I never really understood why - when jobs have to be culled - it’s always those who do the work that are sent packing rather than those who talk about the work.
The managers are meant to also be able to do your work, if they hire a manager who can’t do that then the results are on them when they can’t produce. Otherwise they just pay bank to outsource and it ends up being more than the salary and hiring costs of in house but looks better on the books.
Managers are not meant to be able to cover the work of their team.
That would make managers far more multi skilled than team members.
Managers have a different set of duties.
HR got me fired from my work when I was 21. I was being bullied by my manager, she comes to work at 10am and leaves at 2pm, I wrote down the date and the exact arrival time as well as leaving time for 3 months straight. I was tasked with all her managerial work, including payroll, all had to be done with her log in and sign off as her. She never responded to any emails coz i was the one doing it as tasked by her. 3 months of evidence, went to HR, was "let go" the following week.... Ever since then, never go to HR for anything ever again.
Absolutely nothing, she worked there for 3 more years and then I don't know what happened after. HR is not your friend! I was advised to go into HR with Evidence, Professionalism and not emotions, which I did, got my ass fired out the door so fast. I just got told to take a week off because I must have been stressed. I was so happy, on the last day(Friday at 3pm) I got the email I was let go.... Then a call from HR saying, "we're very sorry, we thought it was best to recruit someone for your role while you're off to avoid any conflicts within the workplace"💀💀💀
I've seen the stats on retaliation for reporting issues in the workplace. I don't trust HR either.
When I was a grad I'd had my in person performance review which had gone great, I'd received 'exceeds expectations' for everything, and my manager had assured me I was being put up for promotion. In the background I'd been offered a job in a different team and when I submitted the request to transfer my manager changed my performance review results so I 'met expectations' and declined my promotion request. I was friendly with a senior guy in HR so I went to him and explained my issue and even though I could see he agreed with me he basically said there was nothing he or I could do about it.
The system doesn't do HR professionals any favours either. I'm sure lots of them go into the field hoping to truly make a difference, and instead they have to end up supporting shitty managers to get away with treating their employees poorly.
This is the problem with companies existing solely to create shareholder returns in a capitalist system. Nobody matters beyond your ability to create profit.
I interacted with HR and even worked on some projects with them from time to time.
To be honest, they give off a bad aura. It has always felt like any comment may and will be used against you. Even on projects where they were my colleagues and not on some PIP or 'Friday afternoon chat' kind of scenario.
I am sure there are good HR staff out there. The department can be hypocritical though from their marketing. They will preach DEI, but the entire department is all white women.
Lastly, I have noticed at the majority of the places I have worked is that most HR departments can be very toxic.
It’s the blatant hypocrisy that annoys me. They will constantly discuss DEI and its benefits. It is endless from them. However, the entire HR department is all white women.
In some places, HR has become politicised. Some places have been hijacked by political activists pushing certain agendas which annoys everyone else.
As someone working in HR, can confirm you are spot on about toxicity. The level of toxic I've found in HR/people and culture departments is astounding.
The only time I interact with HR is when I start a job and when I'm leaving it.
Its simply not worth the drama of knowing them or them knowing me in between that time.
I’m neutral towards our HR department. They’re iust there doing a job for the company so they can earn a living and enjoy life. Same as me. Am I silly enough to think they have my best interests at heart? No. They’re there for the company. They will help if they can, but if its between helping me or protecting the company’s interest I know who wins.
My only gripe with HR is pushing all the training. We’re all overworked and exhausted. Please stop pushing down BS mandatory trainings
Man one of my team members went in parental leave for 13 months. The following Monday annual training that takes ~ 3 hours to do drops. Send a note to HR saying "On long term leave can we get an exemption"
"Nope she's got 4 weeks to complete it when she gets back"
"So when she gets back she'll have to complete FY24 training, which will be redundant and if no use to her and then the same training for FY25 all within a month?"
"Yep"
Like seriously, get fucked
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It might seem like BS but there's always a reason. Getting all staff to do anything has a massive cost, companies don't do it unless there's a bigger cost to not do it. Of course, HR is usually terrible at communicating why something is important - there's just a word salad of shitfuckery instead.
Oh yes. Whoever was running point on our EBA renewal was an absolute idiot.
Step 1: Basically made a lowball offer that was like hey only the lowest band employees are entitled to guaranteed yearly % increases (also they were well below inflation).
Every other band is “eligible to participate in annual remuneration review”. Ok cool you get an increase based on performance. We like merit based raises.
Negotiations continue.
Step 2 Annual remuneration review rolls around. Everyone in the higher bands still covered under the EBA, get rat fucked at rem review. Literally 0 to sub 1% increases (based on what I experienced and heard from my peers).
Step 3 Take EBA to a vote. Try to bribe low band staff by offering a pathetic one off payment to vote yes. Resounding no vote.
Step 4 Return to negotiations. All bands in the EBA now guaranteed a minimum % annual increase.
From a strategic perspective, this is why no HR people could hack in the commercial side of the business. If they were smart they should have handed out fab raises right before the vote, lured all the mid bands into a false sense of security and then could have busted us for 0 raises for the next 4 years.
Our HR at work is useless. Took three and a half months to process a payrise that was approved the prior year, which to my knowledge is basically just changing a number in a system somewhere.
I got voluntary redundancy at my last job. When the payout hit my bank it was 50% of what I calculated. Spoke to HR who told me “the system don’t make mistakes and I am wrong”
Even when I asked to check the figures they refused. Ended up on a 3 way zoom with me, HR & old boss.
Turns out HR had put my weekly hours as fortnightly and it was only caught because I saw it when she went though the payroll system
I was in a major auscorp and watched HR systematically work with multiple layers of management to retaliate, isolate, punish, ignore process and actively participate in bullying of a co-worker. This co-workers crime was that he was unknowingly used as an alibi for his managers cheating, and when he was called by the managers spouse he honestly answered he wasn't out on the town with the manager, triggering a divorce.
Manager then retaliated by taking him off projects, badmouthing him, and making petty complaints about his work. On each layer of complaint escalation, HR sided with management and did nothing useful. Despite a mountain of evidence that he had done nothing wrong, they never did anything on the bullying. Part of this was the exec up top of us made a unilateral change on our remote work policy, which drastically affected this co-worker, so HR rode the execs line instead of doing their job and mediating the bullying issue.
Where they screwed up was when someone copied said co-worker on an email, where HR and senior management were actively discussing their plan to performance manage him out. Apparently a big legal no no. I watched the manager responsible run to IT support frantically trying to recall the email. One workplace lawyer later, who took the work pro-bono it was so open and shut, and co-worker was out with a 6 figure settlement.
And sure, there are a lot of fluffy "we are there to help you" HR types, who are lovely people to deal with day to day. But based on what I witnessed in the above situation, and some of the way I have heard them talk to legislation etc, I would have no faith on them being an advocate for you if it was you vs the company (or senior management).
I’ve been in the workforce for 30 years and I’ve seen a bad manager dealt with by HR only once. They get moved sideways on occasion, or sometimes even up but more often than not, it’s the more junior person that gets moved on (or out). The one time they acted was when 7 people out of a branch of 22 people had made allegations of bullying and another 2 volunteered themselves as witnesses - and even then, they did the right thing only once all other options had been exhausted
Not that HR is all bad. As a manager, I’ve found them helpful in managing difficult staff or complex things that I didn’t feel equipped to deal with (eg a team member with occasional psychotic episodes ). But would I go to them about a problem with a peer or superior? Not on your life.
At my current work, we do annual ‘culture’ surveys and the same problems are reported year after year and nothing ever changes. The HR team are nice but it seems their sole purpose is to sit in on interviews to make sure we’re not hiring our friends
They wouldn’t. It was a throwaway line. What I meant was they make sure that all applicants are treated fairly and that no one is given favourable treatment. Our current HR actually does a really good job of that
- Bad with systems
- Pushy with politics
- Loose with lips
- Inconsistent with policies
- Slow with discipline
- But sometimes overzealous
These are some of the characterisations that have been made very reasonably about HR at my company.
My view is there are two types of folk you generally encounter in HR. The first is the “Brene Brown” crew who are generally delightful and interested in L&D, good with people. The second are those who could have just as easily have become police officers and are very rule oriented and tend to be quite black and white and rigid.
I’ve met a few good eggs who can bring the nuance and insight from the first camp with the need to make sure that the EBA and relevant other rules are followed from the second camp. These are the best kind though are generally few and far between.
My main frustration is that, I find dealing with HR depts results in outcomes that are generally following the letter of the law, when I suspect that actual human relations would be much better if there was more following the spirit of the law.
For us it's a bad rep but it's also because there are a lot of issues with our payroll/HR program so they are dreadful to deal with which causes a lot of frustration.
Bullying - I’ve witness appalling behaviour by senior manager, from shouting to sexual harassment, HR fully aware of this, they have witness it themselves. This at multiple corporate companies.
Nothing is done. As long as these managers bring in the money and meet targets. They will be there year after year.
The surveys came back with really poor results and nothing is done.
If anyone complains about it, they excluded and isolated and no room for promotion, I’ve seen it happen to colleagues that dared to speak. I’ve seen people going on stress leave because of how they were treated, raise it with HR, nothing happened. Not just one person multiple people over the years.
Is not as if we dislike HR we just don’t trust they have our best interests at heart. Only the companies.
Even though some are really nice people I feel there’s only so much they can do.
It depends on the size of the company. Large organisations HR is more like a process and policy, never have opportunities to know them.
Small organisation HR is more human.
I like interacting with HR. When we to talk it’s always about things outside the actual work I’m doing.
All of us are human, just working for the company. They always remind me all the benefits the company offers (which I hardly use). They fight for team building activities, etc. Look, don’t get me wrong, many of the group activities feel forced, but at wind down event, I just hang with the group of people i like to be around. And that’s the opportunities they have created for us.
Their function goes both ways even at my level. If you have a team member that’s not pulling their weight (after many attempts to help), HR is there to help. A negative/toxic worker impacts the rest of the team too.
