that has so many platforms for employees to express themselves — TGIF, Memegen, internal G+, thousands of discussion groups. I know this conversation doesn’t end with my email today. I look forward to continuing to hear your thoughts as I settle in and meet with Googlers across the company. > Thanks, As if anyone can't take a trip to Google Scholar and find that even at the average, men have the equivalent of a 13 IQ point advantage in measures of mechanical reasoning [0], or that in every nation surveyed, men and women prefer sex-typical careers when asked, and culture has no to modest impact on these choices [1]. Bringing up these scientific results, even carefully, when asked for pertinent feedback on a policy, even in a company entrusted with shepherding the world's information, will cost you your job and reputation because of the chilled walking on eggshells environment they enforce. Or fired from Apple after a 20 year career for saying diversity isn't just about identity quotas. [0] http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometrics-psychology/sex-differences-on-g-and-non-g-intellectual-performance-reveal-potential-sources-of-stem-discrepancies/ http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri... [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-008-9380-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-008-9380-7
hrthrowaway 9y ago
Posted with a throwaway, since my primary user is public. I worked at a company in which my reporting manager was significantly harassing me. He did so via recorded systems. The next day, after each time I had a direct complaint and brought it to HR, he then walked through the punishments indicated in the handbook. He indicated "we don't have good ways to ascertain performance", and then said I had "bad performance" during the HR meeting. This set up no bells and whistles with HR. Eventually, he then made up data claiming that I didn't maintain a specific system in a certain way. Truth of the matter was it was handed to me in a failed state before I started working for him. HR was complicit in supporting manager in a firing, even after proof of harassment and retaliation. HR is only good for one thing - and that is defending the company. You're a nothing; a cog that can be replaced. If you have problems in your company, leave. It's not your duty to fix their problems. That's for the C()O positions. Leave before they can make you do so.
- ianai 9y ago
  On the upside, if you do sue them they’re likely to lose. It will be brought before a jury of your peers. Your peers will see a large corporation bullying a single person and side with you. It probably won’t matter what ever pretext the company put as cause for termination. Just do yourself a favor and always document well and know how to pick a fight you’ll win, when necessary. Also spend fine finding the right representation.
  - hrthrowaway 9y ago
    Put it this way, I found a better job within 1.5 months, that pays almost 30k more. I really don't want to rock the boat. But lets just say this: if you're a policy driver and you contract out networking operations, have an indepth review of all the servers they maintain. Things are not rosy underneath.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    > It will be brought before a jury of your peers. In practice you'll settle out of court, likely with an non-disclosure agreement.
  - 9y ago
jarjoura 9y ago
HR is many things though, and I think this article focuses solely on the HR-BP (Business Partner) role. That's the person your org/division reports to for matters of policy and disputes. Of course they will always side with management, that's their job. If you go into it knowing that, having a good relationship with them can be beneficial to your career. Besides, they really can't be your friend, and I'm not sure when anyone was lead to believe that was the case. There's this thing called conflict of interest, still, that doesn't mean they can't be friendly to you and offer you advice.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  > There's this thing called conflict of interest, still, that doesn't mean they can't be friendly to you and offer you advice. That's exactly what conflict of interest means: a situation in which the concerns or aims of two different parties are incompatible. They can't offer you advice. Well, I mean, they can and they do, but take it with a Ganymede-sized grain of salt.
herge 9y ago
I am sure everyone has stories about how awful their HR department it, but if you do not trust HR, then who do you trust in your company? Your boss? Nobody? And, assuming you are a white collar worker (like a programmer) with a full-time permanent job, if you do not trust anybody where you work, why have a permanent position? Why not either become a contractor, or join a job with a union to collectively bargain for you? Are you not the ultimate chump in participating in a system where you are bargaining implicitly from the weakest position?
- fatjokes 9y ago
  Nobody. Trust nobody. It's sad, but it's true. They're your employer---not your friend, not your family. The upside: you don't have to feel bad about being a mercenary about it. You can feel shameless in trying to negotiate higher pay (regardless of your performance or ability). A permanent position is only good because it's effectively higher comp (i.e., benefits, severance, etc). Most programmers are at-will employed anyway so it's not that much different from contractors. A union is also, in theory, a good thing. However, over time it's evolved into a different beast with its own set of problems.
  - herge 9y ago
    Then why not a contractor? If you trust nobody, at least you can protect yourself with a contact.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      In many places, the laws protecting employees are better than whatever you can make the company sign as a contractor.
  - HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
    > Nobody. Trust nobody. It's sad, but it's true. They're your employer---not your friend, not your family. It's not sad to me. It's common sense. In life, you trust your family and your friends - that's it. Anyone who isn't family or friends and who wants you to trust them is suspect (your boss, other companies, your government). Of course you can have friendly relations with all and sundry in your company. I am on good terms with everyone where I work, from the cleaners to the regional CEO. But trust is a different matter altogether.
koolba 9y ago
> The obvious reality is that HR has never been “your friend.” Rather, it is an important component of a company’s legal strategy to document and mitigate any potential lawsuits that might arise from its employees, contractors, or anyone else who may interact with the firm. Using the legal analogy should make this abundantly clear. Only a fool would think the other side's lawyer has their best interests in mind. Simplest advice for dealing with HR is: Don't talk to HR
