My billion pound company has no HR department
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
> "But what if there is a case of bullying to be resolved, or a contract dispute that requires specialist knowledge?
Jackson says he expects his managers to take personal responsibility for these things (with appropriate training) rather than "shelving responsibility to a third party" - just as he used to do when managing his teams."
Is he seriously claiming that he expects individual managers to deal with employment law disputes themselves? If so it only means that they have not had an employment law dispute yet...
If you insert HR in the main company hierarchy, you now have managers who do HR stuff.
Even if you don't call it HR, you still have HR.
I thought this is all understood and does not need spelling out?
But the latter is self-evidently ridiculous, whereas the former happens all the time...
That's a shame. I have. And absolutely love them, and wouldn't trade them for more engineers.
They could useful from an operational standpoint to make sure your resources are being allocated effectively if they focused on process improvements for the company that nobody else has time to test and implement. For example, HR should be keeping track of performance and worker satisfaction working from home; they should have data about performance and satisfaction in the office and compare it, be up to date on hiring and salary trends and have an opinion on what is necessary and appropriate in terms of perks and salary to hire competitively. This is all useful.
There is also a perception issue, as in my experience it feels like they are usually just there to print off some information about health insurance for you and run useless exercises.
Yes. Otherwise you tend to get keyword-based filtering or random filtering based on perceived "cultural fit".
> visa appplications
That is easy to outsource and get good results.
You get that with non-HR managers though; it's not HR-exclusive.
Yes. HR without software development background simply don't have knowledge to do this effectively.
Or they might look at hiring a 10-20 person HR department and say "3 million a year vs a (theoretically) one-time 3 million judgment? We'll keep taking our chances"
It could be a great place to work or an awful place to work. It probably depends a lot on who you are and which manager you end up reporting to.
1) Risk management and mitigation, in which it acts like a police department. There are few checks or balances on HR power, and having police often outweighs the benefits of that police. I've heard of organizations where HR was more than a little bit toxic
2) Support and help. As a manager:
* I don't know what to do if e.g. a high-performing employee with high-level access to confidential information embezzled the company. A manager will run into situations like that one perhaps once in their career. I'd like to turn that over to professionals who know when to call the police, when to turn off the keycard and shut off IT access, or when to have a stern conversation.
* If there's a sexual assault accusation, do I want to be the person who fires someone who might be innocent and has their kids lose their livelihood? Do I want to be the person who tells a potential victim there's not enough evidence.
* There's the daily load of questions about vacation policies, health benefits, disabilities, or complex immigration issues. Quite frankly, I have no idea here, and I really don't want to have an idea.
My experience is that I run into once-a-career issues perhaps every 6-24 months at my rung of the management ladder, and it's helpful to have people who have been through them several times. I definitely don't want to be in a position of making Tough Choices when Bad Things happen. I'm good at mentorship and tech leadership, not e.g. fraud investigations, and I don't want the emotional load those entail.
A good HR department is incredibly helpful (just so long as everyone remembers they work for the company; they're not your agent or some kind of neutral party).
People can work and function without a police force hovering over their every move. The company culture has to be really strong though.
"we lost all the sales data from before 2012"
How?
"Bob left and he'd been storing everything on the cloud. We didn't notice for a while. Then we couldn't find the password, and after a year passed the data was deleted"
(This isn't to say local storage solves the problem. "The folder on the network drive is missing.")
How they do this could be it's own article
* a team to manage the cloud relationship for email/web/hosting for their own apps, and colo if needed.
* design their own laptop images (or get them designed by the vendor) and outsource laptop provisioning/imaging to a 3rd party. If you use virtual desktops you can use your cloud vendor for hosting them.
Both of those could be 5-10 people with the right skills (called it an "infrastructure" team) -- less than 5 is possible but would create key person risk. There's still people with the right set of specialized skills, but it hasn't become a huge bureaucratic organization.
