There seems to be a common pattern of HR being disliked in firms and workplaces across different industries no matter where you’re focused on.
To be honest during my apprenticeship/internship HR weren’t too bad and would have a laugh with you, hell one of them loved the dark humor from one of our technicians.
Is there something I’m missing that HR are soul less and will protect the interests of a firm before yourself? I’m not sure as I think not all HR people are terrible, just comes with the territory so to speak
What are your thoughts on the matter?
What do YOU think of them as a department from your current and past experiences?
Human Resources is just a department that cares about the image of the company
I’ve never worked for a company with the shitty HR people complain about online. Must be a regional thing.
I don’t have the expectation that HR will always be there to protect you (though one company I’ve worked for had HR that actively fought upper management for things like raises and pension stuff). HR is there so the company, and by extension everyone in the company, can do their work properly. If you have a conflict at work, they’re not obligated to be on your side.
HR is there to protect the company.
They will have a laugh with you, sure. Why not? And they will come up with silly games for employees, because it increases employee retention and makes employees likely to think HR is just about boosting fun.
But trusting them? God no.
It’s not that they are unfriendly.
But they are 100% there to represent the company’s interest and not yours. If there is any way, to… turn a situation into something where the company gets more money out of it and you get less, it’s their job to make that happen.
In theory they should have employee retention in mind. In practice, nobody does their HR that way anymore.
All my interactions with HR have been “professional polite” and appropriately friendly. There is no reason to be unnecessarily mean, they are also just doing their job.
It’s because they appear to be something they’re not.
They’re usually friendly and fun and do all sorts of employee retention activities like arranging go karting and such…
They seem like they’re there almost as union stewards, to try and help retain employees and ensure you’re treated well by management. This is not the case. They’re there to protect the company from lawsuits originated by you. This means that they’ll apply rules and such in ways that are not usually beneficial to you.
They’re actually really helpful if you have issues with a coworker! However, you need to remember that despite how friendly they seem, they’re not actually in your corner, they have their own agenda.
So the simple answer is that they aren’t bad at all, but it can feel bad if you thought they were your friend.
So many health benefits, “mental wellness” programs, etc. are ultimately all about “affecting you ability to work”.
I get a free joint-pain exercise program. Every so often, the app asks me a survey which is all about “how many days did you joint pain prevent you from working”, “do you expect your pain to cause you to take time off work” .
HR DGAF about you or me, they’re there for the company and will squash us like bugs if they think it’s good for their company.
Also, yeah, a lot of places have wildly incompetent HR staff on top of that.
They are basically cops. And the analogy holds on many level including that yes, some can genuinely be on your side and try to help you or fix the system from the inside, in a way, but it’s pretty much “luck based”, you have no foolproof way to tell one from the other.
The wise strategy is to be your own HR, study the contracts and the laws. If you go in blind trusting HR you can be lucky and have a good happy professiona life or get fucked.
Knowing also helps dramatically in undestanding where HR can realistically help, where it can harm and where it is going beyond expectations and is on your side.
Don’t expect them to put you above their own survival though…
I currently work for a large corporation with one of the worst HR strategies I’ve ever seen. Their primary focus, as far as I can tell, is to prevent employees from suing the company. But here’s how it practically works out: It is really difficult to promote or get raises for high performers, which makes them a flight risk. That is coupled with it being equally difficult to remove low performers. It takes 6 months to get someone on a PIP, then another 6 months to go through the PIP process. Meanwhile the high performers have to pick up the slack without any extra comp. No one who is any good wants to work in that environment. So what you end up with is a death spiral of talent and increasingly worse products and services. I can’t get out of here fast enough.
We must be coworkers
OMG, what a nightmare. I can only assume you are looking for work elsewhere too. Best of luck to you!!
HR is designed and there to protect the company from employees, they are not really your friend any more than the corporation is your friend. They can be friendly, yes, in the same way you can work for a place that “takes care of it’s workers”, but they serve the business NOT you. I mean the name really breaks it down, Human Resources. They are there to manage the humans for the business just like any other commodity. They are also sometimes called Human Capital Management (HCM), and have a focus on training/education and extracting the most value from each employee.
I don’t know if this is a US thing. I have no large expectations of HR, but I’m also part of a union and like most places my company has signed a collective union agreement. If there’s a conflict the union will represent you as well. The HR people at my company seem completely OK though, I have dealings with them due to my role.
