Your human resources department might be a fantastic resource for you in the workplace. Some organizations have taken the responsibility of relating to their employees seriously and approached the task with subtlety and attention to detail. If this sounds like where you work, love your HR department.
For the rest of you, however, you want to see this top 5. Without further ado, here are the Top 5 Reasons to Hate Your HR Department:
- They think you are a resource
- Talking to them accomplishes nothing
- No real understanding of you or your job
- Inflexible policies and red tape
- They pretend to be on your team
Petroleum, water, lumber, and humans. One of these things is not like the others—unless, that is, you consult the HR department. They view you as a resource, and they are not shy about it. This helps make things a lot simpler, and it helps the decision-makers in the organization feel better about making “difficult decisions” involving people. After all, it’s much more comfortable to talk about squeezing the last drop out of your resources than it is to talk about pushing people beyond their limits.
While subtle, the name indicates a desire to be unaware of your problems, pains, goals, and frustrations unless it will get them sued or cost them money, and that’s about right in most cases. In fact, the name “Human Resources” is a little refreshing in its honesty. It’s just a matter of time before a gentler term is adopted to describe the same practices.
While your meeting with the HR rep may be the closest you get to being heard, the fact of the matter is, he or she is probably someone who can’t change the landscape very much, if at all. The people who could do something about, the ultimate decision-makers, do not want to be bothered by a sea of personal stories. Therefore, your meetings with HR are the equivalent of having a pillow to shout into. You may feel better for getting it off of your chest, but you probably haven’t accomplished much else. The exception to this being, of course, a legitimate opportunity for litigation. That one will be run up the flagpole.
With a professed disinterest in the details of your job or your life and the complete lack of ability to do anything about either anyway, it’s not really surprising that the HR department makes little to no effort to really understand what’s going on in the trenches. On top of that, they are removed from the sort of casual venting and frank discussions that most of us share because if it hits their ears it might have to go in a file and up the flagpole. As a result, the HR department is detached from the very employees that they are supposed to be the front lines of communication for, and it’s probably the last place you want to go with your problems rather than the first.
The policies of the HR department are designed to cover a ridiculously broad range of circumstances with one fell swoop. Making blanket statements about how much of a raise you can give someone, how quickly you can promote someone, and how to move an employee from one role to another laterally is just another step toward oversimplification and homogenization of human dynamics down into human resources. I understand the professed reasons for having such standards, but for the most part, it just seems like a lack of ability and effort to make wise decisions concerning the individuals in the company.
As the employee relations branch of the company, the HR department bears the responsibility for the false claims companies make about how they plan to treat their employees. Mission statements and other motivational blurbs abound with proud declarations of how much employees are valued and respected. “Our people are our key asset, everything we do is informed by our constant vision of teamwork and shared opportunity…” Well, it doesn’t take long to realize how far that is from the truth in most cases. Most companies try not to see people at all—they see resources. The game, for them, is about getting away with whatever you can without causing such a disruption in labor that profits are affected.
While most HR people are well meaning and while some HR departments are helpful to their employees, there is a reason why so many negative stereotypes exist. If your HR department doesn’t fall into these categories, that’s great. For most of us though, there’s a lot of truth to be found in this list. Don’t forget, the entire concept of the HR Department is geared to help the company, not the employee.
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8 responses so far ↓
1 Melissa // Jul 10, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Every time I’ve had to go to the Human Resources office, I’ve spent a lot of my day waiting to be seen, more of it trying to explain my unique situation to them and be understood, and still more trying to sort out how their generic advice or policies apply to me, if at all. I wonder how people in human resources feel about their jobs?
2 Martha // Jul 10, 2007 at 4:03 pm
I spent over 10 years working in human resources, and my experience there is that those folks are frustrated as are most people in a large corporate environment. People ( including HR people) have hearts, and feelings, and compassion. Companies are made up of people, but companies exist to make money for the owners and shareholders, and their commitment to keeping employees satisfied is based in that profit motive. Nothing wrong with that, people , especially employees just need to know that that is the game.
3 Darin // Jul 11, 2007 at 5:28 pm
I really loathe my HR department. They constantly are not allowing me to hire anyone without wiping behind me first. Everything I give out or requet of an applicant has to be apporoved around their time and schedule. When it comes to their schedule, they are never around and I have the hardest time working with them. I personal do not care about what they think and they are definitely not a resource for me. I like your examples here and HR is certainly not necessary in every company to run efficiently.
4 JoJo // Jul 12, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Point #3 is very true. Due to a position that went unfilled in my department for a long time and was then filled by an incompetent person, I ended up working some killer overtime one year trying to clean up all that mess and get things caught up. In the elevator one evening, a co-worker asked me how things were going. I didn’t say anything really bad - just that I was tired of the overtime and wished that whole staffing situation had worked out differently. Unbeknownst to me, an H.R. troll was on the elevator with us and went running to my boss.
My boss had been the one who brought the incompetent person into our department, knowing full well she couldn’t do the job, as part of a group effort between several managers to get her fired. (She should have been fired a long time ago, but they had simply passed her from department to department.) From where I sat, I felt like I had been totally thrown under the bus. I was the one stuck documenting all of her performance issues, which the managers had all been too lazy to do, AND I was the one who got stuck going back and re-doing all of her work, which put me even further behind than we had been when the position was open. To my way of looking at things, my boss was a jerk who totally betrayed me.
Well, after pointy-headed H.R. troll told my boss what he had overheard, I got called in to my boss’s office and given a finger-wagging lecture about how terrible my “attitude” was.
It’s true, the H.R. people are the last ones you want to talk to.
5 Jason // Aug 30, 2007 at 10:56 pm
My HR Director is numb to the world. She doesn’t say hello in the hall (we have less than 200 people, she should know everyone). She can’t help us with anything related to why my direct deposit took 4 years to get fixed, because we outsource that. Our company drives us hard for profits, and if we didn’t waste the $60K minimum we spend on her, we’d hit our profit markers faster. Bottom line, if I ever have my own company, there will NEVER be an HR person. Waste.
6 Jason // Aug 30, 2007 at 10:58 pm
Oh yeah. Our HR troll leaves emails regarding peoples personal business sitting on the community printer all day. What is that?
7 Lisa // Feb 27, 2008 at 3:41 am
I’m glad I found this article. I can’t find the words to describe how I feel about my HR department right now. Disgust is pretty close, because I want to throw up thinking about them. I’m a college graduate who took an entry-leved position at a hotel. Needless to say that entry-level job as turned into 2 year stint in quicksand. Beginning this year I got really serious about finding a better position in the company. I started going to my employment manager about job postings I was interested in, only to find out she was going back and telling my boss that I was applying for everything under the sun and didn’t seem to know what direction I was going in. I was floored, so much for discretion and helping people advance. A new position as come available, I’m practically a shoe in for, and I had to fight tooth and nail to get it. What did they want me to do? Stay in my entry level position forever? People in HR and hiring managers are on the biggest ego trips. They get off on controling people’s lives. It’s sickening. The whole experience has made me start a part-time business, so I can one day work for myself.
8 will // Jul 3, 2008 at 11:42 am
I couldn’t agree more. People often forget that HR is an advocate and adviser to senior management. If your company is large enough, you many have an Employee Relations group who are employee advocates.
Perhaps it is sometimes better to work with your management directly. I know that freaks people out. I have found a blog that helps with that: http://www.managerqanda.blogspot.com I hope it helps.
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