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?
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 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.
I just view HR as a less educated lawyer who represenrs the company and that’s served me plenty well.
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…
It was once upon a time, called Personnel. It was Personnel since its inception, but then one day, some monsters decided that title had the word “person” in it, and, heh, well… ah, we can’t have employees thinking they are people; they need to know that they are no different from a table, a copy machine or a forklift. So some genius of corporate sadism came up with the term Human Resources, to perfectly articulate the fact that to the corporation, you are simply a resource that is classified as human. That should put an end to all this distracting and unproductive “dignity.”
As expected, it’s now called Resources. They stopped treating us as resource that are human, and now just resources.
Seriously? Is this for real? No, this is a joke right?
HR exists to protect the company. The people who protect you is your union. If your workplace does not have a union, be aware that is a solvable problem.
Class traitors
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.
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.
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
Weird. Never seen that spelling. English is messed up.
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.
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.
They are being paid by the company
I overlooked this part. That’s where the conflict of humanity comes in.
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.
no agency or are uniformly of one mindset, protecting the company at all costs
One comment is anecdotal. A million is a statistic.
If you’re suggesting different, then I’d point you to the word ‘exception’, and also suggest that HR has an image problem deeply rooted in a conflict of interest that it needs to solve. And if it wants to support the workers it will need to be funded by the workers to remove that conflict, and once it supports and is supported by the workers in a group, it’s a union.
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 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.
The reason it’s relevant is that most working people do not earn salaries, they earn hourly rates. I’m a welding engineer earning a salary, working with maintenance men and welders and operators who all earn hourly rates. Every company I’ve ever worked for has both salary and hourly and also an HR department.
The situation you are describing does not align with the vast majority of working people’s experiences.
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.
You can easily find HR staff that are wonderful as individuals. Plenty of them.
But HR as an entity isn’t about providing resources to humans, it’s about managing humans as resources. They aren’t there to help employees, though they may do that indirectly sometimes. They’re there to help employers, and even the best individuals doing the job are still doing that job of helping the employer as their primary goal.
Even the best people can be worn down by doing the job and turn into the soulless drone, if they can’t/don’t think they can leave the job.
The only HR department I’ve ever trusted was at a home health agency that was owned by a single person who set the standards, and there were two HR employees that really were there to help balance the company’s needs with the employees’. It was evident in everything they did, and the boss would abide by their decisions even if it cost her.
But! At any point in time, she could have completely done away with that methodology. And that’s why HR as a thing can never be trusted
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!!
Yes. When shit hits the fan, they are there to protect the company, not you. HR is the enemy, disguised as your friend.
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 once had an HR lady who seemed fun, the type you could have a beer with. She was so bad at her job that she was having casual hookups with employees.
The problem with HR is that if you’re liking them they’re probably not doing their job all that well
An HR’s purpose is to find a way to have the company give the least to employees while still complying with the law. They can be nice to you, and most will be because acting nice is part of their job, but if they find out the company will do 0.0001% better without you they will let you go immediately.
In today’s society where 99.9% of the people need to fall in line to their company if they want to not die of hunger or homelessness, it takes a special kind of cruelty to mediate conflicts in favor of the company, undermine any attempt on the side of the employees to improve literally anything of significance, or make the decision to take away someone’s income because they are not being 100% exploitable. Most people cannot do this. So if they become HR while having a heart, they won’t last long in the job. This leaves only the most ruthless, unempathetic removed in the long run. All of which wear humane masks because it’s their job to do so.
Since the only good HR is an HR that quits, AHRAB
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.