- gnicholas 9y ago
  > Simplest advice for dealing with HR is: Don't talk to HR IANAL (anymore), but I'm not sure this is true. That is, there could be certain remedies/benefits/claims that you might give up if you never put the company on notice of the misbehavior. For example, if someone offers you a promotion in exchange for romantic involvement, this would be illegal. You could make claims against the individual. But if no one ever told the company (HR or someone with mandatory reporting obligations), then the company might not be liable. And if this were a one-off situation, this makes sense — the company had no way of knowing that the bad actor was doing anything wrong. But if you tell HR or someone who must report it to HR, then the company is on notice and if they don't deal with the situation appropriately then you can pursue legal remedies against them as well. This is just my recollection from many workplace harassment trainings that we had at the law firm I worked at — I would welcome a more nuanced analysis by a specialist.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    The trouble is, you don't know that the person you report to (HR or another person mandated to report to HR) is the harasser's best buddy. Now you're fucked.
    - walshemj 9y ago
      So appeal the grievance to the next level which best practice says should be over seen by some one out of the chain of command (so to speak).
  - 9y ago
superioritycplx 9y ago
HR is an invented industry that's 99% female.
k__ 9y ago
I worked in HR for a few years and had the general feeling that most people there really cared about employees. Sadly these weren't the people who made the decisions. So you have like 1-10% of people who make decisions for the company wealth and 90-99% who have to realize these. Often they aren't happy about this :(
throwaway666911 9y ago
One thing I have seen HR do: Manager has a really good employee and wants to pay them $X. They have the budget to do it, they think the employee is worth it (they don't want to lose them), their own boss approves. But HR says "No, that is too much, we won't let you pay them that." An employee's own management has a much better idea of how much they are worth to the company than HR does. The folks in HR don't even understand what the employee actually does, or how they compare to their peers in the industry, all they have is meaningless tables of job title vs. salary range that they've purchased from some remuneration consulting firm.
bb88 9y ago
To a company, Humans Are Resources, period. Hence the name "Human Resources". More to the point, a Human Resource professional is only doing a good job with respect to the company if he/she only sees "Humans As Resources". The main job of HR is Hiring and Firing, and the more exposure one has to employees, the harder this is to do.
ianamartin 9y ago
How can you lose something you never had? I've not ever once encountered anyone who trusted HR any farther than they could kick them. In most cases HR really combines a number of things into one working group that none of them are good at. There's compliance, which really ought to be handled by attorneys; there's finance, which really ought to be run by accountants; and there's recruiting, which is really the only role that HR teams can hope to claim competence at. But most of them are bad at this as well. Some companies have event planning and employee sat programs. But HR people are typically not good at sat programs. Those programs need analysts and data scientists to perform experiments. So you've got maybe two real roles they could be good at: recruiting and planning parties. All of these things could easily be outsourced or handed off to other teams. Need a launch party? Hire a professional party planner once or twice a year. Need a recruiter? They are everywhere. Need to make sure everyone's got the required sexual harassment training? Bring in someone to do it once a year. I can't for the life of me understand how any company justifies keeping an HR team around. I mean, who do you really want dealing with a complaint? Someone who is going to try to smooth things over or ignore them because they have no clue about what's at stake? Or do you want to talk to the company's attorney, who will absolutely give a shit about how much hot water harassment can get them into? Everything about HR teams is utterly suspect and useless. Someone needs to start a business infrastructure as a service company that includes legal, accounting, hr, recruiting, and events. That company will clean house. The value proposition is that you, the client, focus on the business, the service provider takes care of everything else. Tons of money saved; happier employees who don't have to deal with shit; and a lot of trust earned along the way--trust in the company, where it belongs.
notacoward 9y ago
As long as they juxtapose "human" with "resource" the role of HR is going to be problematic at best. Everyone else treats us as resources already. If you help employees as humans then you need to hire people who have nothing to do with the "resource" part. Some companies have this, and it's never anything to do with HR. It's life coaches, educational programs, employee assistance programs, hotlines of various sorts, quasi-official employee groups, etc. HR is OK when it's hiring and benefits, downright evil when it's policy police and executive ass-covering. I'd rather deal with actual police and lawyers than people who smile and pretend to be anything else.
jenkstom 9y ago
HR does a few things, but mostly they hire and fire. It's unlikely my second experience with HR will be a positive one.
newscracker 9y ago
As seen in big companies that have been around longer than a few decades, HR exists only to protect the company and to make as much money for the company (which usually aligns with higher executive compensation than being anything meaningful for lower level employees). HR is also inaccessible and useless in such companies since many things are outsourced and there is no "one neck to choke" if there are serious issues. Heck, even getting answers on benefits is getting close to impossible. Everything is driven from the top with the executive compensation in mind. So called "employee friendly" measures are such an eyewash that it's trivial to see through all those sugar coated messages where their priorities lie (hint: it's not you, the employees). If you're someone in an entry level HR job in a large company, I pity you, because all your dreams about having a really employee friendly and helpful function will be crushed beyond recognition within a year on the job. If you're someone at a higher level HR job, I totally despise your existence in the organization, despise your methods, your way of thinking and acting. You aid and abet "crimes" against employees to satisfy the executives, just like bureaucrats do with politicians. I have no respect at all for you! P.S.: This may not apply to all companies, but it's true for most.

