I gotta say, having spent a number of years in Human Resources in a variety of capacities, I’m a little grumpy about the generalizations being thrown around here. I might gently suggest that those who say HR is good-for-nothing might try working in that functional area for a while before passing such judgements.
Because here’s the thing: It’s a totally thankless role.
In HR, you’re pulled in several directions simultaneously. There are umpteen zillion regulations that have to be followed in everything from compensation to hiring to benefits, and HR is expected to (1) be the experts and (2) force everybody to comply. Think about the role of the police in society; we all know they’re necessary, but most people fear and distrust them at least to a small extent, even though it’s irrational. What’s worse, all of these regulations are insanely complicated, and vary widely from state to state, and change on a regular basis. In short, most people know HR as the department that tells you not what you can do, but what you can’t do, and the fact that this is based on corporate interpretation of government regulation doesn’t make it any easier to cope with. You’re hating the messenger, in other words.
Secondarily, HR is generally viewed by executive management as a necessary evil. They’re one of the few functions in an organization that cannot be measured as generating revenue; they’re a black hole of cost. An intelligent HR leader can attempt to quantify financial value of his or her work (e.g., this program with a cost of X increased employee retention by N percent, which saved us Y dollars in recruiting and turnover cost, for a net gain of Z), but even in an ideal world those numbers are never any better than soft. Hence you’re working in an environment of grudging acceptance to begin with.
Then those executives, unable to clearly define what HR exactly does, starts to use them as a mouthpiece for their own idiotic policies. At the five companies where I did HR time, the dress code policy — one of the common things that people complain HR likes to pointlessly regulate — came directly from the CEO’s office, not from HR. We were expected to take the CEO’s casually-tossed-off directive, put it into an enforceable policy (based on federal laws about grooming, religious wear, uniforms, and so on), and disseminate it to staff. That was a no-win proposition from the moment the idea flew from each CEO’s mouth: He would invariably be dissatisfied with the policy as written (because it wasn’t as simple as his ideal, even though it wasn’t legally enforceable) and would constantly tweak it, and regular employees would see only a monthly memo with HR at the top that attempts to clarify some insignificant point or other because some wiseacre in Facilities decided to tweak the previous policy by looking for an unspecified loophole (one guy wrote profanity on his shoes and said, hey, the policy said only no obscenity on shirts, so you can’t get me in trouble, ha ha). Again, you’re hating the messenger.
Basically, what you have in HR is a deep dichotomy of purpose: On the one hand, you’re trying to protect the company from liability; you don’t want employees injured on the job, and you don’t want managers telling applicants “I like your resume, but we think you’re too old” (which happened at one company I worked for), and you want to make sure you’re paying everybody more or less what they deserve given the marketplace, and so on. But on the other hand, you get into HR because you really like working with people, and you want to do “soft” work with employee relations and benefits and career pathing and that sort of thing. You sit at your desk all day long, thinking, “I’d really like to tell everybody ‘yes,’ but my job requires me to tell everybody ‘no.’ Oh, and crap, now we have to lay off a hundred people for no particular reason other than the CEO’s motivation magazine said it would be a good idea this quarter.”
Eventually, I couldn’t take it any more, and I got out. I do databases now. With the perspective I have, the stuff coming out of HR makes a lot more sense. I can see how somebody who doesn’t understand the function could think it’s stupid, but I know better. I’m not saying any particular HR department might not be bad; I’m just standing in opposition to the mindless generalization that they’re all bad.
In my years in HR, I rarely worked fewer than 50 hours a week. Usually more. Because of what I said above, regarding the department being a black hole of cost, the executives did everything they could to staff us with the absolute minimum number of people they could without stressing us out so much we’d throw ourselves off the roof. I suspect your department is an exception.
But without HR support, how many secretaries would be able to do that with their prospective boss?