Asklemmy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Human Resources is just a department that cares about the image of the company

In the startup I worked for, the HR lead was the CEO's significant other. They had made fundamental contributions to the operations of the company since its inception and relatively humble beginnings. Once it had grown beyond a certain size, there wasn't really any particular executive position within a logical company structure for them to fill. The individual departments were run by people more qualified in those areas. I think it made sense for the company to continuously recognize their contributions (and obviously the boss isn't going to fire their partner), but HR ended up being mostly just a cushy job for them to fall into.

It was one of those companies that likes to say its "like a family", but really there's an in-crowd (i.e. the founding staff) and everyone else. I was part of the former, so I could be honest and open with them with regard to HR issues and be supported, and that was nice. But on the other hand, I witnessed HR actions related to incidents involving other staff that caused me cognitive dissonance, because it would've been handled differently if I were the staff member involved. More than anything else, because I had found myself in the right place at the right time. Because I was a part of the landed gentry, as it were. That's fucking bullshit, and the experience made me realize that they weren't actually different from other companies like I had thought.

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.

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.

Let's not forget that the 'R' in HR stands for 'Resources'.

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.

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.

HR is not likely to side with the worker over the company.

There's also a certain kind of "hr energy" that makes my skin crawl. Like if you worked at a company called AB Tech they'd be up front in the meeting going "I SAY A, YOU SAY B! A!" and I'm just like no, please stop, I'm not that excited to make charts for assholes.

The hr person where I work now seems nice, at least. My old job the main hr person gave me the creeps.

It depends. I worked at one company without a dedicated HR department (a payroll company) and it ran fine without it. Managers of each department worked with upper management and finance to decide staffing, we went to management and if needed (I never did) upper management or the lady who did our payroll (they handled both our payroll and client payrolls) or the benefits department (same deal) for most of the sort of things HR does at my company.

I think it's bloated at my current company, there are some people with not a whole job, but it's not like they do nothing or don't provide value, they do. But like, one guy's job is apparently employee development and all he does is choose some general "learning software" that we then have access to. Gives some useless and painfully boring presentations on the aforementioned software that provide nothing of value. Then I have no idea what he does with the rest of the year. Why is that one whole job, when the rest of us basically juggle multiple jobs?

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 current employer is so large that I've never seen or interacted with anyone from HR.