67 points by ilamont 9y ago

Call me crazy, but as I've progressed in my career, I learned to be very wary of HR. It became evident to me that while there are multiple things they do, the primary purpose is to shield the company from liability. Not to help you, as is so often the claim.

SamReidHughes 9y ago
Obviously. Their job is the same as your job: to make the company lots of money.
- nathanaldensr 9y ago
  That's not what parent said at all.
aphextron 9y ago
Totally agreed. They are basically paralegals, akin to tier 1 support for the company's legal team.
- iamdave 9y ago
  Paralegals are far far more valuable than tier 1 support, but this depends on the environment, really.
- walshemj 9y ago
  The average HR person has a lot less knowledge than a para legal. We had one at a meeting at British Telecom address a meeting of or group when asked about this years pay rise seem to think we where all the same blue collar grades as the "engineers" or telecoms linemen and that we where getting the CWU agreed increases. I almost said so we are all getting the Band D increase then (4.6%)
madeofpalk 9y ago
> Call me crazy, but [I am] wary of HR That's the entire thesis of the article.

xiphias 9y ago

Blind sounds like a cool app... I'm looking forward from leaks of the most juicy parts of the data, which will definately happen.

erentz 9y ago

HR has never, ever been on the side of helping employees and should never have had employee trust in the first place. They’re there in theory to serve the interests of the company. But increasingly they seem to have become a kind of self serving force of their own that is bad for the companies (though maybe I’ve just been in a streak of bad companies over recent years).

nathanaldensr 9y ago
It's hard to know for sure, since usually only bad HR events get reported. However, I certainly agree with your feeling. HR is there purely to be administrators of processes involving people (hiring, firing, etc.) and also as a way to shield executives from a) having to spend time managing said processes, and b) being found culpable when their companies break the law.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  > It's hard to know for sure I'm going to strongly oppose this, with a simple statement to support my claim that HR is decidedly not on the employees side when a conflict arises: Follow the money. Who pays the HR bill? It certainly ain't you. Edited to add: when a conflict arises in response to @Joky
  - yardie 9y ago
    If you expand it out logically. Since all companies make money from providing services and those services are provided by employees then employees are paying the HR bill through the carrying costs of being employees.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
      To continue this line of reasoning: ultimately the customer, or end user, pays the bills. Which is nonsense, of course: Neither I, nor the customers, nor the end users, have the authority to hire HR staff, sign off on their salary payments, or set their working policies.

