
Human Resources Isn’t About Humans - rbanffy
https://backchannel.com/human-resources-isnt-about-humans-c09c6c3b8a4f
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webnrrd2k
I've assumed HR is primarily about providing legal cover for the business and
it's upper management. HR exists primarily as a mechanism to minimize
staff/employee lawsuits.

Sure, they also do the paperwork for health care enrollment and track your
vacations and such, but that's a fairly minor role. At least that has been my
experience. Maybe I'm cynical, though?

~~~
vec
It is undeniably true that HR departments exist for the benefit of the
company, not its employees, but I've never quite understood why that leads to
the bad outcomes it does.

If an employee complains to HR of harassment, it seems like the most coldly
rational, protect-the-company reaction they could have would be to do
everything in their power to prevent the complaint from going public and
creating a PR nightmare. Taking the complaint seriously is in their power,
usually make the complainant go away peacefully, and makes you the "good guy"
in the court of public opinion if it comes to that.

Furthermore, given a situation where one of your staff is abusing their
position in any way, I would think most companies would rather find that out
from their HR department than from the local newspaper or the district
attorney.

So why isn't that the default strategy for HR departments? I understand that
not every HR director is necessarily competent, and that large enough power
discrepancies can overcome a lot of good intentions, but it seems like best-
practice HR procedure is to essentially sweep problems under the rug and hope
they go away instead of making an effort to honestly address them. That can't
possibly be a good long-term strategy, can it?

~~~
GVIrish
A lot of the reason HR departments behave the way they do, is because of who
they report to. The people in the C-suite set the tone and if they create a
culture of sweeping things under the rug or otherwise excusing bad behavior,
HR will do that too.

The other thing is that people bring their bias with them and an
organization's culture can make it worse. If someone is a bit biased against
victims of harassment, in HR they'll tend to side with the harasser. If the
culture of the company already tends towards hostile/indifferent/unsupportive,
it only makes HR's behavior worse.

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danso
> _Here’s a story: I worked for a company that let an influential person go at
> the 11-month mark — four weeks shy of a stock option vesting date. This
> person, a public figure, unsurprisingly spent the next few years publicly
> badmouthing the company. It would have been trivial to grant him the extra
> month of vesting, and if he’d left with his options intact, the company’s
> reputation wouldn’t have taken repeated public hits. Instead, management
> went by The Rules, ignoring real-world repercussions. Perhaps an
> ombudsperson could untangle the administrivia that makes troubled departures
> worse than necessary._

While the concept of an HR-ombudsman is intriguing, this doesn't strike me as
the kind of decision the ombudsman should be particularly tasked with. For
one, I've always associated the ombudsman role as one that investigates
complaints without being beholden to the corporate authority, i.e. the thing
that constrains HR to act in behalf of the company's interests.

The worry that an employee deserves special treatment because of that
employee's connections/privilege does not strike me as a "complaint". Street-
smarts, perhaps, but it's already the prerogative of management and PR to
break the rules for public-facing real-world concerns. An ombudsperson being
influential in bending the rules in favor of someone who is deemed
important/better-than-the-average employee strikes me as the very opposite of
the decision that the ombudsperson should be concerned with.

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JSeymourATL
> But too many people in HR roles are, to be blunt, not suited to the work. -

True. Coincidentally, HR has some of the lowest-paid professional roles on the
org chart. You get what you pay for.

~~~
JTon
Sort of a tangent but I wonder, since HR reps can generally view employee
salary info, that leads to higher rates of dissatisfaction. Moreover, I wonder
what forces keep HR salaries lower, since they can view the entire "playing
field"

~~~
ClassyHacker
lower barrier to entry maybe?

~~~
JSeymourATL
> what forces keep HR salaries lower...

Simple talent market demand/supply issue. There are tons of people with
liberal arts degrees. Engineering, not so much.

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kabdib
My rule of thumb: Never, ever go to HR with an issue that is not clerical in
nature. If you have an issue that involves things you'd expect HR to be
responsible for (safe workplace, abusive behavior, etc.) you will be shafted.
Simple numerical issues ("Hey, you paid me too much last month") will often be
handled efficiently.

I'd make an exception for blatantly illegal behavior, in which case I'd report
the issue anonymously.

HR is not there for employees.

------
tlogan
It is Human _Resources_ \- division of company responsible for overall
managing of _resources_ which are biologically humans.

