I’m just a simple pencil pusher. HR Manager at a medium sized business. Any time I bring this up to anyone, I get the same look that Michael gives Toby Flenderson from The Office. They’re mostly joking (I think) but why all of the hate? I genuinely try to help my employees the best I can. Are people just messing around in good fun, or do people generally detest HR employees?
31 comments
HR is like a tow truck driver: you almost never think about them, but when you interact with them either you’re getting fucked or they’re helping you from a bad situation.
I respect HR and I think they’re necessary to make sure the company runs smoothly. Plus, they process my payroll.
But a lot of people learn that even though HR wants to be your friend and come off as fun and charming, HR’s main objectives relate to keeping the company going and protecting the company from labor risks. You have to accept that at a certain point, you’re there to make sure people follow certain rules. It’s not nice all the time, and people will try to stretch how far they can take pushing those rules.
If you think HR is hated, you should see how it is in Internal Audit. 😛
I had a yearly review where the HR person, who didn’t know me by face started to read my file when I walked in.
They hadn’t prepared at all.
He proceeded to tell me to expect no promotion for the next 5 years.
2 months later I found another job with 50% more pay and a company car.
HR is there to protect the company against lawsuits. Nothing more.
They are not your friend.
ive really liked most HR people ive had..
In my experience HR is not to be trusted under any circumstances. They already know too much about me and are not above petty office politics. I am saying that as someone who, for some reason, works under the VP of HR.
But yeah, in general, my experience with them has been poor. Mainly because they are often a toothless tiger. One bad boss can ruin an entire department of good employees but you often need to churn through a few teams before upper management and HR realizes the problem isn’t that they keep hiring bad people, it is that they have management cancers and lack the fortitude to address that properly. There is no point talking to HR about it because everything said to them ends up at the boss anyway, and HR almost always sides with the boss and management. You talk to a union rep, a lawyer, or a potential new employer. Never HR.
In my experience HR rarely has the interest of the worker at heart. Their main goal is applying company policy in a way to protect those at the top from being accountable when shit hits the fan.
People generally detest HR.
In most places, HR is there to protect management and screw over the employees. People hate them for the same reason they hate lawyers. They’re the bureaucrats making the sausage, and most people who have anything to do with them get grossed out by what they see.
Depends really on the size of the company. I’ve worked with small and large companies. Smaller groups, HR is more familiar with you and your circumstances. Larger groups, HR knows you only by name and department. You’ll really only interact with HR on 3 types of occasions: when you come in, when you leave, and when you’re involved with ‘issues that need addressing.’
I like HR folks. They’re typically the most bubbly and fun people in the company. They usually have high EQ and know how to defuse a tense situation.
Mostly bad. HR likes to sugarcoat and obfuscate issues. They also have a tendency to screw over the employee and maintain the company status-quo.
They are not to be trusted under any circumstances. At one job they lost my personal information. I should have quit on the spot but I needed the money at the time, but I never let them think I forgot or forgave them. They didn’t like that.
I worked at a small company for 6 years. We were 75 people when we started, but only 1/2 of that were in the same location as me.
I was friendly with HR and they were super helpful in the 2 or 3 times I needed them (benefits when I got married, moving, etc…). I never had any serious situations I needed to engage with them for.
Now I work for a 50,000+ corporation and can’t recall a single interaction with HR outside of some basic on-boarding and hiring stuff when I first joined.
Literally the only time I’ve dealt with HR is during on boarding paperwork and exit interviews. Occasionally tax or investment matching. So I mostly forget they exist
They were called Human Capital. That’s all I’m going to say.
From my experiences, these comments are incredibly positive. Everyone hates HR. Detest? Detest is not nearly strong enough, because HR is the single most hypocritical part of any large American business.
HR is out to squeeze the most it can out of workers, and cover up the company’s. They smile and then they stab you in the back. They lecture you and then make a mockery of their own rules. They usually know nothing about what the company actually does.
An earlier commentor mentioned auditing. Sure, auditors are a pain, but normally they are respected. They have their rules, you know what they are, and you get dinged if you don’t follow them. On the other hand HR is arbitrary and vague. If they want your job they get it, but NO ONE RESPECTS HR.
This is not like police officers. Sometimes police officers abuse their powers, but sometimes they do save injured motorists or catch serial killers. HR just abuses its power.
On so many levels and in so many ways HR is simply evil. And here is what is odd. I never had an issue with HR, but I saw enough detestable behavior from them to make me lose all respect for the profession. As a profession its driving ethos is dishonest, hypocritical, and woefully ignorant.
One exception where I thought she was as bad as every other HR I interacted with. And then only got to interact with way less competent people.
My experience with HR is that they are not in place to help the employee. HR is in place to protect the company. Sometimes that may just overlap with helping an employee. Boss is sexually harassing their worker, then HR is protecting the company from the boss causing the company to get sued. Unless the boss has enough pull then HR may go after the employee to get them to drop the complaint.