golemiprague 9y ago

HR became feminised and bloated, like every feminised entity it is going to be bogged with formalities and regulations instead of trying to change or solve any problems. The main use of those bloating departments is to fulfil female hiring quotas. It is just a vehicle to transform money from productive males to females, exactly like in the traditional family model, only without the valuable contribution of the traditional housewife.

ghostcluster 9y ago

HR is frightening because one can be sabatoged by blank slatist idelogical puritans who write stuff like this: > Affirming our commitment to diversity and inclusion—and healthy debate > Googlers, > I’m Danielle, Google’s brand new VP of Diversity, Integrity & Governance. I started just a couple of weeks ago, and I had hoped to take another week or so to get the lay of the land before introducing myself to you all. But given the heated debate we’ve seen over the past few days, I feel compelled to say a few words. > Many of you have read an internal document shared by someone in our engineering organization, expressing views on the natural abilities and characteristics of different genders, as well as whether one can speak freely of these things at Google. And like many of you, I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender. I’m not going to link to it here as it’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages. > Diversity and inclusion are a fundamental part of our values and the culture we continue to cultivate. We are unequivocal in our belief that diversity and inclusion are critical to our success as a company, and we’ll continue to stand for that and be committed to it for the long haul. As Ari Balogh said in his internal G+ post, “Building an open, inclusive environment is core to who we are, and the right thing to do. ‘Nuff said.” > Google has taken a strong stand on this issue, by releasing its demographic data and creating a company wide OKR on diversity and inclusion. Strong stands elicit strong reactions. Changing a culture is hard, and it’s often uncomfortable. But I firmly believe Google is doing the right thing, and that’s why I took this job. > Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions. But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws. > I’ve been in the industry for a long time, and I can tell you that I’ve never worked at a company that has so many platforms for employees to express themselves — TGIF, Memegen, internal G+, thousands of discussion groups. I know this conversation doesn’t end with my email today. I look forward to continuing to hear your thoughts as I settle in and meet with Googlers across the company. > Thanks, As if anyone can't take a trip to Google Scholar and find that even at the average, men have the equivalent of a 13 IQ point advantage in measures of mechanical reasoning [0], or that in every nation surveyed, men and women prefer sex-typical careers when asked, and culture has no to modest impact on these choices [1]. Bringing up these scientific results, even carefully, when asked for pertinent feedback on a policy, even in a company entrusted with shepherding the world's information, will cost you your job and reputation because of the chilled walking on eggshells environment they enforce. Or fired from Apple after a 20 year career for saying diversity isn't just about identity quotas. [0] http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometrics-psychology/sex-differences-on-g-and-non-g-intellectual-performance-reveal-potential-sources-of-stem-discrepancies/ http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri... [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-008-9380-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-008-9380-7

hrthrowaway 9y ago

Posted with a throwaway, since my primary user is public. I worked at a company in which my reporting manager was significantly harassing me. He did so via recorded systems. The next day, after each time I had a direct complaint and brought it to HR, he then walked through the punishments indicated in the handbook. He indicated "we don't have good ways to ascertain performance", and then said I had "bad performance" during the HR meeting. This set up no bells and whistles with HR. Eventually, he then made up data claiming that I didn't maintain a specific system in a certain way. Truth of the matter was it was handed to me in a failed state before I started working for him. HR was complicit in supporting manager in a firing, even after proof of harassment and retaliation. HR is only good for one thing - and that is defending the company. You're a nothing; a cog that can be replaced. If you have problems in your company, leave. It's not your duty to fix their problems. That's for the C()O positions. Leave before they can make you do so.