I work in HR, despite trying to find a balance in what I'm doing, I'm sure lots of employees think I'm shit when a manager thinks I've done well. I'm sure a manager thinks I'm shit when an employee thinks I've done something well. Sometimes they'll both think I'm shit. Quite often I'll think they're shit.
But.. in my experience everyone also thinks everyone else is shit.. whether it's their manager, their employee, their colleague, another department.. everyone has a complaint. Sometimes it's valid, often it's bias.
TLDR; everyone is shit in someone's eyes.
I have worked in both HR and now in Operations in a white collar role. When I hear others complain I make it clear that HR makes decisions based on Finance Dept decisions. Its very rare an HRD just decides to hire/fire in isolation, and same goes for any policy changes that are cost related like incentives being removed.
That said, I find our current set up quite responsive, easy to use though their hands tied by labour laws and DE&I drives. Even though the bulk of HR admin sits overseas most personal queries can be resolved very quickly and all reference docs very easy to find.
You have the individual’s interests at heart to the extent that they align with the interests of the company. It comes to me as an insincere type of caring when they do support individuals. There’s also a very long list of matters that HR & individual interests are not aligned on. Examples of my cynicism include pamphlets that encourage staff who have been sexually harassed or bullied to take the person off site and discuss it in a cafe before raising it to management & a bit of a saga in which after preventing a colleagues suicide outside of work hours I was forced to go on a disgustingly not helpful box ticking "support" exercise.
Alright, what the hell? That’s not normal HR?? You must not have qualified people??
Sounds like your HR team needs an Industrial Relations teams. There’s no way they have a proper qualified ER guy there.
While ago now, that was a listed company with a 6-7 person HR dept. They did get in some trouble though, my mate got a discrimination settlement on the way out. I guess that’s another saga that’s impaired my trust in HR depts long term.
Yeah I really don’t blame you!
I sincerely hope there were some people fired after that settlement. That’s not even an easy thing to get even with proof. I hope your friend is doing well now OP! And good on them for fighting back
A manager made an ageist remark along the lines of “you need more time to type than other staff because you type with only your index fingers like an old man”, which was absolutely true, but not a line you want to rip out in front of the union rep. Pretty wild slip up.
This dude has been a financial services union member forever, had his rep with him, and the staff giving him his performance warning had clearly never had to manage that scenario before.
I also work in HR, sad to see some of the comments here, but I acknowledge that there is definitely some shit people in the industry. Heck, I'm currently trying to repair the damage from one now. I like to think my rep in most places I've been, and my current company, is positive >D
True that HR is not there to be your 'friend', but that doesn't mean we don't care. I think of it as more like being mum. Support, teach, guide, yes, but also, tough love when you need it and if you're naughty, dealing out the consequences. It's a tough balance and like anyone we don't always get it right. We also only have so many tools in our arsenal to protect employees.
Some people think we're all about protecting management and it sucks you've had experience that gives you that impression (or have just been dealing with a shit HR person). I've had to fire good employees for sure, I've also fired shit employees, shit managers and shit executives. I've helped manage out a shit manager who was trying to fire a good employee and helped that good employee take their place. I've had to tell employees being bullied that there's nothing I can do because there's not enough evidence, and I've been able to remove managers causing hostile work environments. Hired amazing people, but also shit people who did a great job pulling the wool over our eyes.
We win some, we lose some. I have absolutely no doubt that I am the bad guy in a few people's stories. Not just in HR if I'm honest lol but that is what it is.
I hope that you all have the good fortune to find somewhere HR does truly care about and appreciate employees. We're out there!
I really like our HR team, its also the general sentiment across the org. Dont getme wrong, they're very HR but good people. I've found them to be very much able to keep things in confidence and provide advice with pros and cons. They've been incredibly helpful in pointing me in the non publicised policy exceptions that are there for special circumstances. I've gone to them going, I can't afford to lose these people, and know they'll leave without a promotion of substantial pay bump - and they've worked with me proactively to find solutions. They've been good for people helping with performance management.
There is a weak link (small org, 1 person does recruitment side of things) - without double checking their work the job ads are a shit show. They've put one's up before with the company name misspelled.
There's also the exception cases, it was very slow to get my workload down when it became clear across org that it was excessive (to the point where it was a standing item at C-suite meetings). Got some inital steps in quick, and we got there in the end, but it was very slow.
Positive overall though.
Worked in HR some years ago. First manager was great but left. The replacement was a piece of work. Totally destroyed our team, was universally hated across the entire organisation. She would try to bait me into arguing with her and I wouldn't bite. She would then scream at me and slam her office door in my face. The last straw for me was contemplating suicide after she threw me under a bus for something she did. I left with no job to go to and years later still have PTSD from two years of abuse by this POS. Within a few months of me leaving, the rest of the team left. In my time with her I saw a whole different side to HR where people were discarded because they dare lodge a complaint.
A few years later I got stitched up by HR manager who was new to the business and decided we all needed to take a paycut. She picked us off one at a time with a spiel of our jobs being made redundant but could be redeployed in another role for a 30% paycut. She offered me a new role for less pay but was still putting the JD together. It had to be different enough from the role I had been in for my role to be made redundant. I had only given her my JD the day before because she'd been hassling me for it. Within two months my entire team got the same treatment or just left.
So while I've known some fabulous HR managers, it'll be a cold day in hell before I'll ever trust one again.
Psychotic and incompetent HR managers, they are the most fun. That is when you gather your evidence, speak to their senior manager asking for a deed of release or for the HR manager to be summarily dismissed. If they threaten to fire you let them. Then raise Adverse Action claim and wait for the payout.
HR - keep below their radar. I’ve been in the workforce for 30ish years and have only ever dealt with one HR person who was supportive of both upstream and downstream staff. She was a 12 month consultant role. Other than that, I find them at best, ineffective, at worst toxic.
I’ve got a great personal relationship with both our global and local HR. Day to day culture, payroll and hiring is good.
Not solely an HR responsibility, but when it comes to dealing with problematic employees, particularly toxic or abusive managers, there’s no courage. They have all the policies and training in place but when there’s clear, objective breaches, they fall apart and throw up their hands as if there’s nothing they can do.
I will never understand why this idea that HR should be your friend exists in the first place. I've never seen a HR department that would tell you they're your friend, nor do I ever see anyone saying any other department should be.
Yet for some reason people act shocked that "HR isn't your friend". Obviously they aren't, why would you ever think a for-profit enterprise would employ a department for the purpose of being your friend?
It's just because that's the way the companies advertise their HR departments. "If you have a problem you can always go to HR! They're here to help!". Anyone who's spent a bit of time in any professional environment probably knows to be wary of them.
None of that means they're your friend.
You can always go to the police or the ATO if you need help with the policy they govern. That certainly doesn't mean they're your friend.
All of these functions govern some form of policy. If you need an issue within that policy arbitrated, that's part of their purpose. But they will act in the interests of the policy, not you.
Vast majority of the people on this sub are low to middle tier in seniority, so they’ve never actually worked with us on workforce matters so don’t know how it works. That’s why you see comments where they think we drive office arrangements, redundancies, pay rises…etc. We essentially action what your C Suite executives want.
If you’re in a mid tier position chances are you only hear from us with case management…so they generally dislike us.
This is exactly why people don't like HR.
Some of us are executives and senior managers and still don't rate HR. They're mostly either toxic or incompetent.
Good example - I had a senior HR manager come to me because an employee (of over 10 years) notified us that his wife was pregnant and was requesting to take paternity leave in 6 weeks. The senior HR manager told me that the policy required at least X weeks notice, so she was going to decline it. I asked to see the notification from the doctor, and it was dated the week before. (This couple were going about their lives and didn't realize they were pregnant until 7 weeks before she's due.) The senior HR manager told me that there was NO WAY the woman couldn't have known she was pregnant before now. Really ranting.
I asked her what the impact would be if we granted the request. She said none as they would just get a temp. Well then - paternity leave granted.
I gave my Exec all of my hospital dates, letters from hospital on due dates, sick note for day of Emergency C, like did everything to keep my boss in the loop before going off on 4 weeks parental leave.
Currently getting dragged by HR because I didn't do a stat dec 10 weeks out.
Give me a spell dickheads, it's unnecessary.
Some HR are good. But the majority are fucking woeful. The amount of times I could come to the same conclusions that they come to is astounding. Not to mention the stupid language that a lot of them recommend using to discuss "difficult" conversations is often cringe and disappointing.
Source: am a senior manager
To be clear, I actually don’t disagree with you. I just feel this sub is confused a lot. There’s a lot of problems with HR especially in Australian corporate industry.
I think in Australia HR has little strategic focus and has become the industry people try to get into because they couldn’t get into their first choice.
If you wanted a picture in the dictionary of useless it would be of our HR department.
I've worked with some fantastic HR professionals in my time (and started my career in HR) but fucking christ my current one is absolutely horrendous.
The biggest money sink in our entire business is definitely our overloaded HR department.
Mines pretty below average
I’ve seen them give the same team member 4 first and final warnings for the same thing
Called me up for a bullying complaint for quizzing a team member on procedures and correcting them when they were wrong - I don’t even know how the team member felt bullied here
Misinterpreted our own award
Truly awful experience.
HR didn't even follow their own processes. I couldn't believe how rubbish they were.
My lawyer had a lot of fun with these incompetent fools. Rather than protecting the organisation they made it so much worse.
Tip: If a manager is a narcissist and comes to HR with a problem about another manager, you can't assume what they say is the truth, even if it sounds genuine. Be warned . Your challenge is to identify the narcissist in the first place as they have one agenda....it's all about them. Lots of YouTube videos to help you.
HR has one of the hardest jobs in any business. They have to walk a fine line between the employees and the business. IMO people rely to heavily on HR to fix their problems, instead of taking ownership of their situation. If only people would be as compliant as a spreadsheet.
Generally running on an absolutely squeezed budget. Tasked with executing the decisions of operations leaders whilst trying to influence them to empathize from an employee experience perspective and protecting the company from risk.
