4 ms·

There's legal CYA and there's CYA ingrained in the everyday operation of the company. I think the CYA OP is talking about is the sort where employees (managers,

There's legal CYA and there's CYA ingrained in the everyday operation of the company. I think the CYA OP is talking about is the sort where employees (managers, devs, designers, what have you) deliberately act suboptimally to protect themselves. Making a suboptimal recommendation knowing it will harm someone else more than it will harm you. Diffusing responsibility. Inflating estimates. etc etc.

deleted 14y ago
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jpdoctor 14y ago
> There's legal CYA and there's CYA ingrained in the everyday operation of the company. Maybe other people have different experiences, but I've never met an HR person who did one and not the other.
- potatolicious 14y ago
  HR is CYA by definition, but you can have a HR department without having the whole company behave like said HR department.
  - jonnathanson 14y ago
    True, and you can also have an HR department that goes beyond CYA. Some companies treat Recruiting & HR functions as strategic parts of the business. I'm not talking about lip service, like "Chief People Officer" titles, and things of that nature, which are usually just a whole lot of signaling and little else. Rather, I mean companies wherein recruiting and developing people is part of the hiring manager's job responsibility, and he or she has skin in the game. To the extent that HR is a self-contained silo, completely removed from the hiring manager's organization, it's bound to lose touch and turn into a simple, CYA-esque meat grinder. Additionally, good HR strategy includes implementing events, training programs, talent development strategies, etc., so that retention and promotion of existing employees is just as important as recruitment of new ones. A reasonable KPI, in this case, is turnover (both by volume and by average employee timespan). The ability to find world-class talent by the bucketload is all but wasted if existing employees tend to bounce after 6 months to a year.

deleted 14y ago

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jpdoctor 14y ago

> There's legal CYA and there's CYA ingrained in the everyday operation of the company. Maybe other people have different experiences, but I've never met an HR person who did one and not the other.

potatolicious 14y ago
HR is CYA by definition, but you can have a HR department without having the whole company behave like said HR department.
- jonnathanson 14y ago
  True, and you can also have an HR department that goes beyond CYA. Some companies treat Recruiting & HR functions as strategic parts of the business. I'm not talking about lip service, like "Chief People Officer" titles, and things of that nature, which are usually just a whole lot of signaling and little else. Rather, I mean companies wherein recruiting and developing people is part of the hiring manager's job responsibility, and he or she has skin in the game. To the extent that HR is a self-contained silo, completely removed from the hiring manager's organization, it's bound to lose touch and turn into a simple, CYA-esque meat grinder. Additionally, good HR strategy includes implementing events, training programs, talent development strategies, etc., so that retention and promotion of existing employees is just as important as recruitment of new ones. A reasonable KPI, in this case, is turnover (both by volume and by average employee timespan). The ability to find world-class talent by the bucketload is all but wasted if existing employees tend to bounce after 6 months to a year.