Maybe you’re irked by the endless flow of memos and forms, many of which need to be filled out, pronto. Maybe you’re irritated by new initiatives that regularly emerge from H.R., which never seems to run out of new initiatives, not all of them necessary or especially wise, in your opinion. Or you’ve got some problem with management and you don’t trust that H.R. representatives will actually help. They sure are friendly, but they get paid by the suits. In a crunch, it’s pretty clear whose side they are on.
But if the H.R. department is bothering you, here’s a fact you might find perversely consoling: You are not as aggravated or bummed out as the people who work in H.R.
That was obvious at Unleash, an annual three-day conference and expo held this year at Caesars Forum, an immense convention hall near the Las Vegas Strip. In May, the event brought together some 4,000 H.R. professionals from across the country. It was billed as a place where “global H.R. leaders come to do business and discover inspirational stories.”
“For years, we have been fighting fires with cans of gasoline,” he said. “And now, here we are, after literally giving everything we could, and it’s like: ‘Oh, thanks for everything, but’” — and here’s the G-rated version, get lost — “‘Don’t make too much work for me. I’m not going to dot those I’s and cross those T’s. I’m the business, and you’re H.R.’”
Part of the frustration is that office behavior post-Covid has become notably less civil, which means that H.R. is being called in far more often to referee disputes. Everyone at Unleash had a story about explaining basic etiquette to boorish colleagues. No, you can’t microwave fish at lunch. Stop cutting your toenails on your desk. (...)
H.R. knows that employees and managers are annoyed by its memos, by its processes, by just about anything that interrupts life as it was. When an email is sent nudging everyone to take that 45-minute online course in, say, data security, H.R. can almost hear the eye rolls.
That said, don’t expect apologies. The consensus at Unleash was that most of these new ideas are designed with the goal of a more equitable workplace; like greater diversity, for instance, or standardized workplace reviews.
So get used to the memos.
Also, while you’re whining, get used to human capital management software programs. A recent Business Insider story, titled “Everyone Hates Workday,” asked why half of the Fortune 500 uses this particular piece of software — which handles benefits and recruiting and facilitates pay equity analysis — despite creating “mountains of busywork for everyone.”
It’s not the software’s fault, H.R. veterans say. It’s the fault of your company, which hasn’t configured it wisely or trained you adequately. Workday is here to stay, and one Unleash attendee had this bit of advice for its legions of haters: “Buckle up, buttercup.” (...)
In quieter settings, attendees lamented the low pay, the churn and the increasing workload. One discussed a work-induced mental breakdown. There was a lot of fretting about artificial intelligence, which seems poised to take jobs on the recruitment side of their business. (A number of vendors at the expo were selling software designed for that very purpose.)
Many H.R. executives have left the field in recent years, or they are looking for better offers. In 2022, LinkedIn found that H.R. had the highest turnover rate of any job it tracked.
“Everybody hates us,” said Hebba Youssef, the chief people officer at Workweek who has a podcast and a newsletter for H.R. professionals called “I Hate it Here.” Recent posts have included “Why Does Working in H.R. Feel So Lonely?” and “Everybody Hates Their Jobs Right?”
“Everything feels like a fool’s errand,” said Kyle Lagunas, a former H.R. executive at General Motors who now works at Aptitude Research, an H.R. advisory company based in Boston. He had just finished a highly animated presentation about H.R. tech in front of an audience of about 50 people. Now he sat in the designated media room and ranted a bit about the maddening challenges of running H.R. during and after the tumult of the pandemic.
Ms. Youssef especially bemoaned the mistrust employees feel toward H.R. It’s dispiriting, she said, because most people go into the field to be helpful.
“People in H.R. tend to be very compassionate, very empathetic,” she said. “But a lot of employees look at us as inherently evil.”
Let’s ‘Humanize’ the Company...
“It was initially known as ‘welfare work’ because it was employers demonstrating an interest in the welfare of workers,” said Gary Hoover, executive director of the American Business History Center in Tyler, Texas. After World War II, when the model of lifetime employment became the norm, the job was to ensure that workers stuck around.
