Employees are bypassing HR, sharing on LinkedIn
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
It is.
HR may do other stuff above and beyond, but their first priority will always be compliance.
Consequently, whether or not HR is the appropriate venue to address your problem boils down to -- "Is this a compliance issue for the company? And if so, will resolving it be in my favor?" (E.g. sexual harassment)
If yes/yes, go to HR. If anything else, find another line of redress.
Perhaps employee protection is better in Australia than in the US?
It is worth pointing out it only applies if your annual salary is less than the "high income threshold", which is currently AU$175,000 (approximately US$107,000). They increase that amount every year, and their definition of "income" excludes certain things (such as bonuses). If your income is above that, you can't sue under unfair dismissal law, although you still can sue for common law breach of contract (which is more difficult, however–employers generally try to word employment contracts to maximise their freedom to terminate you, although there is always the chance a court will find the relevant terms of the contract legally invalid, at least as applied to your particular case.)
Likewise, HR departments are by-and-large good places with helpful and supportive people. However, the fact that they have the ability at all to report your conversations to management means no one trusts them and they become ineffective as a result.
From HR's perspective, an employee is a body part of the business. If helping the employee (i.e., healing the body part) is best for the business, that's what HR does. If terminating the employee (i.e., amputating the body part) is best for the business, that's what HR does.
Of course, your analogy is better, because when corporations conduct layoffs to save money to do stock buybacks, that is really much closer to amputating body parts for the sake of a "weight loss" metric.
Look back to when the leading cause of death was "any slight infection" closely followed by any number of other accidents and diseases.
Health, saftey, and treatment have now become so effective that death is relatively a great deal rarer in developed countries not at war to the point where people have an expectation of friends and relatives being kept alive and strong tendency to sue when that doesn't happen; leading to many "malpractice" cases being settled and covered by insurance.
Would you rather live in a world with or without modern medicine and doctors?
No. Try a less false path.
> .. perverse billing incentives, and without unnecessarily complex dministration gatekeeping ..
Now you're doing better, these are actual shortcomings of the US health system, considerably more so than death by malpractice.
"After adding that this extrapolation was surely an underestimation of the actual problem, they concluded that this would mean medical error would rank third in the Centers for Disease Control’s list of causes of death in the U.S. This became the title of their published analysis, which has been cited in at least 1,265 papers according to Scopus, and this memorable idea spread to news articles, television shows, and alternative medicine circles.
Critics of this analysis have pointed out many flaws. It is based on studies whose data was never meant to be generalized to the entire U.S. hospitalized population. For example, one of these studies, by the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was conducted in beneficiaries of Medicare, who are aged 65 or older, have disabilities or have end-stage renal disease which requires dialysis or transplant. The study authors counted the number of deaths in their sample to which they believed medical errors had contributed, and this number was then used in the BMJ analysis to extrapolate to all U.S. hospitalizations. However, this makes the mistake of extrapolating an observation found in one sample to a different type of population. Case in point: if we look at everyone hospitalized in the United States, one patient out of ten is there to deliver a baby. Taking death statistics from a sample of Medicare patients and extrapolating it to all hospitalized patients is like turning apples into oranges, to adapt a popular saying to the current situation."
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-health/m...
At Google, I had an...unusual...de-facto manager for 2 years. After declining their offer to join their team, they spent six months engaging in behavior that violated company policies - though not in obvious ways like sexual harassment or violence.
Going to HR seemed futile. Even assuming they could keep anonymity, their role is simply to investigate and report to management three levels up. Without clear-cut violations, it becomes a credibility contest. Since upper management selected the middle managers, they're inherently biased toward defending their choices.
The situation came to a head between December 1st and January 1st. My performance rating plummeted from "O" (top 10%) to "MI" (bottom 10%) and a technically separate formal warning. Things came to a head because they were nominally leading work that was a huge political warzone between organizations, and they didn't really want to do anything. After I politely demurred their invitation to transfer, they hired a childhood friend as my replacement - they're still launching "new" features with the code I wrote two years ago.
I documented various incidents over those six months that violated Google's code of conduct. But even in the best-case scenario:
- HR confirms the violations.
- They report findings to my third-level manager.
- My second-level manager (who chose my de-facto manager) blames me.
- The third-level manager (who chose the second-level manager) defers to their choice.
I entered Google wondering how they handled professional disagreements. (I was a young CEO for the 5 years prior) Seven years later, I realized they don't - disagreement itself is seen as inappropriate. This dynamic inevitably hurts those lowest in the hierarchy. It's not malicious; everyone believes they're acting appropriately. But once anyone decides to prioritize comfort over strict policy enforcement (a natural human tendency), standard human politics take over. I honestly, swear to god, saw this in abundance at Google in ways I never saw at a fast food job.
What I once dismissed as complaints from underperformers now seems depressingly accurate.
Human RESOURCES.
