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” .
Class traitors
At best they are pretty much useless for employees, at worst they are as dangerous as managment.
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.”
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.
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
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
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.
Human Resources is just a department that cares about the image of the company
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.
Yes. When shit hits the fan, they are there to protect the company, not you. HR is the enemy, disguised as your friend.
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
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.
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.
nope. just the fat fucks that tell them how to do their jobs as if they didnt already know
