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I employ 1,200 people and have no HR department [video]
- kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj 6y agoWith good policies and good people, you don't need "HR". I would argue he has HR just without a centralized department. Although either way, the only good HR is no HR. HR sucks.
- Nailgun 6y agoI have never dealt with HR and came away happy or less stressed.
- rkalla 6y agoToby's the worst.
- CodeGlitch 6y agoAs said elsewhere on HN - HR departments are ultimately there to protect the employer, not the employees. This is fair enough, but not how HR departments advertise themselves.
- kabdib 6y agoDo not EVER believe that HR is there for you. Ever.
- valuearb 6y agoSpot on, not sure who would down vote this factual statement.
- Godel_unicode 6y agoYour privilege is showing. I think that the thing to keep in mind here is that HR, like legal, isn't for when things are going well. This comment sort of assumes that you'll never have a harassment problem, nobody will ever have an issue with getting their FMLA "approved", and the company will never have a performance problem that requires letting someone go in a way that won't get you sued. These things all happen, and there's a lot of No True Scotsmanning in the idea that they only happen to bad companies/people. Edit: I don't like HR either, but I'm very unlikely to need them to keep my boss from harassing me.
- valuearb 6y agoIt sounds like you think HR la job is to prevent harassment, instead of protecting the company against employees who claim harassment.
- Godel_unicode 6y agoWhat if I told you that preventing harassment is the best way to protect the company from harassment claims? Just because some people in HR suck and don't do this doesn't mean that's not what their job is a.
- valuearb 6y agoIf they can’t and won’t prevent harassment it doesn’t matter what they claim their job is.
- Godel_unicode 6y agoMany can and do. My source for this is personal experience of watching coworkers successfully get HR to intervene. As I have repeatedly said on this thread, some HR people being bad does not mean that isn't what HR does/is supposed to do. You're painting with an inappropriately large brush here.
- valuearb 6y agoHR doesn’t work for you, the fact that you’ve witnessed a few random cases where they helped coworkers doesn’t change that. My experience is that HR conspires with managers to serve their aims, so why not just deal with your manager?
- Godel_unicode 6y agoYour experience is irrelevant.
- deleted 6y ago
- yellow_lead 6y agoThis has very little content (1 minute video). I can imagine why it would be advantageous but it would be great to hear more about how it has worked.
- kostarelo 6y agoSome more information, not a lot though. It’s mostly marketing I would say. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56130187 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56130187
- keenreed 6y agoAt this size u need HR just to deal with holiday requests and sick leave.
- FalconSensei 6y agoOr call it by a different name, but doing the exact same functions
- jandrese 6y agoOr just delegate down to the employee's direct supervisor. You need HR when someone has a harassment claim against a coworker, or their boss. Some third party not in their chain.
- nikanj 6y agoHaving 150 people do HR tasks means you have 150 different versions of vacation policies. In large companies that works, because there's an actual HR department that writes the ironclad rules that the direct supervisors follow. Not sure how it works in a wild-west ad-hoc environment like this one.
- mamon 6y agoIsn't that a good thing? Each team has its own vacation policy that suits them, instead of some rules imposed on them by HR department.
- geofft 6y agoAt that point, why have 1,200 people in a single company? Why not have each team hire each other team as contractors? (This isn't sarcasm, I actually do vaguely suspect the world would be a better place if we did this.)
- nikanj 6y agoIt's like microservices: the company, with all the downsides that come from higher transaction latencies between component parts. Economics of scale would also be lost, if you had to do all the book keeping, IRS reporting, etc etc for 120 companies of 10, instead of one company of 1200.
