HR has lost the trust of employees
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I'm going to strongly oppose this, with a simple statement to support my claim that HR is decidedly not on the employees side when a conflict arises:
Follow the money.
Who pays the HR bill? It certainly ain't you.
Edited to add: when a conflict arises in response to @Joky
Which is nonsense, of course: Neither I, nor the customers, nor the end users, have the authority to hire HR staff, sign off on their salary payments, or set their working policies.
Even when HR is perfectly operational, it favors the institution over anything else. Of course, in real life we have difficulty favoring the institution over the management.
I imagine some questions are out of HR's reach though. Why is the pay highest at the top? Why should a supervisor need more pay than the people they supervise? Why can't we make all pay information public in a public company? Could we recruit, hire, and keep talented people (especially at the top) with something other than simply better pay? How "hands-on" should HR be?
When all you've got is an agent, everything looks like a principal.
This leads to fads such as stack ranking which in 99% of cases causes huge damage to companies by being penny wise and pound foolish.
What would happen if your company did not have a HR dept?
- who would greet and onboard new employees?
- who would sign them up for health care?
- who would pay them and send out tax forms?
Even if there may be other roles that take care of the above I'm sure a lot more stuff I'm not thinking of right now would get a lot more annoying without a HR dept.
HR are what would be called in the military REMFs. Most corporations I've worked with have an order of magnitude more "support" staff than people who are actually doing revenue-producing work, and the bigger they are, the more wastage of this type they can afford to support, which feeds upon itself to produce yet more management and ancillary positions.
I worked at a company in which my reporting manager was significantly harassing me. He did so via recorded systems. The next day, after each time I had a direct complaint and brought it to HR, he then walked through the punishments indicated in the handbook. He indicated "we don't have good ways to ascertain performance", and then said I had "bad performance" during the HR meeting. This set up no bells and whistles with HR.
Eventually, he then made up data claiming that I didn't maintain a specific system in a certain way. Truth of the matter was it was handed to me in a failed state before I started working for him. HR was complicit in supporting manager in a firing, even after proof of harassment and retaliation.
HR is only good for one thing - and that is defending the company. You're a nothing; a cog that can be replaced. If you have problems in your company, leave. It's not your duty to fix their problems. That's for the C()O positions. Leave before they can make you do so.
In practice you'll settle out of court, likely with an non-disclosure agreement.
But lets just say this: if you're a policy driver and you contract out networking operations, have an indepth review of all the servers they maintain. Things are not rosy underneath.
Companies would be weary of hiring people that sued previous employers and not for no reason no one can ever know the facts first hand and even borderline frivolous law suits tend to be settled, so having the choice between someone who sued a previous employer and someone who hasn’t most companies would opt out for the latter.
It became evident to me that while there are multiple things they do, the primary purpose is to shield the company from liability. Not to help you, as is so often the claim.
We had one at a meeting at British Telecom address a meeting of or group when asked about this years pay rise seem to think we where all the same blue collar grades as the "engineers" or telecoms linemen and that we where getting the CWU agreed increases.
I almost said so we are all getting the Band D increase then (4.6%)
That's the entire thesis of the article.
Using the legal analogy should make this abundantly clear. Only a fool would think the other side's lawyer has their best interests in mind.
Simplest advice for dealing with HR is: Don't talk to HR
IANAL (anymore), but I'm not sure this is true. That is, there could be certain remedies/benefits/claims that you might give up if you never put the company on notice of the misbehavior. For example, if someone offers you a promotion in exchange for romantic involvement, this would be illegal. You could make claims against the individual. But if no one ever told the company (HR or someone with mandatory reporting obligations), then the company might not be liable. And if this were a one-off situation, this makes sense — the company had no way of knowing that the bad actor was doing anything wrong. But if you tell HR or someone who must report it to HR, then the company is on notice and if they don't deal with the situation appropriately then you can pursue legal remedies against them as well.
This is just my recollection from many workplace harassment trainings that we had at the law firm I worked at — I would welcome a more nuanced analysis by a specialist.
Now you're fucked.