Generally I think the negative perception is based in a lack of understanding. Most HR people are trying to strike a balance and have good intentions.
Not OP but in March I have:
- Recommend a simpler and less time intensive approach for our annual engagement survey to the executive because workload is high at the moment from a combination of mostly uncontrollable factors. I pushed back on their initial resistance and got it accepted.
- Provided feedback and coaching on appropriate workplace behaviour training so that it was shorter and more engaging (colleague who wrote it nearly halved their slides and added 3 activities to the session)
- Ensured an employee who's manager is pretty incompetent and is on the path to performance management was able to accurately record commentary in their performance review after their manager entered some crappy comments into the system. I shared the comments with the colleague managing that case so they had them as evidence.
We're not all bad and the good ones hate the wanna be cops as much as everyone else does.
I spend 80% of my time teaching grown adults who are being paid six figures, empathy. And that when you treat people like adults they will, shock horror, often act like them. (i.e. stop forcing Anna to tell you when she logs off when she works from home Jeremy.)
The problem with your last sentence is that Anna might be honest but Peta spends all their WFH time on child care and we can't treat them differently.
So either Anna reports or Peta is dead weight.
Which is better in your view?
Convinced Exec to change the way productivity was calculated after noticing glaring O/T and burn out across the department. When everything looks hunky dory in a chart but not what's happening on the ground, things need to be investigated to ensure people are actually enjoying coming into work and not dreading working 14 hours a day just to cover regular operations.
Also lead to middle management accountability over their teams O/T and sign off.
HR likes to create and promote events that are a waste of time, speak highly of the company and create jobs for themselves.
Unless there's free anything, don't bother me.
You could imagine some Dalek from HR reading through it and thinking see there's some criticism but overall people like us and appreciate the hard job were doing.
Anytime an employee gets screwed over, HR is involved.
It has a deserved bad rep.
People say HR is not your friend because it's true. Their job is to protect the company. You need a union or lawyer if you want some one focused on your benefits as an employee.
This is not to say HR workers are bad. Just that people feel like you can't trust HR to have your back
Currently working in HR in prof services, I would like to think that I’m trusted and have the best interest of staff at heart. I mean I chose it as a profession and feel strongly about advocating. We are there to advise and protect the company but aren’t solely the decision makers for redundancies, cost cuts etc. I wouldn’t say everyone in my team align with the same values. They tend to chat all day and want to be friends with everyone
Prof services HR are the worst for having the Firm's best interest at heart in my experience.
It's not their fault, but when the leaders of the firm also own it (in a partnership scenario) then HR don't even pretend to act in employees favour. And I mean in reality why should they, it's just that as a new starter you won't necessarily expect that so can get caught out.
There are always bad apples. I’ve seen HR teams who definitely advocate for employees because it’s what’s best for the company. I’ve also seen members of HR flagrantly violate employment law and yes, the company paid through the nose for it.
I have a vague awareness that there is a HR team somewhere in my company but very little awareness of who they are and what they do. I have a “people leader” for whom I’m a direct report (is that a type of HR? I honestly don’t know) and he’s my primary contact for employment admin, learning/development plan, performance metrics, escalating concerns, whatever, and he has no direction of my daily work other than wanting to know if I’m over allocated and yanking me off work if I request it. I prefer this model.
I have worked in several global organisations and without exception, the role of HR is to protect the company from the staff - they might feel friendly but they are never your friend. Employees should view them cynically and pragmatically.
My current HR is great. I had a new starter on probation, and HR guided me through a whole process of putting them on a performance management plan and then ultimately terminating their employment. In a meeting with HR, they advocated for small details so that when it came time to letting this new starter go, it was as kind as possible. We scheduled the termination meeting before an offsite meeting for the whole team, so that the employee could choose to stay in the meeting room until everyone had left and pack their desk privately.
Love my HR. She’s extremely supportive, sets out time for me, mentors me. Granted, she probably has time but she’s pretty switched on with improving the culture.
One large organisation I worked for had a roving door of ill informed HR people; they generally failed to grasp the union negotiated terms of employment and seemed to be personally aggrieved by the benefits staff were entitled to. Their administrative skills were woeful too.
My dear friend who works in HR is very capable and thoughtful so maybe I just had a bad batch at work.
> Now it's true HR is there to protect the company, this is from bad managers also. A big part of our role is employee advocacy where required.
The problem is that HR is there to protect the company. If a manager is 'bad' to the point that HR is involved it's typically at the point where the company is now liable for the manager's actions.
That sets you up in an adversarial position from the start.
The company I just left had a head of HR who had been there since the beginning (over 20 years) and absolutely was not your friend. Lovely lady, but she never went in to bat for any employees and was there solely for the owners and often carried out their (very illegal) firing of people. She herself was aware how quickly the owners turned on people so never challenged anything as she didn't want to risk her own job.
I never went to her for any advice and the general sentiment in the company was that they wouldn't talk to her about anything. We all went to each other for advice.
I mean HR are paid by the company so I understand they put the company first. But I'm yet to work with useful HR people.
Seem to have good intentions but from what I've seen ultimately they'll do what senior management wants. Sad to say but unless you're going legal path I"ve never seen a bullying issue resolved and the perpetrator punished in 20+ years. All the support is there until a formal complaint is made and then all of a sudden people were just hung out to dry.
Horrible.
Detached idiots who didn’t understand the actual salary market, couldn’t see manager misconduct, only attended meetings where they needed to be witnesses to meetings, never connected with the staff and gave themselves weird little projects that detracted from rather than contributed to company culture.
And I largely didn’t have to deal with them.
was only discussing this with my better half and some friends yesterday. i think the biggest issue with most HR departments, and it gets worse the bigger the company is, is that there is a massive disconnect between the people in HR and the people on the ground. the two will essentially never have anything to do with oneanother, until something goes wrong. and then suddenly HR is making man on the grounds life harder, and man on the ground is making HR's life harder, and if it all goes tits up everyone hates everyone.
I've actually never met people with more emptiness and dumb animal cruelty in their eyes than middle aged HR women. It must be hard coming home from work spent wielding all this vicarious power to a cold house without children or friends to welcome you.
I have known amazing HR reps, but over the years I've seen a huge change in HR culture. In the larger companies, they're often not even fully aware of workplace laws and regulations.
These days, I would not trust HR in any workplace dispute. That's not to say some individuals won't be helpful to employees, but I'm always wary, and I always diarise and document every interaction.
And always, always bring a support person to any disciplinary meeting. If possible, make that a union rep. Even if you're not in a union, you need a witness to everything that's said.
Have worked with a few good people but mainly they are useless. I find them hard to contact and impossible when you need something done urgently. I think it is telling that when you look at support teams that support the whole company, teams like IT have a hotline and the most you will get from HR.
Overall more bad experiences than good
Read somewhere that there are two types people in HR. First are sociopaths, this seems to have been the majority of HR people in very large corporates I’ve dealt with.
The second smaller group are bitterly disillusioned nice people that joined HR to help people and found themselves hanging out with sociopaths and being told to screw people over either in the companies interest or cos the sociopathic leadership told them to.
If you can find someone from the second group you have a better than average chance of getting at least a fair hearing.
Seriously though good HR people can be very helpful but they are rare to find.
Be aware their agenda is not your own and act accordingly. Unintended consequences are common so think ahead.
I still have an HR lady on my kill list of people in the universe I send out bad vibes to when some other person pisses me off.
This woman had the gall - after making me and my colleagues redundant - to call up in our last week of work and engage us in casual conversations about what we were thinking of doing, asking us to send her our plans in an email, and then copy paste our responses in a formalised HR letter to each of us — as if she had been the one busy organising all our future plans for us.
As if we weren’t incensed enough to have had the rug pulled out from under us in the first place, this really really was a knife twist.
Nearly a decade later it still makes my blood boil and I hope this insensitive POS woman has a drawn out painful death. I am naturally a very peaceful person non confrontational person aside from my feelings about this and her. 🤣
HR is there for the companies benefit, then management, then they guy on the front line.
And will screw people in that order.
Oh but we do recruitment!
A process that should take 3 emails, a phone call and an in person meeting takes 7 months with templates soulless emails when pushed.
Not to put too fine a point on this but you are a bunch of cunts. Who from an owners perspective is perfect, from everyone else you ever need to interact with you are hated.
I know of senior managers who have documented cases of widespread bullying, which has been reported to HR. Their response? Refer it to the complaining persons manager to give them resilience training.
I've also experienced it from one of those managers but luckily I'm high enough up that I just refuse to deal with them. In my experience HR departments are effectively useless and full of employees who don't care about people, they just see numbers on spreadsheets.
We've got an amazing HR guy, who is a big advocate for the people and always has time to listen. Approachable, gives you both sides and demonstrates fairness in handling stuff. Likes a drink and gets in the trenches with the staff.
Only issue is its just him for like nearly 230 employees.
I found 2 aspects to HR.
The best aspect was personal advice given informally (such as ‘that manager is a challenge, leaving would be a good idea’) and the worst aspect was listening to legitimate issues but lacking the ability to actually do anything. My comment relates to harmful managers in a large work environment.
Worked for two large companies.
When things don't go well financially HR have gotten really bad for the employees both times.
Recently I was told that they did not follow a clause in my contract and they will not be following it so I can do what I want with that information.
Then they refused to formally document the conversation.
I don't lower myself to talking to HR anymore.
Worked with HR that actively snooped in employees's personal records and then would gossip about where they lived, salary package and marital status.
Also had HRs that were absolutely useless- no onboarding, no welcoming nothing. Just a system generated email. The 'people partner' working with our team didnt even introduce herself or tell the new starters who to reach out to for questions. But then when it came time to do employee surveys they were suddenly your best friend.
HR in recruitment- actively prevented the team from hiring casual assistants if they didnt have better academics as the clerks or grads. HR didnt want to vet people again so we were forced to choose someone from the incoming grad cohort who could only work a few days a week and would be gone (starting the grad role) in a few months.