Looking at their website, they appear to have a data science team, so none of this precludes them having other teams to address cross-cutting concerns like cyber-sec, reliability, etc. Or from having software developers attached to teams tasked with delivering new products, e.g. they have several API offerings[1].
Why not call it just the IT team? What would the difference be, really?
> How can a company learn how to find better and better ways to deal with things if it takes all of the intelligence of its people and diverts them from those big problems.
This is an argument for HR and IT, not against. If everyone in your organisation has to go out shopping for their own computer and set up their own sharepoint etc, they're all wasting their time doing something that should've been taken care of for them.
The problem isn't the existence of HR and IT, it's the dynamic of HR and IT as a set of interest groups - putting processes in place that make IT or HR's lives easier at the cost of productivity the other employees.
"Take it to the Apple store".
Are you fucking kidding me? You want me to send my staff out during the lockdown to get a piece of YOUR hardware fixed? No option to ship it, no drop off desk at our office or something.
You're absolutely right that when you setup a department called "IT" they are now a group of people that need to be catered to as much as the other staff.
"We don't want to expose IT staff to risk, so send your own staff to get the computers repaired. Then it's your fault if they get sick and die." was the message I got.
If you actually think that something bad is going on, talking up actual hierarchy (complaining to higher ups) or leaving are only two sensible options. And if complaining to higher ups, then you put your resignation to HR.
But none of my interactions with HR made me think that these would be people capable to solve issues. They don't have processes to even realize problems are happening. They don't have trust of employees either.
I've interacted with HR teams at a couple of jobs in the UK. These interactions have been fine. They have been there as the contact people to make sure I get paid for my work, that I can access my benefits, and that I am subject to the procedures and processes that I'm entitled to.
They are paid by the company and therefore they of course work for the company – and part of that job is ensuring compliance. But this is the same as e.g. a security officer, or a health and safety officer, or any number of other roles the involve running companies correctly and in accordance with best practices in a way that can benefit both company and staff. It's not an "either-or" situation!
I would see this as "routine administration". It is useful thing.
> with suggested lines of questioning for soft-skills, a framework for the decision process
Our HR quite sux in these. They also consistently attempt to match people on positions that don't suit them - both by personality (the persons personality not matching job) and by technical knowledge/background. So their input is not trusted and managers doing hiring consistently complain about it or simply ignore them.
This is an ad hominem but I don’t care: I have seen you here many times before pushing right-wing disinformation - and not something can be chalked up to a valid difference of opinion, but instead indicating that you are either a saboteur or, at best, hopelessly ignorant.
I see that yesterday you were pushing the (utterly preposterous and despicable) right-wing conspiracy that the COVID lockdowns are a progressive ruse and that after vaccinations the lockdowns will continue under different pretenses.
So I am wondering if maybe your hostility to HR comes from the possibility that you are a right-wing crank who makes employees extremely uncomfortable? I sure as heck wouldn’t hire you for anything!
I won that fight and that person was gone fast.
Do you work in HR? I don’t think I’d hire you either.
Nobody is saying HR is infallible. But a mistake like “HR had a silly policy around hiring” is not as bad for an organization as “the director of engineering got drunk, harassed an intern, and threatened to fire her if she complained.”
This was at a time when the company was growing customer base by 100% every few months and we needed people ASAP. HR decided it was marginally easier for them if everyone started on the 1st, harming productivity of value-add departments.
Making your life marginally better at the expense of company growth is ruling with an iron fist. Every department needs to be willing to do what it takes to sustain growth.
> “the director of engineering got drunk, harassed an intern, and threatened to fire her if she complained.”
It’s unclear to me how HR is any different from the CEO here. If any employee at my company experienced sexual harassment I would expect them to come to me, and said Director would be out the door within minutes. No need for HR there. If anything they’re just another hoop the victim has to jump through.
If the intern trusted you, why why would HR be a hoop they had to jump through?
How many employees do you have that rampant start date abuse had been going on without your knowledge?
Still, though, most of those issues can still apply to HR. IME, employees rarely trust HR departments to be on their side in a dispute. They’re paid by the company to look after the company’s interests, after all.