Desks, xerox machine, Vasarely replica in the meeting room, humans, printers, patents and inventions, inventory in the warehouse, etc., all the same. Resources. Buy, sell, replace, act like it worths more than elsewhere. But eventually just items tossed around.
... I had a sceptic smile when one pretended they are better by pinning 'People Manager' designation on the very same person taming this troublesome and risky resource for the very big and famous but utmost caring company that I came across recently. Some seem to feel the weigth of the word (or just trying to pretend ever stronger how caring they are, when the bi-weekly pizza and everyone-is-so-happy-here group photo in company logo t-shirts are just too stale and overused).
That said - it'd be recommended that the employee have a pretty air tight story since there internet can easily turn the other way.
These folks are using their negative experiences to become influencers or teach others. I doubt the LinkedIn subtweeting at a boss actually impacts the specific toxic boss.
Some people are horrible to colleagues and peers and can work the system to progress their careers. Some organizations reward this unconsciously (because everyone is such a person!). I don’t think there’s much an individual can do to change such a culture. You just need to leave and find a better one.
Complaining to HR probably won't help you, but it could be part of what eventually helps someone. Often not worth it compared to finding another job though.
I've seen a number of people I used to work with, who are suddenly CTO's, or some C-level position, although I truly doubt it. Someone I used to work who can barely communicate in sentences and has a fairly heavy autism, and never managed anyone, is now listed as 'IT Director' on LinkedIn. I had to laugh.
And let's not forget the recruiters, who are always described like this: "Getter-Doner-of-Things; Enterpreneur; Executive Headhunter; author; Thought Leader; and Father"
Sorry, now it's me expressing my feelings.
At the point where you have to choose between going to HR and posting on LinkedIn, the company has already allowed discrimination or retaliation, and so should be punished for allowing that. If you go to HR, there's much less chance of the company being actually punished like they should be. You _want_ them to be held legally liable for allowing discrimination or retaliation
They are special trained to tear unwanted employees into shreds.
No surprise, really. They are employed by the same company you're disagreeing with.
As an employee your HR dept is your union.
LinkedIn is 99%+ corporate-slime and self-promoting behavior, and that fact makes me suspect anything someone says there.
HN is far from perfect, but, for example, there's enough people posting pseudonymously, and I think a good percentage of those are saying something because they want to say it or think it should be said. Not because they're posturing for hiring or followers.
This is exactly the reason tinnitus go to HR. Can confirm.
> Tim Glowa, the founder and CEO of HR Brain, says that "rather than venting online, reporting helps build a proper case while ensuring confidentiality and protecting your professional reputation," adding, "What you post online can follow you indefinitely."
If you read between the lines on this it’s clear as day that they are saying speaking up is bad for your career, without saying those words explicitly.
Executives, VPs and SVPs hate being held accountable by their workers, that’s my main takeaway here
For example, an issue related to something that you expressed in your public can be picked up, embraced and extended and turned into a racial or other high attention/impact issue. The press can run with it and create a mess. More likely, nobody cares, and you’ll be painted as a crazy person, and crazy people go away.
HR is there to protect the company from you, not you from the company.
That's... a pretty funny statement 8-)
Just another example of people thinking a database entry on a corporate software platform is their "real life"...
However, I’ve come to seriously respect younger workers who don’t take shit from anyone and will gladly burn a company to the ground on social media if they feel like they are being abused in the workplace.
I support civil disobedience but aren't many attempts at civil disobedience by lone actors largely ineffective?
I think its important to call out ineffective civil activism so that individuals can create more effective strategies for creating actual change for the social good.
* Don't talk about your current employer. Work within the company to solve any problems there. (If you can't solve problems there, get away ASAP. Work with a lawyer, if necessary. Still don't talk about it publicly while you're there.)
* Don't name individuals. That's fraught with risks, including you being somehow wrong and doing harm, Internet mobs being dumb as snot, and all the shameless data-mining surveillance many companies are doing could mean outsized/inappropriate harm to someone.
* Don't name a company if you've worked for them, or otherwise had non-public access to it. Who is going to trust you in the future if you don't show discretion.
* Don't violate NDA.
* Be sufficiently vague so that you can talk about generalizable learnings. Your goal is for other people to learn not to do X; your goal isn't to hurt the reputation of a person who once did X. To help anonymize the subjects, you talk about things you've "seen" (in an ambigious sense) at places you've worked, as well as with people you've talked with, companies you've studied, etc., without saying which it was. You can do this without saying anything untrue. This is harder to do with only a few years of experience, though.
* Don't try to unmask anonymous/pseudonymous other people who share, nor unmask the identity of companies/people they're talking about. You could be wrong in your deductions, or you could just be disrepecting how they tried to share with discretion in good faith.
Other guidelines/practices?
(Since you posted that one-line response, at least 3 people have downvoted me, but no explanation other than your one-line disagreement without argument. So I'm not learning much, and maybe I wasted my time bothering to type out my current thinking.)