ianai 9y ago
On the upside, if you do sue them they’re likely to lose. It will be brought before a jury of your peers. Your peers will see a large corporation bullying a single person and side with you. It probably won’t matter what ever pretext the company put as cause for termination. Just do yourself a favor and always document well and know how to pick a fight you’ll win, when necessary. Also spend fine finding the right representation.
- hrthrowaway 9y ago
  Put it this way, I found a better job within 1.5 months, that pays almost 30k more. I really don't want to rock the boat. But lets just say this: if you're a policy driver and you contract out networking operations, have an indepth review of all the servers they maintain. Things are not rosy underneath.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  > It will be brought before a jury of your peers. In practice you'll settle out of court, likely with an non-disclosure agreement.
- 9y ago

jarjoura 9y ago

HR is many things though, and I think this article focuses solely on the HR-BP (Business Partner) role. That's the person your org/division reports to for matters of policy and disputes. Of course they will always side with management, that's their job. If you go into it knowing that, having a good relationship with them can be beneficial to your career. Besides, they really can't be your friend, and I'm not sure when anyone was lead to believe that was the case. There's this thing called conflict of interest, still, that doesn't mean they can't be friendly to you and offer you advice.

TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
> There's this thing called conflict of interest, still, that doesn't mean they can't be friendly to you and offer you advice. That's exactly what conflict of interest means: a situation in which the concerns or aims of two different parties are incompatible. They can't offer you advice. Well, I mean, they can and they do, but take it with a Ganymede-sized grain of salt.

herge 9y ago

I am sure everyone has stories about how awful their HR department it, but if you do not trust HR, then who do you trust in your company? Your boss? Nobody? And, assuming you are a white collar worker (like a programmer) with a full-time permanent job, if you do not trust anybody where you work, why have a permanent position? Why not either become a contractor, or join a job with a union to collectively bargain for you? Are you not the ultimate chump in participating in a system where you are bargaining implicitly from the weakest position?

fatjokes 9y ago
Nobody. Trust nobody. It's sad, but it's true. They're your employer---not your friend, not your family. The upside: you don't have to feel bad about being a mercenary about it. You can feel shameless in trying to negotiate higher pay (regardless of your performance or ability). A permanent position is only good because it's effectively higher comp (i.e., benefits, severance, etc). Most programmers are at-will employed anyway so it's not that much different from contractors. A union is also, in theory, a good thing. However, over time it's evolved into a different beast with its own set of problems.
- herge 9y ago
  Then why not a contractor? If you trust nobody, at least you can protect yourself with a contact.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    In many places, the laws protecting employees are better than whatever you can make the company sign as a contractor.
- HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
  > Nobody. Trust nobody. It's sad, but it's true. They're your employer---not your friend, not your family. It's not sad to me. It's common sense. In life, you trust your family and your friends - that's it. Anyone who isn't family or friends and who wants you to trust them is suspect (your boss, other companies, your government). Of course you can have friendly relations with all and sundry in your company. I am on good terms with everyone where I work, from the cleaners to the regional CEO. But trust is a different matter altogether.

koolba 9y ago

> The obvious reality is that HR has never been “your friend.” Rather, it is an important component of a company’s legal strategy to document and mitigate any potential lawsuits that might arise from its employees, contractors, or anyone else who may interact with the firm. Using the legal analogy should make this abundantly clear. Only a fool would think the other side's lawyer has their best interests in mind. Simplest advice for dealing with HR is: Don't talk to HR

gnicholas 9y ago
> Simplest advice for dealing with HR is: Don't talk to HR IANAL (anymore), but I'm not sure this is true. That is, there could be certain remedies/benefits/claims that you might give up if you never put the company on notice of the misbehavior. For example, if someone offers you a promotion in exchange for romantic involvement, this would be illegal. You could make claims against the individual. But if no one ever told the company (HR or someone with mandatory reporting obligations), then the company might not be liable. And if this were a one-off situation, this makes sense — the company had no way of knowing that the bad actor was doing anything wrong. But if you tell HR or someone who must report it to HR, then the company is on notice and if they don't deal with the situation appropriately then you can pursue legal remedies against them as well. This is just my recollection from many workplace harassment trainings that we had at the law firm I worked at — I would welcome a more nuanced analysis by a specialist.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  The trouble is, you don't know that the person you report to (HR or another person mandated to report to HR) is the harasser's best buddy. Now you're fucked.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    So appeal the grievance to the next level which best practice says should be over seen by some one out of the chain of command (so to speak).
- 9y ago

superioritycplx 9y ago

HR is an invented industry that's 99% female.