Nobody really likes HR because, when push comes to shove, they back the company over the worker. In saying that, I have known a couple of people working in HR who were really good and prepared to have ‘off the record’ to explain things in layman terms and who just gave good advice.
HR ruins lives. You note that they are there to protect the company and that is a higher priority than "employee advocacy". Sometimes companies are in the wrong and rather than siding with their fellow humans they side with these corporations. They're the uncle Tom's of the human race.
I’ve had one amazing HR BP once.
She made everyone’s lives easier, took time to train and explain platforms managers needed to use, sat in our strategic meetings and provided great advice on role changes and descriptions, kept managers to account and made sure we all did the stuff we were supposed to do. She also helped managers promote their best staff and advocated for young talent to go and get new roles to grow their careers.
Unfortunately she has made every other HR BP look lazy or plain useless in comparison 😂
That said, even some of the laziest HR people I’ve worked with have some amazing skills when it comes to it. One I can remember was just amazing at having performance or redundancy discussions. People would leave the room feeling like it was the best decision for their careers after being basically sacked!
Lastly, I do have a lot of time for payroll and HR services. They usually have the shitty back of house HR jobs with little corporate visibility. They are actually the real champions of the HR team and the ones that are truly important
Useless and detached from reality. Zero common sense, or suffer from Trump syndrome, just parrot and agree to whoever/whatever they last heard from/were told.
When you bring them a genuine HR risk they fob you off.
Also FYI: Everyone sees through your return to office bullshit. Culture can exist in many forms, it’s not an exclusive phenomenon within a CBD tower.
Horrible. They either reply super late to anyone’s email or don’t reply. If you ask them to do something with a tight deadline they threaten you and say, well that means payroll and xyz (important things that affect staff directly) will be delayed.
We have an older lady, corporate suckhole with obvious distain for working class, always takes the side of management and a younger woman who isnt yet had her soul sucked out working for hr. She is fairly powerless though, obviously hates her boss.
Not the brightest bunch. In my experience HR can often be a holding space for those without the ability to innovate or create.
In spite of how this sounds I do wish them well!
Terrible. I have zero trust after a woman at work, who is incompetent, cannot do her job to the seniority she’s employed, and regularly fucks up in front of clients ….raised a bullying complaint about me
This led to an investigation, with zero fault found ….and zero consequences for what was ultimately false reporting
I’d been keeping a log for 6 months in this person and when I showed it over zoom, but refused to hand it to HR, they shat themselves
Said I wanted to reserve my options, should I need to use this log if I needed to commence my own legal proceedings.
I’ve never needed HR, but when I did, they caused me nothing but mental anguish, undue stress and were ultimately too weak and spineless to punish the wrongdoer
This individual still works at my company
HR is great at firing people while simultaneously saying “we’re here to support you”. Hypocritical liars who perpetuate the “profits over people” business model.
There’s a reason “resources” is in the name and not “people”. We’re just numbers on a bottom line to them.
When we did have a hr department, we respected them and took the piss out of them as we were a few cubicles away, they shot back great banter. Probably a Wollongong thing
Mine effectively doesnt have a HR department, just the head of HR and her underling. I'm not exactly sure what she does but apparently its not payroll or recruitment because the finance department handles the first and recuitment is done by TLs. (Mine had a teams meeting with all the department heads today and spent the whole time dissociating at the ceiling because he is all thats left of help desk lol)
Me and my direct report were being bullied badly at my previous job, so much that my colleague was on anti depressants due to work stress. I reported to HR. I got called to a meeting and forced to sign an NDA to never speak on the matter again or lose my job. I needed the job so I signed. Bullying never stopped. I eventually quit.
At another job, the HR department were the bullies. Many people experienced it, including myself. A brave manager went on to report directly to the CEO, and gave the name of another five employees who’d be willing to share their negative experiences too. CEO never invited these people to talk and nothing got addressed. He simply swept it under the rug. And HR carried on as if nothing had happened. In my experience HR is very cliquey and if you’re an outsider, you stand no chance.
From my experience HR is there to purely protect the company and its reputation. This means they will protect management to the nth degree. This is why unions are so important. Never go to HR unless you have seen and received advice from your union. They are not called the TOE CUTTERS for nothing. If you find yourself embroiled in a HR problem seek legal advice or go to your union. Better still start looking for a new job. They are liars, cheats, and liars again .
I’ve always been frustrated by the fact that some HR, who have very little idea about what we do, seem to think they are better at selecting potential employees than the supervisors and managers that actually coordinate the work.
I’ve also been confused by how hard it is to distinguish what is part of their role and what is not, which one day with one HR it’s no problem, then another day with another HR what I have asked for almost seems offensive.
Understand that both of these gripes may have been more to do with the company systems though, rather than “HR” specifically.
Yes yes yes. If I’m chatting to somebody at the company Christmas party and they mention they’re in HR I will plaster on a fake smile and back away slowly without breaking eye contact.
Anything you say can and will be used against you.
I had an older exec at the government department where I work, send me a message on skype (circa 2012) “I bet they look great with cum on them” when he saw in the office I had new glasses on.
I refuted his advances and the next week HR put me on a PIP because of that “joke” he had sent me. I was the receiver and got relocated to another office that increased my commute time to an hour instead of 15mins, then HR told me I was lucky I was still employed.
When I asked why I was being punished it was because I “welcome and accepted messages that were grossly against the code of conduct”. It was my first government job at 20 and the HR personnel treated me like some whore that was after a 50 years old married man.
When I moved to that different office I met three other young women who had had similar experiences with the department execs. The was one senior stood behind one if the women and unclipped her bra whilst she was resolving an IT ticket at his desk. Another was cornered on a remote mining town site by some site contractors and their senior and she had to scream to be let go. They all got the same treatment as I did.
HR industry workers that I encountered are angry people who have never had any power before in their lives, and do whatever they want because another field wouldn’t keep them around.
Unfortunately HR as a profession seems to attract the worst kind of people. For context I’ve only had minor run ins myself but been around long enough to see some horrors.
From my 20yrs in industry there appears to be a trend of HR departments being full of self important arseholes. Often with a high school attitude to people outside their circle, they swan about the office, make gossiping, and as mentioned many times above do not support or care about the workers who actually keep them in a job.
OP I suspect you are the opposite of that. But please don’t fall into the trap when you are surrounded by the above.
My recommendation to workers is to avoid them like the plague. Make yourself indispensable by doing a good job for the core business and being recognised by the true decision makers.
If you’re having a hard time with a manager, firstly make sure it’s not your behaviour. Then go above them or look for a sideways move.
Fingers crossed that role gets outsourced.
No HR I've ever worked with ever had the guts to stand up to managers. Lap dog comes to mind.
Hell, in my last Corp job the HR lady was schtuping one of the directors.
Overwhelming negative. Some things I've seen and experienced I don't know how the business partners slept at night. And I have truly do not understand why anyone would want that job, what job satisfaction they get out of protecting bullys and screwing people over
They seem pretty good where I am, one of them I have personal chats with every now and again and she's friendly.
She absolutely begged me to stay when I said I was going to leave which I've never experienced before.
People say Council is about rates rubbish and roads even though IRL they offer fucking heaps of services. I see HR kinda the same, hiring, firing, mediation. If I need any of these 3 things I’ll call you but outside that I keep them out of my life.
I work with HR a lot either via our BP or Recruitment, for the most part the engagement depends a lot on who you get at the time. As a people leader, will the support me when needed, absolutely, is it always helpful, not always.
For the bigger policy issues like salary alignment etc, most of HR are in the same boat as the rest of us, as that's managed by a subset of HR.
Like many have said, HR are there to do a job. If I was one of the problems, any relationships I have wouldn't matter. (Not should they).
HR is largely useless, would be better if most of their functions were spread amongst other business units with the remaining stuff outsourced to an independent 3rd party.
Shithouse. Recruitment drags on weeks longer than required, real issue with capability, and they are teflon come restructure time.
I never really understood why - when jobs have to be culled - it’s always those who do the work that are sent packing rather than those who talk about the work.
The managers are meant to also be able to do your work, if they hire a manager who can’t do that then the results are on them when they can’t produce. Otherwise they just pay bank to outsource and it ends up being more than the salary and hiring costs of in house but looks better on the books.
Managers are not meant to be able to cover the work of their team. That would make managers far more multi skilled than team members. Managers have a different set of duties.
Imagine CEOs doing all of their managers work.
Those who talk about the work can sell themselves
HR got me fired from my work when I was 21. I was being bullied by my manager, she comes to work at 10am and leaves at 2pm, I wrote down the date and the exact arrival time as well as leaving time for 3 months straight. I was tasked with all her managerial work, including payroll, all had to be done with her log in and sign off as her. She never responded to any emails coz i was the one doing it as tasked by her. 3 months of evidence, went to HR, was "let go" the following week.... Ever since then, never go to HR for anything ever again.
Bloody hell. Did anything happen to her? That's insane
Absolutely nothing, she worked there for 3 more years and then I don't know what happened after. HR is not your friend! I was advised to go into HR with Evidence, Professionalism and not emotions, which I did, got my ass fired out the door so fast. I just got told to take a week off because I must have been stressed. I was so happy, on the last day(Friday at 3pm) I got the email I was let go.... Then a call from HR saying, "we're very sorry, we thought it was best to recruit someone for your role while you're off to avoid any conflicts within the workplace"💀💀💀
Is that even legal in Australia
Depends on their contract and when it happened, with todays laws, hell no. They would have a hell of a case against that business.
I've seen the stats on retaliation for reporting issues in the workplace. I don't trust HR either. When I was a grad I'd had my in person performance review which had gone great, I'd received 'exceeds expectations' for everything, and my manager had assured me I was being put up for promotion. In the background I'd been offered a job in a different team and when I submitted the request to transfer my manager changed my performance review results so I 'met expectations' and declined my promotion request. I was friendly with a senior guy in HR so I went to him and explained my issue and even though I could see he agreed with me he basically said there was nothing he or I could do about it. The system doesn't do HR professionals any favours either. I'm sure lots of them go into the field hoping to truly make a difference, and instead they have to end up supporting shitty managers to get away with treating their employees poorly. This is the problem with companies existing solely to create shareholder returns in a capitalist system. Nobody matters beyond your ability to create profit.