My wife works in HR and there a lot of misconceptions about the field. First off, a lot of people call them “the cops of the company” or claim that they’re only out to protect the company. If your HR person is any good then that is not their goal. Good HR people are there to protect the company, yes, but they’re also there to protect the employees. It’s been proven time and time again that being good and fair to your employees leads to more productivity. A good HR person is always fighting with the top brass trying to convince them to do the right thing for the employees. They’re in the weeds with the executives explaining to them why giving a raise that just matches inflation is not a raise, and anything less is actually a demotion. They’re explaining why giving benefits will actually earn the company money in the long run through employee retention. They’re trying their best to get performance reports, pay bands, etc, so that employees will see feedback on their performance and receive help when they need it and increased salaries when they’re excelling.
Not all HR departments are great, there are plenty that are awful, but imagine this scenario – and this has happened to my wife many, many, many times:
You go to the executives with a plan for raises and benefits, you’ve been working on it for months. Both physically working on it, and in meetings explaining to the executives how this plan will not just benefit them but also the employees. After all that work, the executives take your carefully crafted plan, completely gut it despite all your advising, then hand it back to you and tell you to present it to everyone as though this was your grand dream from the beginning. It’s pretty demoralizing, but you have to put on a brave face and try to remain positive while explaining “your plan”, and keep all the stuff about how good it actually could have been if you’d be allowed to do what you know is right to yourself.
It’s better than nothing, after all. You’ve made some improvement to people’s experience of the workplace.
You know you’ve got a good HR team if you’re working somewhere that has solid benefits, quarterly or semi-annual performance reports (with raises), pay bands and clear paths forward in your career, raises that at least meet inflation, a positive work culture where you feel at least some trust and comradery in your peers, etc. If you do, then those people are not your enemy.
In brief, I hope some of you reading this will take away this message: HR people are not the enemy. They’re just the messengers, and the advisors. If you have a problem with the HR department where you work, then you almost certainly have a problem with the team of executives who aren’t listening to their expertise.
Good HR people are there to protect the company, yes, but they’re also there to protect the employees.
Their primary responsibility is to protect the company, protecting employees only matters in the context of protecting the company.
Didn’t bother reading the rest, because you’re already bullshitting.
Source: almost 4 decades in very large (tens of thousands of employees) companies
Does it matter what their intentions are if the result is that they end up protecting employees too? They are being paid by the company too, and it’s their job to make sure the company follows legal practices to ensure the company doesn’t get sued. Of course they have an incentive to protect the company, but any trained and educated HR person knows that treating employees well is a great way to protect the company.
Does it always work out that way? No. Why? There are HR people who are bad at their jobs or intentionally malicious or unscrupulous, yes. There are also “HR departments” that are run by family members of an executive of the company and don’t have any idea what they’re doing.
All I’m saying is that HR departments, most of them, at least try to talk executives into doing the right thing, but at the end of the day HR doesn’t get to make the final decision.
If you’re mad at the HR department of your company for something, it almost certainly wasn’t their idea.
Or in very simple terms, don’t shoot the messenger.
I appreciate the positive and constructive outlook and for that I value your contribution. Your wife seems like she’s being the change we want to see in less-than-stellar HR departments, but I think to consider the benefits of HR from the employee POV just isn’t safe unless you’re absolutely certain where the priorities lie for your local HR team.
The phrase “cops of the company” is an even more accurate term in the sense that while some cops may actually believe in serving their community, many perhaps most do not, and trusting one is hazardous to your health. A good HR department does care about employees and the company, but how does an employee know that they have one of the good ones? I feel like this is something you don’t really know until you lean upon it such as when disagreements occur, and then either the rickety post will hold or you fall flat on your face. Me? I’m not leaning on that rickey post any more than I would willingly speak to a “friendly” neighborhood police officer. Your job isn’t a place for trust. It’s business. That HR person could be your wife, or they could be the kind to shoot first and ask questions later.
I don’t have a problem with my local PD nor do I have any issues with my HR, but I definitely don’t want a visit from either.
I understand your point, although I disagree. I will say that my intentions were never that you (and everyone else) should be buddies with HR, or even trust them. But there’s a huge difference between being friendly but at a distance and being actively hostile.
My wife also works in HR and I now work in an adjacent department, EHS. I came to post pretty much the same as you did.
I will add that it’s interesting reading these threads and seeing the conspiracy theory type comments uniformly painting HR across the world. They speak as if the employees that comprise HR have no agency or are uniformly of one mindset, protecting the company at all costs, even though that doesn’t benefit them personally at all. It’s a simple solution for a complex situation, so it sounds good but doesn’t hold up under the merest scrutiny.