It is important that you give the company notice of bad behavior so that they can be held responsible later if they fail to stop it. That notice could come from your attorney if you want to feel more protected, but saying blanket "don't talk to HR ever" is not correct.
An employee's own management has a much better idea of how much they are worth to the company than HR does. The folks in HR don't even understand what the employee actually does, or how they compare to their peers in the industry, all they have is meaningless tables of job title vs. salary range that they've purchased from some remuneration consulting firm.
If you're someone in an entry level HR job in a large company, I pity you, because all your dreams about having a really employee friendly and helpful function will be crushed beyond recognition within a year on the job. If you're someone at a higher level HR job, I totally despise your existence in the organization, despise your methods, your way of thinking and acting. You aid and abet "crimes" against employees to satisfy the executives, just like bureaucrats do with politicians. I have no respect at all for you!
P.S.: This may not apply to all companies, but it's true for most.
In most cases HR really combines a number of things into one working group that none of them are good at. There's compliance, which really ought to be handled by attorneys; there's finance, which really ought to be run by accountants; and there's recruiting, which is really the only role that HR teams can hope to claim competence at. But most of them are bad at this as well. Some companies have event planning and employee sat programs. But HR people are typically not good at sat programs. Those programs need analysts and data scientists to perform experiments. So you've got maybe two real roles they could be good at: recruiting and planning parties.
All of these things could easily be outsourced or handed off to other teams. Need a launch party? Hire a professional party planner once or twice a year. Need a recruiter? They are everywhere. Need to make sure everyone's got the required sexual harassment training? Bring in someone to do it once a year.
I can't for the life of me understand how any company justifies keeping an HR team around. I mean, who do you really want dealing with a complaint? Someone who is going to try to smooth things over or ignore them because they have no clue about what's at stake? Or do you want to talk to the company's attorney, who will absolutely give a shit about how much hot water harassment can get them into?
Everything about HR teams is utterly suspect and useless. Someone needs to start a business infrastructure as a service company that includes legal, accounting, hr, recruiting, and events. That company will clean house. The value proposition is that you, the client, focus on the business, the service provider takes care of everything else. Tons of money saved; happier employees who don't have to deal with shit; and a lot of trust earned along the way--trust in the company, where it belongs.
Sadly these weren't the people who made the decisions.
So you have like 1-10% of people who make decisions for the company wealth and 90-99% who have to realize these. Often they aren't happy about this :(
That's exactly what conflict of interest means: a situation in which the concerns or aims of two different parties are incompatible.
They can't offer you advice. Well, I mean, they can and they do, but take it with a Ganymede-sized grain of salt.
And, assuming you are a white collar worker (like a programmer) with a full-time permanent job, if you do not trust anybody where you work, why have a permanent position? Why not either become a contractor, or join a job with a union to collectively bargain for you? Are you not the ultimate chump in participating in a system where you are bargaining implicitly from the weakest position?
The upside: you don't have to feel bad about being a mercenary about it. You can feel shameless in trying to negotiate higher pay (regardless of your performance or ability).
A permanent position is only good because it's effectively higher comp (i.e., benefits, severance, etc). Most programmers are at-will employed anyway so it's not that much different from contractors.
A union is also, in theory, a good thing. However, over time it's evolved into a different beast with its own set of problems.
It's not sad to me. It's common sense. In life, you trust your family and your friends - that's it. Anyone who isn't family or friends and who wants you to trust them is suspect (your boss, other companies, your government).
Of course you can have friendly relations with all and sundry in your company. I am on good terms with everyone where I work, from the cleaners to the regional CEO. But trust is a different matter altogether.
Should we believe that family and friends are beyond the reach of the cardinal sins? I'm going to proclaim loudly: No! Family and friends are ideally placed to defraud us and sleep with our partner.
This isn't and indictment against trust, because, in practice, we trust family and friends anyway, and are rightly surprised and disappointed when they let us down.
We shouldn't be surprised or disappointed when HR, Legal, Management, etc, turn against us.
Is HR more trustworthy than, say, the Chinese government ? Yes
(in most cases) is HR more trustworthy than far-off management of the company ? Usually, yes.