Did the employee find the company was acting unethically, violating their own policy, and the employee has legally obtained recordings and notes to prove it? HR may just tell the employee they can F off with a small check to shut up unless they want to be in a legal battle and risk getting nothing years down the road.
I generally hate government dictates on things, but I’d be all for publicly traded companies having an outside auditor embedded with HR just like they do for accounting and other functions.
The only time I talk to HR officially is to confirm handbook wording or ask about procedures not explicitly called out. I’m all about CYA so I always check the handbook or get an email from HR if I have to do something out of the ordinary. For a small stretch of time I worked remotely prior to covid to help with kids medical issues. There was wording for traveling people on working remote but not office based folks. So I got an exception,in writing from HR management, to cover my ass.
It has all been pleasant.
Now , I have found that food theives tend to be HR folk for some reason. No clue why it is.
I work for a massive manufacturing company. My HR-Generalist helped me put together a resume and apply for an office job to get off the shop floor. Coached me on the interview questions and helped me look for a position I’d be the most likely to get hired for. Nothing but good things to say about HR in my experience.
My experiences with HR were all the same. They act nice and bubbly but they’re only there for three reasons:
-to maximize the value that the company can wring out of employees
-to shield management from the social consequences of their decisions.
-to protect the hierarchical structure of the company, even if it’s bad for the company.
HR has no idea what individual contributors do. They don’t actually monitor what workers are doing, or even understand it. This is a problem because all of the info that HR gets is filtered through management, which is obviously biased towards management.
HR will sit in on your review and push back for management when you ask for a raise. But will they do the opposite?
Someone said that HR is unlike cops, because cops actually help you sometimes. But they are exactly like cops in one way- no one is forced to be a cop, and no one is forced to be in HR.
There’s a million ways to make money in this country, but somehow people choose do violence on behalf of the state (cops). Others choose to help exploit workers (HR).
OP, your friends are rightfully suspicious of your career choice- unless they’re also corporate apologists.
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IMHO, my biggest issue with HR is the bullshit acronyms, “360 review process” and now the “diversity & inclusion” programs being force-fed down employee’s throats.
Look, I just want to show up at work, do my job, collect my paycheck and go home at the end of the day. I’m all for yearly reviews, but holy shit do I hate having my goals have to roll up to some corporate big-wig’s goals and spend time making up BS to meet those “goals”
IMHO, the best HR was at a small company. They helped new employee stuff, employee benefit questions and spent most of their time working on fun “office things” like our Haloween party or whatnot. Very little of the corporate crap that HR usually has.
You got you’re answer OP 🥶
You got you’re answer OP 🥶
I work in payroll/finance and am very close to HR. Everyone is correct – HR is not your friend. HR is not here to serve you. HR’s purpose is to protect the company. But that’s every department’s purpose – recruiting, finance, marketing, operations, IT. All those other departments aren’t here to serve you the individual with specific hopes, dreams, and families either. You don’t get a laptop from IT because they like you. You get one to do your job. All those departments are filled with regular individuals who also have independent lives and just trying to get by.
For everyone who has a problem with HR, depending on the size of the organization, it’s not uncommon for much of HR’s directives and influences to come from leaders outside of HR. It’s not always HR leading the pack on performance reviews, hiring processes, or whatever other thing they’re blamed for – it’s frequently (and ideally) a group of people.
I’m not here to defend the clowns in HR that overstep. However, everyone with a low opinion of HR should take a minute to consider all of the potential stakeholders involved in the decision making processes at your workplaces. Just because HR said or did something you didn’t like doesn’t mean 1. You’re correct. 2. HR came up with this all their own. They’re often just the messenger.
Coming from a country with a strong union foundation it’s a fairly common opinion here that HR “is the company”, and if you go to HR due to problems with “the company” as a worker, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. As a regular worker myself my interactions with HR have been purposely anonymous.
Only interactions I have seen with them is laying off or screwing over men (strangely common)
My HR is my boy! Seriously we’re working friends who can speak openly. He talks a lot of shit about people at work.
His boss..I’m good with, but more reserved and professional.
At my last job, HR was more the bearer of bad news “you can’t do that”..
I absolutely despise my HR manager. He doesn’t know anything about our benefits and employees are usually left to do their own research if they have questions. He also can’t be trusted. If you share confidential information, he immediately shares it with the top managers. Complaints about him go nowhere.
I work closely with our HR teams and I can personally say most people care. Your main point of contact might be an HRBP and those folks are touch-and-go. The initiatives, processes and analytics are really meant to help employees.
I have nothing bad to say. They’ve always helped me and explained complicated things. Some of the seminars they’ve put on have been a bit dry but they’ve been just fine over all. Obviously they’re there to protect the intuition’s interests and I keep that in mind, but I don’t have anything against any of them.