- kostarelo 6y agoFull article https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56130187 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56130187
- wombatmobile 6y ago> But it is a single, personal incident, which haunts him to this day, that really underpins his management philosophy. "When I was 27, I was managing a manufacturing business in north London and there was a woman who ran the reception and also did customer service, who was in her 40s," he remembers. "One day I heard her speaking to a customer on the phone and I thought I could help, so I leaned in and gave her some wise words. "She finished the call, like a consummate professional, and she turned to me and said: 'Greg, I bring up two boys and a husband on the poxy wage this company pays. If I can do that, you can be pretty sure I can do anything this company wants from me. And by the way Greg, I was here before you were here and I'll be here after you have gone. I love the company more than you do, so you never need to tell me what to do.'" Jackson was stunned into silence because she had just given him - her boss - an incredible dressing down. "I realised she was right, and I remember I gave her a hug. It was one of the greatest learning experiences of my life and it forms the basis of my management theory today." The episode taught him to favour a hands-off approach that lets individuals and teams sort their own affairs as much as possible without interference from above.
- wombatmobile 6y agoSomething doesn't seem on the level with this article. The photos are copyright Greg Jackson and Octopus Energy. The office shot is too idealised. The last statement should be a direct quote, but it is written as a statement of fact: > The episode taught him to favour a hands-off approach that lets individuals and teams sort their own affairs as much as possible without interference from above. This seems like his PR team has fed the article to the journalist, who has complied by publishing what they wanted, without researching the veracity by interviewing staff independently.
- ALittleLight 6y agoWhat are you supposed to do if the 40 year old woman really was doing something wrong though? I realize in this instance she wasn't, but what if she wasn't a consummate professional capable of anything the company needed but just thought she was?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- detaro 6y agopreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26248154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26248154
- raybb 6y agoRough transcript: The question we asked ourselves was, are companies with big H.R. departments full of happier people, are they more productive? Well, the answer is usually no. You know job adverts always saying we're looking for creative people. You can take responsibility who's got passion for customers and all that stuff. And yet when people start working for a company, the first thing the company does is drown them in processes and bureaucracy. Now, actually, if you're going to go around recruiting smart people who are talented and motivated and really want to make a difference for customers, the most important thing a company can do is free them up to deliver that stuff that, you know, is magic about humans. If you spend all of your time at work, whenever there's something difficult handing onto another function rather than learning to do it yourself, it's less fulfilling for you. But it's also means the company getting less out of you. You know, how can a company learn how to find better ways of dealing with things if it takes all of the intelligence of its people and diverts them from from those big problems?
- mingabunga 6y agoIf you have HR people, you'll have HR problems
- mjfl 6y agoI feel like an HR department is one of these bureaucratic components where its stated purpose is different than its essential purpose to the business, and it would be hard to replace without accurately modeling this hidden essential purpose and precisely replicating it on a smaller scale. If you just conduct the stated functions of HR through your CEO office, you may not capture the essential function and it may not work out.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- OJFord 6y agoI'm not sure how meaningful this is, HR is hardly rigidly defined, it can be anything from outsourced to including functions like payroll and so being unavoidable. I'm glad Octopus is a company like this though, considering itself edgy I suppose I mean, and having 1k2 employees rather than being just an almost empty shell as are many energy companies. For the unacquainted: it's rather HN-friendly - its tracker plan is updated daily rather than monthly or less frequently as most are, and it also has an 'Agile' plan with an API and hourly pricing. (I'm not a customer, just like the idea of it, perhaps soon.)
- mellosouls 6y agoMore here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56130187 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56130187 But this is all very vague and hand-wavy as to how specialist functions, skills and knowledge are provided especially with regard to legal compliance, and tech types rubbing their hands in glee should note that he dismisses IT departments as well. It seems there is a more nuanced philosophy here that there may be useful lessons to draw on but it isn't detailed in these articles.
- valuearb 6y agoI was skeptical until you said he dismisses IT Departments, now I really like this guy.
- LatteLazy 6y agoGood HR is really good. But most places, especially bigger firms, have mediocre or bad HR. That's worse than nothing. Either do it properly or don't do it at all.
- alexdean 6y agoHe may think he doesn't have an 'HR department', but whoever holds the pen on his holiday policy, equipment policy, training & development policy, maternity & family friendly rights policy, expenses policy - well, there's his HR department.
- valuearb 6y agoHis managers handle that for their own employees.