Are your friends and colleagues more trustworthy than HR ? Definitely
Is your family more trustworthy than your friends ? Usually
Of course your situation may differ, and some common sense needs to be applied, but HR is VERY low on the trust ladder.
If you're in a good employment situation, you trust your CEO to run the company well and create good opportunities and prevent abuse in the chain of command.
If you're in a bad situation, you trust nobody and quietly collect your paycheck.
In the middle, you trust your manager to be a decent person and not throw you under the bus.
HR is legal for the company. You need to take steps in your own hand. Not illegal, mind you. But you need to protect yourself.
This, a thousand times this!
In my last job, we had a media license that was set to expire after some months. My employer, thinking I was a fool, told me that we could just keep using it for a few months after the expiry and when we got caught we would just call it an "accounting error."
All along, the plan was to hold me responsible and fire me when we got caught. It's not the first time he's pulled that, so I wrote it down. He's the sort to take credit for your ideas, but blame you for his failures.
Because of him, I never trust someone who has skin in the game. They'll sell me out in a cold second ("nothing personal, it's just business.") if it'll help their bottom line or career prospects.
In short: get everything in writing, take photos of the computer clock and calender when you finish after working overtime, write down the details of any meetings or discussions. If you're in a place where health and safety issues aren't ever dealt with then photograph everything, with as much dating evidence as you can (front page of the day's paper, perhaps). Don't attend disciplinary meetings alone, have a lawyer with you.
Most importantly, know your rights and assert them. All the time. Don't let something slide just once, because "You worked one hour overtime last week, so it's now part of your job..."
Don't trust them.
For the record, I trust people who behaved trustworthy and ethically in the past. E.g. I watch how they treat others, whether they lie about them or to them and assume they will treat me the same.
If HR past claims checks out, if they promised only thinga I consider realistic etc, I will trust them. Otherwise not.
There are a large number of people who read HN. While you might speculate as to why someone cast a particular vote in any particular direction (though we generally only notice the downvotes), it's not generally going to be useful. They may have voted for a reason you agree with, or one you don't, or one you don't understand at all. Note that you assume you know the reason they down-voted. And this is completely human: by default we attribute causes and stories and explanations, and it takes effort to explore more than those the first seem to fit the evidence. It's not a fault; as far as we can tell it's just a fact of human psychology.
And if they didn't provide an explanation at the time, the likelihood of them doing so after the fact isn't all that high. This is I suspect one of the motivations for the HN guideline
> "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If I were to speculate, I'd say it's a reaction to the last line: "Are you not the ultimate chump in participating in a system where you are bargaining implicitly from the weakest position?", as people don't generally react well to an implication that they're chumps, even made in passing as a hypothetical. I don't know whether that is the reason, or whether that's a valid reason, but I mention it as an example of another reason.
All in all, just follow the guidelines. If you have something substantial to add, do so in the most constructive way you can, keeping in mind that while you can't control how others behave on HN, you can influence it by how you comment. I believe that's how we get to a level of discussion, as you well put it, a few cuts above the rest.
That's it. Anything else asking too much, and anything less is not acceptable. If I can't count on each and every one of those things, I won't take a job. If any of those things get violated, I'm out.
Of course there are different tolerance levels for different things. The people on your team are people. They have bad days. We all do. But if someone has too many bad days, then it goes back to the boss needing to protect my time. I don't know what the threshold is, but at a certain point, the boss needs to take action, so that my time isn't getting eaten up by an unprofessional coworker. That could mean someone who's just bad at his job, and I have to fix things. That could mean that there's some harassment going on. One of those could potentially be fixed with a pip. One of those needs to be addressed immediately.
On the other hand, if a company fucks up payroll, I'm looking for a new gig immediately. That's it. We're done.
I was in a management position for the first time at my last job, and I will soon be again at my new job. I actually have a lot more sympathy for managers than I used to. As a manager, you don't really have a group of peers you can expect to be professional. You have competitors who pretend to be peers. And that sucks. You're kind of alone. I highly recommend Michael Lopp's book, managing humans to anyone who hasn't read it.