k__ 9y ago

I worked in HR for a few years and had the general feeling that most people there really cared about employees. Sadly these weren't the people who made the decisions. So you have like 1-10% of people who make decisions for the company wealth and 90-99% who have to realize these. Often they aren't happy about this :(

throwaway666911 9y ago

One thing I have seen HR do: Manager has a really good employee and wants to pay them $X. They have the budget to do it, they think the employee is worth it (they don't want to lose them), their own boss approves. But HR says "No, that is too much, we won't let you pay them that." An employee's own management has a much better idea of how much they are worth to the company than HR does. The folks in HR don't even understand what the employee actually does, or how they compare to their peers in the industry, all they have is meaningless tables of job title vs. salary range that they've purchased from some remuneration consulting firm.

bb88 9y ago

To a company, Humans Are Resources, period. Hence the name "Human Resources". More to the point, a Human Resource professional is only doing a good job with respect to the company if he/she only sees "Humans As Resources". The main job of HR is Hiring and Firing, and the more exposure one has to employees, the harder this is to do.

ianamartin 9y ago

How can you lose something you never had? I've not ever once encountered anyone who trusted HR any farther than they could kick them. In most cases HR really combines a number of things into one working group that none of them are good at. There's compliance, which really ought to be handled by attorneys; there's finance, which really ought to be run by accountants; and there's recruiting, which is really the only role that HR teams can hope to claim competence at. But most of them are bad at this as well. Some companies have event planning and employee sat programs. But HR people are typically not good at sat programs. Those programs need analysts and data scientists to perform experiments. So you've got maybe two real roles they could be good at: recruiting and planning parties. All of these things could easily be outsourced or handed off to other teams. Need a launch party? Hire a professional party planner once or twice a year. Need a recruiter? They are everywhere. Need to make sure everyone's got the required sexual harassment training? Bring in someone to do it once a year. I can't for the life of me understand how any company justifies keeping an HR team around. I mean, who do you really want dealing with a complaint? Someone who is going to try to smooth things over or ignore them because they have no clue about what's at stake? Or do you want to talk to the company's attorney, who will absolutely give a shit about how much hot water harassment can get them into? Everything about HR teams is utterly suspect and useless. Someone needs to start a business infrastructure as a service company that includes legal, accounting, hr, recruiting, and events. That company will clean house. The value proposition is that you, the client, focus on the business, the service provider takes care of everything else. Tons of money saved; happier employees who don't have to deal with shit; and a lot of trust earned along the way--trust in the company, where it belongs.

notacoward 9y ago

As long as they juxtapose "human" with "resource" the role of HR is going to be problematic at best. Everyone else treats us as resources already. If you help employees as humans then you need to hire people who have nothing to do with the "resource" part. Some companies have this, and it's never anything to do with HR. It's life coaches, educational programs, employee assistance programs, hotlines of various sorts, quasi-official employee groups, etc. HR is OK when it's hiring and benefits, downright evil when it's policy police and executive ass-covering. I'd rather deal with actual police and lawyers than people who smile and pretend to be anything else.

jenkstom 9y ago

HR does a few things, but mostly they hire and fire. It's unlikely my second experience with HR will be a positive one.

newscracker 9y ago

As seen in big companies that have been around longer than a few decades, HR exists only to protect the company and to make as much money for the company (which usually aligns with higher executive compensation than being anything meaningful for lower level employees). HR is also inaccessible and useless in such companies since many things are outsourced and there is no "one neck to choke" if there are serious issues. Heck, even getting answers on benefits is getting close to impossible. Everything is driven from the top with the executive compensation in mind. So called "employee friendly" measures are such an eyewash that it's trivial to see through all those sugar coated messages where their priorities lie (hint: it's not you, the employees). If you're someone in an entry level HR job in a large company, I pity you, because all your dreams about having a really employee friendly and helpful function will be crushed beyond recognition within a year on the job. If you're someone at a higher level HR job, I totally despise your existence in the organization, despise your methods, your way of thinking and acting. You aid and abet "crimes" against employees to satisfy the executives, just like bureaucrats do with politicians. I have no respect at all for you! P.S.: This may not apply to all companies, but it's true for most.