I agree with this - if a CEO tolerates bad behavior (such as sexual harassment) in their company, having an HR department or not will make little difference.
See, there are several processes that
If you’re in the growth stage of a tech startup, you need engineers and support ASAP.
HR making their life marginally easier on themselves at the expense of growth is unacceptable to me.
I legitimately cannot even fathom it. This is akin to telling God how to run Heaven.
That's a great way to torpedo your career.
"You can't invest $10 million in ergonomic chairs." should be "While ergonomic chairs are a good investment, we might be better served investing $10 million in our core competencies for now, and perhaps focus later on the chairs when our revenue stream is a bit more stable."
"You can't add cool-sounding feature because it's an inherent security risk." should be, "While cool-sounding feature does, indeed, sound cool, I'm concerned about the potential liability this might expose the company to, given that implementing cool-sounding feature causes <security issue> by its very nature. I could look at implementing something that mimics the functionality of cool-sounding feature, but keeps our products secure."
And lastly, Humble Jr. QA Engineer should say, "Mr./Mrs./Miss So-And-So, if I claim that bug <Z> is fixed when its not, this might come back to reflect negatively on our company when Customer Y reports that bug."
And lastly, almost every company's founder / CEO / leader has dictatorial powers. Companies aren't governments. You live and die by the good graces of those above you, and if you can get noticed by the people at the very top, and you consistently deliver for them, you'll have a far more pleasant work life.
Or just telling people what they can and can't do and see how that one works out for you...
Maybe HR is an underutilized or badly utilized department in certain places. I dont know. Just thoughts I been having about HR.
EDIT: I'm not saying that companies are using HR successfully. I am saying that this is my view at how HR can be (and should be) used successfully. It all stems from the realization that humans are a company's most important resource. Accepting that conjecture, having good HR (how ever way you define that) is extremely important.
You have a very strange idea of what a HR department does. Its job is to protect management from workers, and that's it. "HR is not your friend" is a common saying for a reason.
They're literally paper pushers to make sure contracts are drafted correctly, salary payments arrive etc..
You are describing a union.
HR exists to serve the companies interests, not the employees.
As the name implies, the purpose is to manage, and maximize the efficient utilization of, the resource "human being".
This can mean preventing abuse because it's a legal issue or because it's bad for productivity and team morale.
But it just as often means shuffling people around and making sure affected employees keep quiet, don't cause a stir or actually sue.
This is not black or white, of course, there are companies and HR departments that value employees and try protect them, but there will always be a conflict of interest because the primary goal is to help the company.
Human Resources exists to limit liability of, and reduce the associated costs caused by, the humans at your company.
I have a close friend who used to be the Vice President of Human Resources at one of the largest companies on the planet. I have known this person since I was 7. Working in HR changed him, and definitely not for the better. He told me about how early in his career, he had to a fire a man who had worked at <Enormous Defense Contractor> for 28 years. Who, according to their records, had only ever taken 3 sick days. He didn't fire him because of poor performance. He didn't fire him because of a sexual harassment scandal. He fired him because the Director of HR told him to fire him, because he was one of the last employees brought in under a 30 year retirement scheme, and he was going to eligible for a 50% pension in 14 months.
He created a predictive analytic model that could identify when someone was considering leaving their job within a 3-6 month period, with 94% accuracy.
He has told me about conversation after conversation where an employee came to him for a raise but instead he convinced them that they didn't want more money, they wanted more recognition and responsibility, so he created new job titles for them a laughably increased salaries that didn't even keep place with inflation.
He recently tendered his resignation and has since gone to work for a private firm, where he no longer has to be a, quite frankly, ruthless piece of shit.
He's a far better person for it. His drinking has considerably diminished, and his outlook on humanity is far less dark. HR is where decent people become twisted into cynical shitbags and where evil mother fuckers become downright sinister. In 25 years, I've only ever known one decent HR person. Just one.