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Ten Reasons Everybody Hates HR

This article is more than 7 years old.

I became an HR person in 1984. I managed Customer Service and Operations before I was put into my first HR job by my awesome boss, John Brady, who told me when I came back from vacation, "You're the HR Manager now." I was like "What?" I was sad to leave my team in the Order Processing department.

We had a fantastic crew and we had fun. I was sad because I thought that being an HR person meant that I wouldn't be able to talk to our customers or sales reps any more. I loved our customers and our salespeople. We laughed and joked on the phone all day.

John said, "Go ahead and talk to whoever you want." He got me to see a bigger vision for HR, before I had spent 10 minutes in the HR department. John said, "The purpose of HR is to make this organization an awesome place to work and to make sure we don't do anything stupid." I liked that vision. I dug right in.

I was in a bubble because I didn't realize during most of my 50,000 years as an HR leader that most people hate HR. They fear HR people. I didn't know that at the time. I thought my job was to be the den mother and pixie-dust-distributor in our company. I didn't realize that many HR leaders who would like to be den mothers or -dads and pixie-dust-distributors aren't allowed to do that.

In many organizations the role of HR is to keep the company out of court. The role of HR is to keep the company from getting sued -- by its own employees! Can you imagine a sadder or less inspiring reason to come to work? Does your CFO stand up at the executives' meeting and say, "It was a good month -- none of our customers or vendors sued us!" Of course not.

It's a given that your customers and vendors won't sue you unless a truly terrible and unlikely set of events take place. You'll have plenty of warning if that event sequence begins. It works exactly the same way in HR, but fearful leaders and fearful HR people see imaginary ready-to-sue-them employees around every corner!

I never spent two seconds during my eons in HR worrying about getting sued by my fellow employees. We were having too much fun to think about suing one another. If somebody was unhappy, a manager or another employee or an HR person would hear about it. Then we could figure it out and get past it.

Waves of good and bad energy circulate in every organization.

All we have to do is pay attention to them. It easy to do that -- we almost can't help it! We are humans. Humans are animals. We know when the energy around is positive and when it's negative. We need to start telling the truth about that.

Here are ten reasons people hate HR. None of them is inevitable or built into the HR function. Not one of them is an intractable problem. If you are an HR person, you can start to address this issue today. You can step out of the traditional HR box and bring yourself fully to your role, with your humor, your warmth and your quirks. You can do HR your own way!

If you are an employee and you've had bad experiences with HR in your company, you can take a step, too. You don't have to wait for the next "confidential" employee survey to throw shade on HR. You can bring yourself to work too, and interact with HR people when you don't have a problem. You can honor the human side of everyone you work with.

We all have the tendency to divide up the world into two groups: Us and Them. It's easy to make HR people the enemy. You can take the opposite view and assume that the HR folks in your shop are doing their best. Remember that hostility and fear are two sides of the same coin.

10 Reasons People Hate HR

• HR people seem to take the company's side in any interaction, never the employee's side.

• HR people seem to want to get employees in trouble for tiny infractions.

• HR people are not viewed as trustworthy, even though they say, "Tell me what's on your mind!"

• HR people stand idly by while incompetent and abusive supervisors get promoted and mistreat employees.

• HR people often "know HR" but don't know anything about the business they work for.

• HR people often spout policy instead of actively getting involved to remove roadblocks their employees face.

• HR people are seen as political and more concerned with their own place in the company's pecking order than with the welfare of the team.

• HR people talk more about policies, benefits and other announcements than they talk about culture, fear, trust, conflict or any of the million human issues that arise in every organization.

• HR people often have trouble seeing the "human side" of any issue, from a time-off request to a variation in a pay-grade or a hiring issue, focusing instead on keeping every process uniform and exception-free.

• HR people, who can be Ministers of Culture in their organizations, are too often seen as culture-killers instead!

What can a leader do if his or her organization's HR function is not living up to its potential? The first step is to look  in the mirror! Too many executives lead HR, if they lead it at all, through fear rather than trust. They focus on keeping payroll costs down and keeping "employee issues" to a minimum, instead of setting ambitious goals and then hiring brilliant people to help achieve them -- and letting those brilliant people do their jobs!

The world is changing too fast for stuck-in-the-mud organizations to survive. HR has a big job to do, but it won't happen until HR people and their colleagues come together to acknowledge and celebrate the critical cultural role that empowered and switched-on HR people fill!

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