The bottom line is that I don't think my expectations are really out of line. I think of them as the bare minimum of what I will accept as an employee and the bare minimum of what I will provide as a manager. If I can't get that as an individual contributor, the company is broken. If I can't provide that as a manger, I'm broken.
I’ve had to fire a few people in my time. Most of them ended up getting fired vs a suspension or other punishment because they confided in HR.
Unless you’re a real consultant who goes from job to job, contracting isn’t much better. You still subject to bad bosses and bad prime contractors. But... if your spouse has good benefits you can make a lot more.
More to the point, a Human Resource professional is only doing a good job with respect to the company if he/she only sees "Humans As Resources". The main job of HR is Hiring and Firing, and the more exposure one has to employees, the harder this is to do.
> Affirming our commitment to diversity and inclusion—and healthy debate
> Googlers,
> I’m Danielle, Google’s brand new VP of Diversity, Integrity & Governance. I started just a couple of weeks ago, and I had hoped to take another week or so to get the lay of the land before introducing myself to you all. But given the heated debate we’ve seen over the past few days, I feel compelled to say a few words.
> Many of you have read an internal document shared by someone in our engineering organization, expressing views on the natural abilities and characteristics of different genders, as well as whether one can speak freely of these things at Google. And like many of you, I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender. I’m not going to link to it here as it’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.
> Diversity and inclusion are a fundamental part of our values and the culture we continue to cultivate. We are unequivocal in our belief that diversity and inclusion are critical to our success as a company, and we’ll continue to stand for that and be committed to it for the long haul. As Ari Balogh said in his internal G+ post, “Building an open, inclusive environment is core to who we are, and the right thing to do. ‘Nuff said.”
> Google has taken a strong stand on this issue, by releasing its demographic data and creating a company wide OKR on diversity and inclusion. Strong stands elicit strong reactions. Changing a culture is hard, and it’s often uncomfortable. But I firmly believe Google is doing the right thing, and that’s why I took this job.
> Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions. But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws.
> I’ve been in the industry for a long time, and I can tell you that I’ve never worked at a company that has so many platforms for employees to express themselves — TGIF, Memegen, internal G+, thousands of discussion groups. I know this conversation doesn’t end with my email today. I look forward to continuing to hear your thoughts as I settle in and meet with Googlers across the company.
> Thanks,
As if anyone can't take a trip to Google Scholar and find that even at the average, men have the equivalent of a 13 IQ point advantage in measures of mechanical reasoning [0], or that in every nation surveyed, men and women prefer sex-typical careers when asked, and culture has no to modest impact on these choices [1].
Bringing up these scientific results, even carefully, when asked for pertinent feedback on a policy, even in a company entrusted with shepherding the world's information, will cost you your job and reputation because of the chilled walking on eggshells environment they enforce.
Or fired from Apple after a 20 year career for saying diversity isn't just about identity quotas.
[0] http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri...
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-008-9380-7
That jumped out at me as the one sentence that most strongly supports your claim of ideological puritanism.
I mean, it wouldn't be an "alternative view" if it didn't rub The Current Standard[1] the wrong way.
In practice what this says is: we want you to feel safe to express your alternative views, so we know who to fire. Which is perfectly rational from a company's perspective, and we should all know this by now: choose your battles.
1. The current standard is the equivalent of an adolescent restricted to the diet of an infant. The rapidly changing body would acquire dysfunctional and deformative symptoms and could not properly mature on a diet of apple sauce and crushed pears. - Saul Williams in Coded Language.
That jumped out at me as the one sentence that most strongly supports your claim of ideological puritanism.
I mean, it wouldn't be an "alternative view" if it didn't rub The Current Standard[1] the wrong way.
In practice what this says is: we want you to feel safe to express your alternative views, so we know who to fire. Which is perfectly rational from a company's perspective, and we should all know this by now; choose your battles.
1. The current standard is the equivalent of an adolescent restricted to the diet of an infant. The rapidly changing body would acquire dysfunctional and deformative symptoms and could not properly mature on a diet of apple sauce and crushed pears. - Saul Williams in Coded Language.