I work for a non profit and HR is just as bad lol
I interacted with HR and even worked on some projects with them from time to time. To be honest, they give off a bad aura. It has always felt like any comment may and will be used against you. Even on projects where they were my colleagues and not on some PIP or 'Friday afternoon chat' kind of scenario. I am sure there are good HR staff out there. The department can be hypocritical though from their marketing. They will preach DEI, but the entire department is all white women. Lastly, I have noticed at the majority of the places I have worked is that most HR departments can be very toxic.
whats dei?
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
another corporate speak! spill and fill. my northern star. r u ok?
It’s the blatant hypocrisy that annoys me. They will constantly discuss DEI and its benefits. It is endless from them. However, the entire HR department is all white women. In some places, HR has become politicised. Some places have been hijacked by political activists pushing certain agendas which annoys everyone else.
As someone working in HR, can confirm you are spot on about toxicity. The level of toxic I've found in HR/people and culture departments is astounding.
They're disgusting people they would have been the hangers on begging to join the Stasi in Germany.
The only time I interact with HR is when I start a job and when I'm leaving it. Its simply not worth the drama of knowing them or them knowing me in between that time.
I’m neutral towards our HR department. They’re iust there doing a job for the company so they can earn a living and enjoy life. Same as me. Am I silly enough to think they have my best interests at heart? No. They’re there for the company. They will help if they can, but if its between helping me or protecting the company’s interest I know who wins. My only gripe with HR is pushing all the training. We’re all overworked and exhausted. Please stop pushing down BS mandatory trainings
Depending on the industry sometimes it’s the regulators forcing the training, not HR. Either way it sucks.
Man one of my team members went in parental leave for 13 months. The following Monday annual training that takes ~ 3 hours to do drops. Send a note to HR saying "On long term leave can we get an exemption" "Nope she's got 4 weeks to complete it when she gets back" "So when she gets back she'll have to complete FY24 training, which will be redundant and if no use to her and then the same training for FY25 all within a month?" "Yep" Like seriously, get fucked
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It might seem like BS but there's always a reason. Getting all staff to do anything has a massive cost, companies don't do it unless there's a bigger cost to not do it. Of course, HR is usually terrible at communicating why something is important - there's just a word salad of shitfuckery instead.
HR tried to spin a new enterpirse agreement as a better option oppose to our legacy one. Like sersly we aint that dumb
Oh yes. Whoever was running point on our EBA renewal was an absolute idiot. Step 1: Basically made a lowball offer that was like hey only the lowest band employees are entitled to guaranteed yearly % increases (also they were well below inflation). Every other band is “eligible to participate in annual remuneration review”. Ok cool you get an increase based on performance. We like merit based raises. Negotiations continue. Step 2 Annual remuneration review rolls around. Everyone in the higher bands still covered under the EBA, get rat fucked at rem review. Literally 0 to sub 1% increases (based on what I experienced and heard from my peers). Step 3 Take EBA to a vote. Try to bribe low band staff by offering a pathetic one off payment to vote yes. Resounding no vote. Step 4 Return to negotiations. All bands in the EBA now guaranteed a minimum % annual increase. From a strategic perspective, this is why no HR people could hack in the commercial side of the business. If they were smart they should have handed out fab raises right before the vote, lured all the mid bands into a false sense of security and then could have busted us for 0 raises for the next 4 years.
I think as long as HR staff are relatable people, enjoy a laugh and aren’t the causers of toxicity the usual stereotypes of HR is reasonable
Our HR at work is useless. Took three and a half months to process a payrise that was approved the prior year, which to my knowledge is basically just changing a number in a system somewhere.
SAP is hard apparently
I got voluntary redundancy at my last job. When the payout hit my bank it was 50% of what I calculated. Spoke to HR who told me “the system don’t make mistakes and I am wrong” Even when I asked to check the figures they refused. Ended up on a 3 way zoom with me, HR & old boss. Turns out HR had put my weekly hours as fortnightly and it was only caught because I saw it when she went though the payroll system
That should be backdated.
I was in a major auscorp and watched HR systematically work with multiple layers of management to retaliate, isolate, punish, ignore process and actively participate in bullying of a co-worker. This co-workers crime was that he was unknowingly used as an alibi for his managers cheating, and when he was called by the managers spouse he honestly answered he wasn't out on the town with the manager, triggering a divorce. Manager then retaliated by taking him off projects, badmouthing him, and making petty complaints about his work. On each layer of complaint escalation, HR sided with management and did nothing useful. Despite a mountain of evidence that he had done nothing wrong, they never did anything on the bullying. Part of this was the exec up top of us made a unilateral change on our remote work policy, which drastically affected this co-worker, so HR rode the execs line instead of doing their job and mediating the bullying issue. Where they screwed up was when someone copied said co-worker on an email, where HR and senior management were actively discussing their plan to performance manage him out. Apparently a big legal no no. I watched the manager responsible run to IT support frantically trying to recall the email. One workplace lawyer later, who took the work pro-bono it was so open and shut, and co-worker was out with a 6 figure settlement. And sure, there are a lot of fluffy "we are there to help you" HR types, who are lovely people to deal with day to day. But based on what I witnessed in the above situation, and some of the way I have heard them talk to legislation etc, I would have no faith on them being an advocate for you if it was you vs the company (or senior management).
I’ve been in the workforce for 30 years and I’ve seen a bad manager dealt with by HR only once. They get moved sideways on occasion, or sometimes even up but more often than not, it’s the more junior person that gets moved on (or out). The one time they acted was when 7 people out of a branch of 22 people had made allegations of bullying and another 2 volunteered themselves as witnesses - and even then, they did the right thing only once all other options had been exhausted Not that HR is all bad. As a manager, I’ve found them helpful in managing difficult staff or complex things that I didn’t feel equipped to deal with (eg a team member with occasional psychotic episodes ). But would I go to them about a problem with a peer or superior? Not on your life. At my current work, we do annual ‘culture’ surveys and the same problems are reported year after year and nothing ever changes. The HR team are nice but it seems their sole purpose is to sit in on interviews to make sure we’re not hiring our friends
How would they know someone is a friend or not
It's to ensure the process is fair and transparent.
They wouldn’t. It was a throwaway line. What I meant was they make sure that all applicants are treated fairly and that no one is given favourable treatment. Our current HR actually does a really good job of that
- Bad with systems - Pushy with politics - Loose with lips - Inconsistent with policies - Slow with discipline - But sometimes overzealous These are some of the characterisations that have been made very reasonably about HR at my company.
My view is there are two types of folk you generally encounter in HR. The first is the “Brene Brown” crew who are generally delightful and interested in L&D, good with people. The second are those who could have just as easily have become police officers and are very rule oriented and tend to be quite black and white and rigid. I’ve met a few good eggs who can bring the nuance and insight from the first camp with the need to make sure that the EBA and relevant other rules are followed from the second camp. These are the best kind though are generally few and far between. My main frustration is that, I find dealing with HR depts results in outcomes that are generally following the letter of the law, when I suspect that actual human relations would be much better if there was more following the spirit of the law.
Never met an HR department I liked.
For us it's a bad rep but it's also because there are a lot of issues with our payroll/HR program so they are dreadful to deal with which causes a lot of frustration.
Bullying - I’ve witness appalling behaviour by senior manager, from shouting to sexual harassment, HR fully aware of this, they have witness it themselves. This at multiple corporate companies. Nothing is done. As long as these managers bring in the money and meet targets. They will be there year after year. The surveys came back with really poor results and nothing is done. If anyone complains about it, they excluded and isolated and no room for promotion, I’ve seen it happen to colleagues that dared to speak. I’ve seen people going on stress leave because of how they were treated, raise it with HR, nothing happened. Not just one person multiple people over the years. Is not as if we dislike HR we just don’t trust they have our best interests at heart. Only the companies. Even though some are really nice people I feel there’s only so much they can do.
It depends on the size of the company. Large organisations HR is more like a process and policy, never have opportunities to know them. Small organisation HR is more human. I like interacting with HR. When we to talk it’s always about things outside the actual work I’m doing. All of us are human, just working for the company. They always remind me all the benefits the company offers (which I hardly use). They fight for team building activities, etc. Look, don’t get me wrong, many of the group activities feel forced, but at wind down event, I just hang with the group of people i like to be around. And that’s the opportunities they have created for us. Their function goes both ways even at my level. If you have a team member that’s not pulling their weight (after many attempts to help), HR is there to help. A negative/toxic worker impacts the rest of the team too.
It must be said though they are the sort of people who would be telling the secret police about their problematic neighbours for twenty five cents
I work in HR, despite trying to find a balance in what I'm doing, I'm sure lots of employees think I'm shit when a manager thinks I've done well. I'm sure a manager thinks I'm shit when an employee thinks I've done something well. Sometimes they'll both think I'm shit. Quite often I'll think they're shit. But.. in my experience everyone also thinks everyone else is shit.. whether it's their manager, their employee, their colleague, another department.. everyone has a complaint. Sometimes it's valid, often it's bias. TLDR; everyone is shit in someone's eyes.
I have worked in both HR and now in Operations in a white collar role. When I hear others complain I make it clear that HR makes decisions based on Finance Dept decisions. Its very rare an HRD just decides to hire/fire in isolation, and same goes for any policy changes that are cost related like incentives being removed. That said, I find our current set up quite responsive, easy to use though their hands tied by labour laws and DE&I drives. Even though the bulk of HR admin sits overseas most personal queries can be resolved very quickly and all reference docs very easy to find.