~~~
mywittyname
The rep is the human, you're the resource.

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kwhitefoot
I think HN titles should start carrying country codes just as they sometimes
have dates. My experience of HR is that they are people trying to do their
best for everyone. But this is in a different country (Norway). Of course I
could just be lucky, perhaps it is just this company, or just the division, or
the factory, or even just the people themselves.

Nonetheless I think it is time for HN to admit, and celebrate, that it has
become an international forum and start behaving accordingly.

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moron4hire
Did nobody notice that "human" is just an adjective in "human resources"? The
operative noun is "resources".

~~~
nkrisc
I always wince slightly when "people" are referred to as "resources." As in,
"we need more dev resources for this project." You mean developers, which are
people.

~~~
pklausler
When I'm around cargo-cult management types who use "resource" to mean
"person", I've been known to introduce myself as "a resource in the ____
group" just to see whether it will slide by unnoticed.

------
edent
CTRL+F union

No results.

How many lawyers does your employer have? How many do you have? Equalise
things. Join a union!

Don't have the clout to change something yourself? Join a union!

Worried that the boss will retaliate and you won't be able to do anything?
Join a union!

Want a friendly, non-judgemental ear to give you advice? Join a union!

Want to gather lots of information about working conditions in a safe a
anonymous way? Join a union!

Worried that you're being discriminated against? Join a union!

Need to bargain for better rights or pay? JOIN A UNION!

Want to improve the way the "lazy fat cat union bosses" work? Guess what -
unions are democratic! Join a union and improve it!

I'm in a senior(ish) position in the tech industry and I'm a proud member of
[https://www.prospect.org.uk/](https://www.prospect.org.uk/)

When I've had problems, my union has given me top-notch advice. They've
provided expensive legal support. They've trained me up. They've helped me
out. I pay ~£18/month to be a member. I consider it a form of legal insurance
- and it is bloody cheap. Oh, bonus points, the settlement they got me when my
position was made redundant has paid for the union dues for many years to
come.

tl;dr Unions work.

~~~
ManFromUranus
I disagree, just ask the manufacturing industry how well unions work. They
worked well at getting employers to relocate their production facilities.

~~~
crpatino
In an ideal world, union leadership should work _with_ management team to make
the company succeed _and_ share the fruits of that success with the rank and
file employees. A corollary of this is that if the company fails to succeed,
there will be no goodies to share.

In practice, American unions failed to see that. Even if we ignore the cases
where leadership just enriched themselves, unions concerned themselves mostly
with extracting as much value as the employer would bear, and to a lesser
degree to shield employees from the consequences of their mistakes.

On the other hand, fluid capitals means jobs would have gotten outsourced
regardless of union's stance. In Mexico, which is far from having the cheapest
labor in the world, minimum wage is less than $5USD _per day_. There are loads
of social problems derived from that, but the fact that this is feasible at
all relies on a much lower cost of living compared with USA. Try to implement
that on the other side of the border and you'd be facing bread riots in no
time.

~~~
s73ver
This is wrong. Back in the day, unions did see that, and were happy to work
with the companies. However, the companies were the ones that broke that
social contract first, trying to frame negotiations as adversarial.

And, so what if the employees are trying to extract as much value as they can
out of their employer? Isn't that what capitalism is all about? Isn't that
what the employer is doing to the employees, and anyone else they deal with?
Why do we see it as acceptable for the company to do so, but not the workers?

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rdiddly
A bit confusing that this article starts out stating that HR is flawed
_fundamentally_ and irretrievably because of the nature of its inherent
purpose, and then goes on to suggest ways to _reform_ HR. Can you reform
something (and also, why bother reforming something) that has, as its purpose,
something diametrically opposed to all of your supposed reforms?

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dragonwriter
Human resources is about managing humans _as_ resources controlled by the
employer.

This is kind of obvious from the name.