We get the same shit in EHS, how we’re just there to prevent company liability and don’t really care. It’s quite frustrating since it’s anything but true and tends to be perpetuated by employees who don’t actually engage with EHS, so they don’t actually know who we are or what we do. Reading through the comments, it’s much the same here.
Most EHS departments are like most HR departments. Perception management to benefit 1) the department and 2) the company. Any possible way EHS can use lax regulations (most places outside the EU) to avoid accountability, it will happen in nearly every circumstance.
I worked in EHS for a time. The amount of scab, toxic and corrupt behavior I saw made me NOPE out of that career field real fast. EHS got more people fired and swept more incidents under the rug than anyone else. Masters of gaslighting and virtue signaling.
Of course there will be exceptions, and I’m sure you’re one of them.
I don’t know how you expected the Everyone Here Sucks department to be a good idea /s
Seriously!! Not my smartest move.
It’s been proven time and time again that being good and fair to your employees leads to more productivity.
That still only benefits the company. In capitalism my productivity is truly the only variable I control. The more productive I am the more value is extracted from me to the company/shareholders. Yet nothing is gained from me except exhaustion.
You get paid by the company. The company not closing down benefits you. Also, your performance should (in most cases) lead to raises to your salary.
The company extracts a profit, technically if they came out even they still wouldn’t need to close.
Min-maxing one’s own productivity is truly the only power an the wage slave has in his pocket.
Also, your performance should (in most cases) lead to raises to your salary.
We all know that is 100% not how things work.
You’re simping for the boss, typical HR.
You’re making up straw man arguments and you obviously haven’t even read my post.
Also, I’m not HR.
Not defending either side, but how often do hourly employees get raises based on performance at your wife’s company? You say performance should lead to salary increases, but what about the majority of people who only make hourly rates?
I have no opinion on that because that’s not what we’re talking about. Usually companies that offer hourly rates rather than salaries don’t have an HR department, or the HR department is so far removed from those employees as to make no difference to them whether they’re there or not.
I’m not sure what you want me to say because it’s pretty much irrelevant to the situation I’m describing.
Hahaha, you’re so full of shit your eyes are brown.
All companies with more than a handful of employees, have HR. It’s a legal issue for them.
Salary vs hourly really has fuck all to do with this.
Let me throw you a little binary choice set:
A1: HR are great, and I trust them.
A2: HR are great, and I don’t trust them.
B1: HR sucks, and I trust them.
B2: HR sucks, and I don’t trust them.
Obviously option A1 and A2 have the same outcome, while B1 has significantly worse outcomes than B2. What’s worse is that, by your own post, HR can go from A to B in an instant, because they’re following orders.
Obviously it’s in my own best interest that I district all HR.
Just a friendly fyi, it’s camaraderie.
Thanks, but they’re actually both accepted spellings.
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/comradery/ https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/comradery
Please don’t use Mirriam-webster as an English source. Noah was on a tear to re-make English when he created American. And it’s as american as a hot-dog eating contest – but in as much as dictionaries only tell you what’s popular and only accidentally say what’s right, this one is the farthest from canon outside of one country. I’m surprised there’s still a ‘u’ in ‘source’; or a ‘c’, for that matter.
Weird. Never seen that spelling. English is messed up.
I don’t particularly care about them and they seem mostly useless at my company. We don’t have any onsite HR reps that I know of, everything is more or less done electronically with them, and we end up performing most of the “normal” HR functions within our dept by ourselves. The only reason I know HR even exists is because we have to fill out our own performance reviews every year and we have these dumb SMART goals they make us do, which are the bane of my existence.
At best they are pretty much useless for employees, at worst they are as dangerous as managment.
They are usually very aligned with management, and try to obscure that…
HR is valuable only at the margins, when someone is a real PITA and needs to be fired, or when there’s some niche legal employment issue. Which is to say, HR is necessary, if mostly worthless.
I imagine that HR at some multicountry conglomerate is not your friend. In the middle-sized companies I have worked at HR has been quite supporting when needed. Of course it is also a question of what kind of stuff they are responsible for. For example, bullying is not an HR topic here, there are specific other people for that.
They’re very supportive when you need it because that’s their job. They’re being nice to you so the boss doesn’t have to be. Imagine instead of an entire department dedicated to preventing you from taking your boss to court, there was no such department. The world boss actually has to treat his employees with respect, for a change. HR are not your friends, police are not your friends. Anyone who’s job it is to hold you back is not your friend.
