You don’t need a degree in HR to not be an asshole. Why does the staff put up with that? In any company I worked at, the office manager was just someone who ordered pens and stuff. Basically one step above the receptionist.
superstar - Yeah…that’s because you are in “upper-management”. Those of us down here in the peanut gallery only see a bunch of fascists handing out performance evaluations, Myers-Briggs tests and memos about how to dress on casual Friday.
Well, mostly they don’t, they just quit.
I have been with the same biotech company for 14 years. When the company was small we didn’t have a real HR staff but the last decade or so we have.
I know a lot of my co-workers have issues with HR, but I have never really understood why. I think a lot of it is “shoot the messenger” mentality. Employees get mad at HR for enforcing a policy that is coming from management. Some people can’t seem to get it through their thick heads that HR at our company generally doesn’t make policy, they only try to communicate it.
HR also has little control over hiring at our company, mostly because they can’t be expected to understand the technical backgrounds of the types of people (scientists) we are usually hiring. They have more input over firing people, I think, mostly because those rare cases when someone is getting fired are pretty cut and dried (sexual harassment, or whatever).
Luckily we don’t have much in the way of a corporate dress code, so that kind of thing has never been an issue either. And our current CEO is a very savvy lawyer, so he is not about to decree policies that are legally unenforceable.
My only complaint about HR as a group recently is that they have been trying to build up their importance within the company. Our annual performance review process last year was more complex than the Normandy landings, and took much longer.
HR did lose people in the recent round of layoffs, roughly in the same proportions as the rest of the company.
Individually I generally find them all rather nice and helpful, if slightly vapid.
My theory about HR: NOBODY ever gets promoted from the HR dept. You can never become a line manager from this dept, and from the day you start, you know that your career is a virtual dwad end. This makes HR people bitter. Added to this: most companies doe not adnhere to written procedures in matters of firings, demotions, and advancement, etc. This means that HR people are getting the ax when disgruntled ex-employees decide to file lawsuits against companies-this adds more stress to these jobs.
I would NOT want to be a HR employee in this era of downsizing…you might even wind up getting attacked!