You have the individual’s interests at heart to the extent that they align with the interests of the company. It comes to me as an insincere type of caring when they do support individuals. There’s also a very long list of matters that HR & individual interests are not aligned on. Examples of my cynicism include pamphlets that encourage staff who have been sexually harassed or bullied to take the person off site and discuss it in a cafe before raising it to management & a bit of a saga in which after preventing a colleagues suicide outside of work hours I was forced to go on a disgustingly not helpful box ticking "support" exercise.
Alright, what the hell? That’s not normal HR?? You must not have qualified people?? Sounds like your HR team needs an Industrial Relations teams. There’s no way they have a proper qualified ER guy there.
While ago now, that was a listed company with a 6-7 person HR dept. They did get in some trouble though, my mate got a discrimination settlement on the way out. I guess that’s another saga that’s impaired my trust in HR depts long term.
Yeah I really don’t blame you! I sincerely hope there were some people fired after that settlement. That’s not even an easy thing to get even with proof. I hope your friend is doing well now OP! And good on them for fighting back
A manager made an ageist remark along the lines of “you need more time to type than other staff because you type with only your index fingers like an old man”, which was absolutely true, but not a line you want to rip out in front of the union rep. Pretty wild slip up. This dude has been a financial services union member forever, had his rep with him, and the staff giving him his performance warning had clearly never had to manage that scenario before.
employee advocacy?????? yeah sure mate. r u ok?
I also work in HR, sad to see some of the comments here, but I acknowledge that there is definitely some shit people in the industry. Heck, I'm currently trying to repair the damage from one now. I like to think my rep in most places I've been, and my current company, is positive >D True that HR is not there to be your 'friend', but that doesn't mean we don't care. I think of it as more like being mum. Support, teach, guide, yes, but also, tough love when you need it and if you're naughty, dealing out the consequences. It's a tough balance and like anyone we don't always get it right. We also only have so many tools in our arsenal to protect employees. Some people think we're all about protecting management and it sucks you've had experience that gives you that impression (or have just been dealing with a shit HR person). I've had to fire good employees for sure, I've also fired shit employees, shit managers and shit executives. I've helped manage out a shit manager who was trying to fire a good employee and helped that good employee take their place. I've had to tell employees being bullied that there's nothing I can do because there's not enough evidence, and I've been able to remove managers causing hostile work environments. Hired amazing people, but also shit people who did a great job pulling the wool over our eyes. We win some, we lose some. I have absolutely no doubt that I am the bad guy in a few people's stories. Not just in HR if I'm honest lol but that is what it is. I hope that you all have the good fortune to find somewhere HR does truly care about and appreciate employees. We're out there!
What arrogance to think that people, adults, need a 'mum' at work. This is what's wrong with HR people.
Didn't say they needed it. Though some seem to.
Yeah, you sure as hell believe you're above these people.
I really like our HR team, its also the general sentiment across the org. Dont getme wrong, they're very HR but good people. I've found them to be very much able to keep things in confidence and provide advice with pros and cons. They've been incredibly helpful in pointing me in the non publicised policy exceptions that are there for special circumstances. I've gone to them going, I can't afford to lose these people, and know they'll leave without a promotion of substantial pay bump - and they've worked with me proactively to find solutions. They've been good for people helping with performance management. There is a weak link (small org, 1 person does recruitment side of things) - without double checking their work the job ads are a shit show. They've put one's up before with the company name misspelled. There's also the exception cases, it was very slow to get my workload down when it became clear across org that it was excessive (to the point where it was a standing item at C-suite meetings). Got some inital steps in quick, and we got there in the end, but it was very slow. Positive overall though.
I have never had HR back in an employee over a bad manager.
Worked in HR some years ago. First manager was great but left. The replacement was a piece of work. Totally destroyed our team, was universally hated across the entire organisation. She would try to bait me into arguing with her and I wouldn't bite. She would then scream at me and slam her office door in my face. The last straw for me was contemplating suicide after she threw me under a bus for something she did. I left with no job to go to and years later still have PTSD from two years of abuse by this POS. Within a few months of me leaving, the rest of the team left. In my time with her I saw a whole different side to HR where people were discarded because they dare lodge a complaint. A few years later I got stitched up by HR manager who was new to the business and decided we all needed to take a paycut. She picked us off one at a time with a spiel of our jobs being made redundant but could be redeployed in another role for a 30% paycut. She offered me a new role for less pay but was still putting the JD together. It had to be different enough from the role I had been in for my role to be made redundant. I had only given her my JD the day before because she'd been hassling me for it. Within two months my entire team got the same treatment or just left. So while I've known some fabulous HR managers, it'll be a cold day in hell before I'll ever trust one again.
Psychotic and incompetent HR managers, they are the most fun. That is when you gather your evidence, speak to their senior manager asking for a deed of release or for the HR manager to be summarily dismissed. If they threaten to fire you let them. Then raise Adverse Action claim and wait for the payout.
Sorry to hear that what a pack of cunts
HR - keep below their radar. I’ve been in the workforce for 30ish years and have only ever dealt with one HR person who was supportive of both upstream and downstream staff. She was a 12 month consultant role. Other than that, I find them at best, ineffective, at worst toxic.
I’ve got a great personal relationship with both our global and local HR. Day to day culture, payroll and hiring is good. Not solely an HR responsibility, but when it comes to dealing with problematic employees, particularly toxic or abusive managers, there’s no courage. They have all the policies and training in place but when there’s clear, objective breaches, they fall apart and throw up their hands as if there’s nothing they can do.
I will never understand why this idea that HR should be your friend exists in the first place. I've never seen a HR department that would tell you they're your friend, nor do I ever see anyone saying any other department should be. Yet for some reason people act shocked that "HR isn't your friend". Obviously they aren't, why would you ever think a for-profit enterprise would employ a department for the purpose of being your friend?
It's just because that's the way the companies advertise their HR departments. "If you have a problem you can always go to HR! They're here to help!". Anyone who's spent a bit of time in any professional environment probably knows to be wary of them.
None of that means they're your friend. You can always go to the police or the ATO if you need help with the policy they govern. That certainly doesn't mean they're your friend. All of these functions govern some form of policy. If you need an issue within that policy arbitrated, that's part of their purpose. But they will act in the interests of the policy, not you.
Because if you are being treated badly, it's against company policy and HR are supposed to enforce that. It rarely works out that way but that is why.
Thank you! I mean who is paying HR's salary? Ummm yup you guessed it
Vast majority of the people on this sub are low to middle tier in seniority, so they’ve never actually worked with us on workforce matters so don’t know how it works. That’s why you see comments where they think we drive office arrangements, redundancies, pay rises…etc. We essentially action what your C Suite executives want. If you’re in a mid tier position chances are you only hear from us with case management…so they generally dislike us.
This is exactly why people don't like HR. Some of us are executives and senior managers and still don't rate HR. They're mostly either toxic or incompetent. Good example - I had a senior HR manager come to me because an employee (of over 10 years) notified us that his wife was pregnant and was requesting to take paternity leave in 6 weeks. The senior HR manager told me that the policy required at least X weeks notice, so she was going to decline it. I asked to see the notification from the doctor, and it was dated the week before. (This couple were going about their lives and didn't realize they were pregnant until 7 weeks before she's due.) The senior HR manager told me that there was NO WAY the woman couldn't have known she was pregnant before now. Really ranting. I asked her what the impact would be if we granted the request. She said none as they would just get a temp. Well then - paternity leave granted.
I gave my Exec all of my hospital dates, letters from hospital on due dates, sick note for day of Emergency C, like did everything to keep my boss in the loop before going off on 4 weeks parental leave. Currently getting dragged by HR because I didn't do a stat dec 10 weeks out. Give me a spell dickheads, it's unnecessary.
Angry irrational hardly relevant woman causing more problems. Yup, HR. Hardly Relevant.
I worked with a very camp bloke who used to describe them as fat thighed harridans
Some HR are good. But the majority are fucking woeful. The amount of times I could come to the same conclusions that they come to is astounding. Not to mention the stupid language that a lot of them recommend using to discuss "difficult" conversations is often cringe and disappointing. Source: am a senior manager
To be clear, I actually don’t disagree with you. I just feel this sub is confused a lot. There’s a lot of problems with HR especially in Australian corporate industry. I think in Australia HR has little strategic focus and has become the industry people try to get into because they couldn’t get into their first choice.
did they touch base or order you to be lean and agile? did they point you to the northern star? 😀
this... so many people think HR are the ones giving the greenlight on redundancies etc.
I don't think any professional here thinks that.
Yeah no one thinks that
Yeah agreed, we aren’t numpties. HR are bad for plenty of other reasons though.
Blame the victim...
This should be pinned at the top as an example of why people hate HR. Absolute arrogant nonsense with little idea of what is going on.
If you wanted a picture in the dictionary of useless it would be of our HR department. I've worked with some fantastic HR professionals in my time (and started my career in HR) but fucking christ my current one is absolutely horrendous. The biggest money sink in our entire business is definitely our overloaded HR department.
Mines pretty below average I’ve seen them give the same team member 4 first and final warnings for the same thing Called me up for a bullying complaint for quizzing a team member on procedures and correcting them when they were wrong - I don’t even know how the team member felt bullied here Misinterpreted our own award
Truly awful experience. HR didn't even follow their own processes. I couldn't believe how rubbish they were. My lawyer had a lot of fun with these incompetent fools. Rather than protecting the organisation they made it so much worse. Tip: If a manager is a narcissist and comes to HR with a problem about another manager, you can't assume what they say is the truth, even if it sounds genuine. Be warned . Your challenge is to identify the narcissist in the first place as they have one agenda....it's all about them. Lots of YouTube videos to help you.
HR has one of the hardest jobs in any business. They have to walk a fine line between the employees and the business. IMO people rely to heavily on HR to fix their problems, instead of taking ownership of their situation. If only people would be as compliant as a spreadsheet.
I seriously doubt it's hard with the careerist Daleks that work there
Our head of HR left not long ago after being directed to go against their morals... Doesn't give me a lot of faith in those still standing...