“That starts to fade in the 1980-1981 recession,” said Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “Companies were facing an existential threat from Japan, which was building better cars, better steel. Executives started laying off people and, in downsizing mode, you don’t care too much about keeping employees happy.”
By then, “personnel department” had been rebranded as “human resources.”
“The idea was to stop thinking of employees as people that needed to be taken care of,” said Professor Cappelli. “People became resources, assets like any other, like machinery. The priority wasn’t to help people. It was to help the business.”
The question of the H.R. department’s priorities and purpose has festered ever since. When the #MeToo reckoning began, many wondered why H.R. hadn’t forestalled many of the worst misdeeds with timely, forceful interventions. Critics contend that the department’s first mission has long been the quiet and smooth operation of a company, and before the epidemic of sexual harassment became a national scandal, that often meant quashing conflicts.
More recently, H.R. has been in charge of dealing with the fallout of epochal events. When offices closed down because of Covid, H.R. administered remote work rules, which kept evolving as back-to-work dates were repeatedly pushed into the future. Tens of millions of U.S. workers quit their jobs starting in 2021 in what became known as the Great Resignation. H.R. found replacements. When diversity, equity and inclusion programs were mandated by upper management in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, which brought renewed efforts to address racial disparities, H.R. had yet another mission.
Some of these missions have since changed, yet again. (...)
Other jobs in the H.R. portfolio have not changed so much as multiplied. There are now so many workplace grievances that companies are calling in outside counsel to investigate more and more internal complaints, producing a robust source of billable hours at law firms.
One of those firms is Ogletree Deakins, which has offices in 32 states. After the start of the pandemic, so many corporate clients hired the firm to conduct internal investigations that in 2021 it created a dedicated practice group. Since then, the group has doubled its head count to 50 lawyers, from 25.
Many are looking into complaints by low-level H.R. employees against ones at higher levels.
Yes, the H.R. department wants help investigating itself.
by David Segal, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times[ed. Back in the day we had the Personnel Department, which mostly just processed employment applications. Responsibility for interviewing and vetting applicants, dealing with behavioral and performance issues, managing work assignments, etc. were a managers role. That's what managers are supposed to do, right? Apparently not. From the comments section:
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"I worked in HR for nearly 40 years. The problem with HR is they have no power. They say they are there for the employee, but if a problem has to do with management, they are useless. This applies to any area of HR where they think, at least initially, that they are there to solve problems by relaying useful information, which is necessary for improvements both to management and to employees. That's a myth. Management is not interested in making improvements that impact employees. The only thing that might get their attention is if an employee's issue could get them sued with the outcome most likely going to be in the employee's favor. They pay lip service to whatever mission statement about "one for all and all for one" someone in HR wrote up for them to sign off on. Employees don't expect much from management, but they do, at least at first, expect something better from HR, and they don't get it."---
"I'm long retired and I've yet to meet or have heard of HR person worth a lick of salt to the employees they're theoretically there to help. In the firm I worked in most of my career, it was worse, a couple managers were corporate psychopaths and they played HR for suckers as much as they did the staff they were managing. Indeed, one routinely told us to tell them what they wanted to hear, then ignore it, here's what I want..... I even have an issue with the profession's title... I know practitioners are caring people, but my gosh, HR is a term that took over and replaced "personnel officer" .... that was at least more honest about the core of the job. As a wise person who was an expert in labor arbitration once told me — humans are NOT RESOURCES, gold, silver, oil, etc. are resources. Human are people with human needs, desires, emotions and all that, even HR people we're now told, no surprise. Resources on the other hand have always been natural stuff we dig up, grow, process, chew up and promptly discard whatever's left, moving on without skipping a step to the next batch. Maybe the HR people need to begin with a news philosophy. But I won't be holding my breath. Corporate bosses will always be king, no matter how unwise...."