- jcims 6y agoThat sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. All it takes is one bonehead. Not even a bonehead really, I don't want to try to maintain any semblance of technical acumen in my role and take care of the folks that I support and know all the intricacies of labor-related laws and standards.
- chrisseaton 6y agoWhat makes HR immune to having 'boneheads' in any other company? If your risk is 'someone might be a bonehead' then having HR as a separate department doesn't help does it?
- jcims 6y agoPossibly, but if you have a separation of duties with the manager and HR tasks, you’re more likely to have someone go to bat for you when one gets out of line. When it all goes through a single person, there’s less of a balancing force there. Both obviously can be abused.
- dogma1138 6y agoNothing but as a manager I wouldn’t want to deal with clearly HR related issues alone. Form a managers perspective I see HR essentially as your legal counsel, if the company wants to delegate that to the legal department sure but they’ll be likely overpaying those who’ll be tasked with dealing with HR issues all day long.
- nom 6y agoNo company at that scale will function without people taking care of all the HR and IT functions. Sure it doesn't have to be traditional, there doesn't have to be a department responsible for it, but it has to be done - and you need a lot of manpower to do it. Hence why you usually have departments dedicated for those tasks. You might call it something different or distribute their responsibilities down the chain but it will still exist. Makes for a good headline though, who doesn't hate HR and IT... ...always getting in our way of running random code on our machines or coming to work without pants /s
- valuearb 6y agoI’ll counter argue that IT and HR sap enough productivity out of the workforce that the work they do is a net negative.
- valuearb 6y agoHR’s closest department in responsibility is Legal, both serve to protect the company, not its employees. So I can see the argument that you don’t need HR if you have a legal department, have it train managers to handle employee grievances properly, and let each manager deal with vacations, sick leave etc as they see fit. And finance can handle ordering computer equipment and network management services, get rid of IT as well.
- nasalgoat 6y agoThere's a lot more to IT than just ordering equipment. Also, no finance person in my entire working history ever knew anything about managing a network. They can barely use Excel in my experience. The flip side is that no IT person I know could do accounting. Some things you just can't double up roles on.
- valuearb 6y agoIt depends on your network needs. Most are easily outsourced, which is a perfect fit for Finance/Operations personnel. If your team needs a custom network solution, it’s probably better managed by your team. Keep important decisions close.
- andreskytt 6y agoThat is one view at it. The other one is, that hr is a strategic partner to ceo in terms of organizational behaviour and its fit to the strategy. The former appears dominant in US, the latter in EU.
- botman_ 6y agoAccording to Linkedin there are 25 HR employees at his company Octopus Energy. Their roles are Learning & Development, Talent Acquisition, Onboarding, Payroll Management. These are all roles that are typically taken on by the HR department. He has an HR department whether he calls it like that or not.
- saos 6y agoGood luck Greg
- enjeyw 6y agoAnecdotal but I know someone who works on the software engineering team at Octopus, and in their experience there’s way too much micromanagement, and minimal empowerment from engineers to apply their own judgment. the point being that narrative and reality are not the same thing.
- sjm 6y agoThis is a terrible idea in the current state of the tech industry, where plenty of highly skilled tech specialists are “promoted” to positions managing people, without the training or emotional intelligence to handle what an HR department can handle.
- gmoore 6y agoAbsolulty nothing helpful about that video...
- timoth3y 6y agoHR gets a lot more hate than they deserve. I've built several startups, and I do get the the whole "we don't need no stinking HR to tell us how to treat people!" vibe. It's definitely true at small companies and one of the great things about startups. But it doesn't scale. Onboarding a new employee at a larger company involves coordination with IT (laptop and account setup), security (badges and access), legal, accounting (payroll and tax info), and a bunch of things I probably don't even know about. If I had had to put all my work on hold and do this myself for each new employee, my productivity would plummet. Also, it's not my job to understand the nuances of labor law or how it's reflected company policy. If a team member asks me, for example, "Does my broken arm qualify me for disability accommodation?" I want to have an expert I can refer them to rather than having to go on somme corporate scavenger hunt to get the answer.
- rumblestrut 6y agoAs my boss says: “HR is not your friend.”