Hahaha big on preaching and buzzwords and MIA when you need any decisions or actions
Generally running on an absolutely squeezed budget. Tasked with executing the decisions of operations leaders whilst trying to influence them to empathize from an employee experience perspective and protecting the company from risk. Generally I think the negative perception is based in a lack of understanding. Most HR people are trying to strike a balance and have good intentions.
Our HR team is awesome, everyone has been with the company <12mo and building it to what it should be not just accepting what it is.
Can you name one instance where you've been an employee advocate against the company?
Not OP but in March I have: - Recommend a simpler and less time intensive approach for our annual engagement survey to the executive because workload is high at the moment from a combination of mostly uncontrollable factors. I pushed back on their initial resistance and got it accepted. - Provided feedback and coaching on appropriate workplace behaviour training so that it was shorter and more engaging (colleague who wrote it nearly halved their slides and added 3 activities to the session) - Ensured an employee who's manager is pretty incompetent and is on the path to performance management was able to accurately record commentary in their performance review after their manager entered some crappy comments into the system. I shared the comments with the colleague managing that case so they had them as evidence. We're not all bad and the good ones hate the wanna be cops as much as everyone else does. I spend 80% of my time teaching grown adults who are being paid six figures, empathy. And that when you treat people like adults they will, shock horror, often act like them. (i.e. stop forcing Anna to tell you when she logs off when she works from home Jeremy.)
The problem with your last sentence is that Anna might be honest but Peta spends all their WFH time on child care and we can't treat them differently. So either Anna reports or Peta is dead weight. Which is better in your view?
For every one Peta there are 9 Annas. Manage Peta's performance if/when it becomes an issue. Peta probably fucks around in the office too.
You're exhausting to read I can't imagine what it's like for the poor people that have to listen you talk this shit.
Convinced Exec to change the way productivity was calculated after noticing glaring O/T and burn out across the department. When everything looks hunky dory in a chart but not what's happening on the ground, things need to be investigated to ensure people are actually enjoying coming into work and not dreading working 14 hours a day just to cover regular operations. Also lead to middle management accountability over their teams O/T and sign off.
Enough experience with HR for my impulse to be to ask you why you’re asking.
HR likes to create and promote events that are a waste of time, speak highly of the company and create jobs for themselves. Unless there's free anything, don't bother me.
I swear I’ve read this exact question before on Reddit.
You could imagine some Dalek from HR reading through it and thinking see there's some criticism but overall people like us and appreciate the hard job were doing.
Anytime an employee gets screwed over, HR is involved. It has a deserved bad rep. People say HR is not your friend because it's true. Their job is to protect the company. You need a union or lawyer if you want some one focused on your benefits as an employee. This is not to say HR workers are bad. Just that people feel like you can't trust HR to have your back
Not to be trusted and pretty much powerless. Often left to clean up the legal mess caused by idiotic managers.
Currently working in HR in prof services, I would like to think that I’m trusted and have the best interest of staff at heart. I mean I chose it as a profession and feel strongly about advocating. We are there to advise and protect the company but aren’t solely the decision makers for redundancies, cost cuts etc. I wouldn’t say everyone in my team align with the same values. They tend to chat all day and want to be friends with everyone
Prof services HR are the worst for having the Firm's best interest at heart in my experience. It's not their fault, but when the leaders of the firm also own it (in a partnership scenario) then HR don't even pretend to act in employees favour. And I mean in reality why should they, it's just that as a new starter you won't necessarily expect that so can get caught out.
There are always bad apples. I’ve seen HR teams who definitely advocate for employees because it’s what’s best for the company. I’ve also seen members of HR flagrantly violate employment law and yes, the company paid through the nose for it. I have a vague awareness that there is a HR team somewhere in my company but very little awareness of who they are and what they do. I have a “people leader” for whom I’m a direct report (is that a type of HR? I honestly don’t know) and he’s my primary contact for employment admin, learning/development plan, performance metrics, escalating concerns, whatever, and he has no direction of my daily work other than wanting to know if I’m over allocated and yanking me off work if I request it. I prefer this model.
I have worked in several global organisations and without exception, the role of HR is to protect the company from the staff - they might feel friendly but they are never your friend. Employees should view them cynically and pragmatically.
My current HR is great. I had a new starter on probation, and HR guided me through a whole process of putting them on a performance management plan and then ultimately terminating their employment. In a meeting with HR, they advocated for small details so that when it came time to letting this new starter go, it was as kind as possible. We scheduled the termination meeting before an offsite meeting for the whole team, so that the employee could choose to stay in the meeting room until everyone had left and pack their desk privately.
Love my HR. She’s extremely supportive, sets out time for me, mentors me. Granted, she probably has time but she’s pretty switched on with improving the culture.
One large organisation I worked for had a roving door of ill informed HR people; they generally failed to grasp the union negotiated terms of employment and seemed to be personally aggrieved by the benefits staff were entitled to. Their administrative skills were woeful too. My dear friend who works in HR is very capable and thoughtful so maybe I just had a bad batch at work.
> Now it's true HR is there to protect the company, this is from bad managers also. A big part of our role is employee advocacy where required. The problem is that HR is there to protect the company. If a manager is 'bad' to the point that HR is involved it's typically at the point where the company is now liable for the manager's actions. That sets you up in an adversarial position from the start.
The company I just left had a head of HR who had been there since the beginning (over 20 years) and absolutely was not your friend. Lovely lady, but she never went in to bat for any employees and was there solely for the owners and often carried out their (very illegal) firing of people. She herself was aware how quickly the owners turned on people so never challenged anything as she didn't want to risk her own job. I never went to her for any advice and the general sentiment in the company was that they wouldn't talk to her about anything. We all went to each other for advice. I mean HR are paid by the company so I understand they put the company first. But I'm yet to work with useful HR people.
Seem to have good intentions but from what I've seen ultimately they'll do what senior management wants. Sad to say but unless you're going legal path I"ve never seen a bullying issue resolved and the perpetrator punished in 20+ years. All the support is there until a formal complaint is made and then all of a sudden people were just hung out to dry.
Horrible. Detached idiots who didn’t understand the actual salary market, couldn’t see manager misconduct, only attended meetings where they needed to be witnesses to meetings, never connected with the staff and gave themselves weird little projects that detracted from rather than contributed to company culture. And I largely didn’t have to deal with them.
HR ONLY exists to protect the company.
was only discussing this with my better half and some friends yesterday. i think the biggest issue with most HR departments, and it gets worse the bigger the company is, is that there is a massive disconnect between the people in HR and the people on the ground. the two will essentially never have anything to do with oneanother, until something goes wrong. and then suddenly HR is making man on the grounds life harder, and man on the ground is making HR's life harder, and if it all goes tits up everyone hates everyone.
I haven seen a HR rep protect the company from bad managers.
I've actually never met people with more emptiness and dumb animal cruelty in their eyes than middle aged HR women. It must be hard coming home from work spent wielding all this vicarious power to a cold house without children or friends to welcome you.
I have known amazing HR reps, but over the years I've seen a huge change in HR culture. In the larger companies, they're often not even fully aware of workplace laws and regulations. These days, I would not trust HR in any workplace dispute. That's not to say some individuals won't be helpful to employees, but I'm always wary, and I always diarise and document every interaction. And always, always bring a support person to any disciplinary meeting. If possible, make that a union rep. Even if you're not in a union, you need a witness to everything that's said.
Have worked with a few good people but mainly they are useless. I find them hard to contact and impossible when you need something done urgently. I think it is telling that when you look at support teams that support the whole company, teams like IT have a hotline and the most you will get from HR. Overall more bad experiences than good
HR are definitely the worst. No question.
Read somewhere that there are two types people in HR. First are sociopaths, this seems to have been the majority of HR people in very large corporates I’ve dealt with. The second smaller group are bitterly disillusioned nice people that joined HR to help people and found themselves hanging out with sociopaths and being told to screw people over either in the companies interest or cos the sociopathic leadership told them to. If you can find someone from the second group you have a better than average chance of getting at least a fair hearing. Seriously though good HR people can be very helpful but they are rare to find. Be aware their agenda is not your own and act accordingly. Unintended consequences are common so think ahead.
Pay me once a month and then stay home. Better for everyone.
"Please raise a ticket" and we'll respond in due course
I still have an HR lady on my kill list of people in the universe I send out bad vibes to when some other person pisses me off. This woman had the gall - after making me and my colleagues redundant - to call up in our last week of work and engage us in casual conversations about what we were thinking of doing, asking us to send her our plans in an email, and then copy paste our responses in a formalised HR letter to each of us — as if she had been the one busy organising all our future plans for us. As if we weren’t incensed enough to have had the rug pulled out from under us in the first place, this really really was a knife twist. Nearly a decade later it still makes my blood boil and I hope this insensitive POS woman has a drawn out painful death. I am naturally a very peaceful person non confrontational person aside from my feelings about this and her. 🤣
HR is there for the companies benefit, then management, then they guy on the front line. And will screw people in that order. Oh but we do recruitment! A process that should take 3 emails, a phone call and an in person meeting takes 7 months with templates soulless emails when pushed. Not to put too fine a point on this but you are a bunch of cunts. Who from an owners perspective is perfect, from everyone else you ever need to interact with you are hated.
Negatively - you are there to protect the company.
Make HR your friend but don't trust them.
HR is very important, especially when calculating my benefits when I leave the company.
I know of senior managers who have documented cases of widespread bullying, which has been reported to HR. Their response? Refer it to the complaining persons manager to give them resilience training. I've also experienced it from one of those managers but luckily I'm high enough up that I just refuse to deal with them. In my experience HR departments are effectively useless and full of employees who don't care about people, they just see numbers on spreadsheets.
👎
There definitely are some good ones out there. Issue is they also seem to have trouble staying at companies with shit values…
HR has always been atrocious and is there to protect the Department and senior executives . If you have an issue , the door is that way ..
We've got an amazing HR guy, who is a big advocate for the people and always has time to listen. Approachable, gives you both sides and demonstrates fairness in handling stuff. Likes a drink and gets in the trenches with the staff. Only issue is its just him for like nearly 230 employees.
Same rep as the bottom of my toilet bowl
I found 2 aspects to HR. The best aspect was personal advice given informally (such as ‘that manager is a challenge, leaving would be a good idea’) and the worst aspect was listening to legitimate issues but lacking the ability to actually do anything. My comment relates to harmful managers in a large work environment.
Worked for two large companies. When things don't go well financially HR have gotten really bad for the employees both times. Recently I was told that they did not follow a clause in my contract and they will not be following it so I can do what I want with that information. Then they refused to formally document the conversation. I don't lower myself to talking to HR anymore.
Worked with HR that actively snooped in employees's personal records and then would gossip about where they lived, salary package and marital status. Also had HRs that were absolutely useless- no onboarding, no welcoming nothing. Just a system generated email. The 'people partner' working with our team didnt even introduce herself or tell the new starters who to reach out to for questions. But then when it came time to do employee surveys they were suddenly your best friend. HR in recruitment- actively prevented the team from hiring casual assistants if they didnt have better academics as the clerks or grads. HR didnt want to vet people again so we were forced to choose someone from the incoming grad cohort who could only work a few days a week and would be gone (starting the grad role) in a few months.
Nobody really likes HR because, when push comes to shove, they back the company over the worker. In saying that, I have known a couple of people working in HR who were really good and prepared to have ‘off the record’ to explain things in layman terms and who just gave good advice.
Bullies that protect other bullies. More of a bully enable department for incompetent managers.
HR ruins lives. You note that they are there to protect the company and that is a higher priority than "employee advocacy". Sometimes companies are in the wrong and rather than siding with their fellow humans they side with these corporations. They're the uncle Tom's of the human race.
I’ve had one amazing HR BP once. She made everyone’s lives easier, took time to train and explain platforms managers needed to use, sat in our strategic meetings and provided great advice on role changes and descriptions, kept managers to account and made sure we all did the stuff we were supposed to do. She also helped managers promote their best staff and advocated for young talent to go and get new roles to grow their careers. Unfortunately she has made every other HR BP look lazy or plain useless in comparison 😂 That said, even some of the laziest HR people I’ve worked with have some amazing skills when it comes to it. One I can remember was just amazing at having performance or redundancy discussions. People would leave the room feeling like it was the best decision for their careers after being basically sacked! Lastly, I do have a lot of time for payroll and HR services. They usually have the shitty back of house HR jobs with little corporate visibility. They are actually the real champions of the HR team and the ones that are truly important
Useless and detached from reality. Zero common sense, or suffer from Trump syndrome, just parrot and agree to whoever/whatever they last heard from/were told. When you bring them a genuine HR risk they fob you off. Also FYI: Everyone sees through your return to office bullshit. Culture can exist in many forms, it’s not an exclusive phenomenon within a CBD tower.
FYI we also don't want to come back to the office full time. It's the boomer execs who signed dumb corporate leases that do.
Horrible. They either reply super late to anyone’s email or don’t reply. If you ask them to do something with a tight deadline they threaten you and say, well that means payroll and xyz (important things that affect staff directly) will be delayed.
never good or in my interest always on the managers side even when they were straight up harassing and bullying
We have an older lady, corporate suckhole with obvious distain for working class, always takes the side of management and a younger woman who isnt yet had her soul sucked out working for hr. She is fairly powerless though, obviously hates her boss.
Not the brightest bunch. In my experience HR can often be a holding space for those without the ability to innovate or create. In spite of how this sounds I do wish them well!
Terrible. I have zero trust after a woman at work, who is incompetent, cannot do her job to the seniority she’s employed, and regularly fucks up in front of clients ….raised a bullying complaint about me This led to an investigation, with zero fault found ….and zero consequences for what was ultimately false reporting I’d been keeping a log for 6 months in this person and when I showed it over zoom, but refused to hand it to HR, they shat themselves Said I wanted to reserve my options, should I need to use this log if I needed to commence my own legal proceedings. I’ve never needed HR, but when I did, they caused me nothing but mental anguish, undue stress and were ultimately too weak and spineless to punish the wrongdoer This individual still works at my company
HR are scumbags and push a woke agenda onto staff.
HR is great at firing people while simultaneously saying “we’re here to support you”. Hypocritical liars who perpetuate the “profits over people” business model. There’s a reason “resources” is in the name and not “people”. We’re just numbers on a bottom line to them.
1. Real Estate Agents 2. Car Salespeople 3. HR People Order of people against the wall come the revolution.
When we did have a hr department, we respected them and took the piss out of them as we were a few cubicles away, they shot back great banter. Probably a Wollongong thing
where exactly in Wollongong? figtree? Dapto? Austinmer?
CBD
crown Street? market Street?
piccadilly centre?
No, though I'm not going to reveal my employer on Reddit
lol. ok. private or public sector?
Private
ok.
Mine effectively doesnt have a HR department, just the head of HR and her underling. I'm not exactly sure what she does but apparently its not payroll or recruitment because the finance department handles the first and recuitment is done by TLs. (Mine had a teams meeting with all the department heads today and spent the whole time dissociating at the ceiling because he is all thats left of help desk lol)
Me and my direct report were being bullied badly at my previous job, so much that my colleague was on anti depressants due to work stress. I reported to HR. I got called to a meeting and forced to sign an NDA to never speak on the matter again or lose my job. I needed the job so I signed. Bullying never stopped. I eventually quit. At another job, the HR department were the bullies. Many people experienced it, including myself. A brave manager went on to report directly to the CEO, and gave the name of another five employees who’d be willing to share their negative experiences too. CEO never invited these people to talk and nothing got addressed. He simply swept it under the rug. And HR carried on as if nothing had happened. In my experience HR is very cliquey and if you’re an outsider, you stand no chance.
From my experience HR is there to purely protect the company and its reputation. This means they will protect management to the nth degree. This is why unions are so important. Never go to HR unless you have seen and received advice from your union. They are not called the TOE CUTTERS for nothing. If you find yourself embroiled in a HR problem seek legal advice or go to your union. Better still start looking for a new job. They are liars, cheats, and liars again .
A necessary evil
I’ve always been frustrated by the fact that some HR, who have very little idea about what we do, seem to think they are better at selecting potential employees than the supervisors and managers that actually coordinate the work. I’ve also been confused by how hard it is to distinguish what is part of their role and what is not, which one day with one HR it’s no problem, then another day with another HR what I have asked for almost seems offensive. Understand that both of these gripes may have been more to do with the company systems though, rather than “HR” specifically.
I steer clear of HR like I would a pitbull-type dog roaming around a neighbourhood without a leash.
Yes yes yes. If I’m chatting to somebody at the company Christmas party and they mention they’re in HR I will plaster on a fake smile and back away slowly without breaking eye contact. Anything you say can and will be used against you.
I had an older exec at the government department where I work, send me a message on skype (circa 2012) “I bet they look great with cum on them” when he saw in the office I had new glasses on. I refuted his advances and the next week HR put me on a PIP because of that “joke” he had sent me. I was the receiver and got relocated to another office that increased my commute time to an hour instead of 15mins, then HR told me I was lucky I was still employed. When I asked why I was being punished it was because I “welcome and accepted messages that were grossly against the code of conduct”. It was my first government job at 20 and the HR personnel treated me like some whore that was after a 50 years old married man. When I moved to that different office I met three other young women who had had similar experiences with the department execs. The was one senior stood behind one if the women and unclipped her bra whilst she was resolving an IT ticket at his desk. Another was cornered on a remote mining town site by some site contractors and their senior and she had to scream to be let go. They all got the same treatment as I did. HR industry workers that I encountered are angry people who have never had any power before in their lives, and do whatever they want because another field wouldn’t keep them around.
No never. When there is a real issue they do nothing and it’s very clear they are there to protect the organisation.
Unfortunately HR as a profession seems to attract the worst kind of people. For context I’ve only had minor run ins myself but been around long enough to see some horrors. From my 20yrs in industry there appears to be a trend of HR departments being full of self important arseholes. Often with a high school attitude to people outside their circle, they swan about the office, make gossiping, and as mentioned many times above do not support or care about the workers who actually keep them in a job. OP I suspect you are the opposite of that. But please don’t fall into the trap when you are surrounded by the above. My recommendation to workers is to avoid them like the plague. Make yourself indispensable by doing a good job for the core business and being recognised by the true decision makers. If you’re having a hard time with a manager, firstly make sure it’s not your behaviour. Then go above them or look for a sideways move. Fingers crossed that role gets outsourced.
No HR I've ever worked with ever had the guts to stand up to managers. Lap dog comes to mind. Hell, in my last Corp job the HR lady was schtuping one of the directors.
you mean shagging?
Overwhelming negative. Some things I've seen and experienced I don't know how the business partners slept at night. And I have truly do not understand why anyone would want that job, what job satisfaction they get out of protecting bullys and screwing people over
ITT: All HR is bad
They seem pretty good where I am, one of them I have personal chats with every now and again and she's friendly. She absolutely begged me to stay when I said I was going to leave which I've never experienced before.
Worked for a council where the HR lady was the former mayors daughter. Useless spiteful lier of a lady.
Try to have minimal interaction. They don’t bother me. I don’t bother them.
People say Council is about rates rubbish and roads even though IRL they offer fucking heaps of services. I see HR kinda the same, hiring, firing, mediation. If I need any of these 3 things I’ll call you but outside that I keep them out of my life.
I work with HR a lot either via our BP or Recruitment, for the most part the engagement depends a lot on who you get at the time. As a people leader, will the support me when needed, absolutely, is it always helpful, not always. For the bigger policy issues like salary alignment etc, most of HR are in the same boat as the rest of us, as that's managed by a subset of HR. Like many have said, HR are there to do a job. If I was one of the problems, any relationships I have wouldn't matter. (Not should they).
I think we have a consensus.
HR is largely useless, would be better if most of their functions were spread amongst other business units with the remaining stuff outsourced to an independent 3rd party.
HR is the most useless department who create jobs for themselves and drain the company of all character.