HR Departments

The BBQ Pit
41

I’ve lived through the change from Personnel to HR. Then my ex-wife was an HR Director for some years, and only then did I realise the real reasons for the change and why large organisations all fund HR.

The bottom line is, HR is a buffer so management don’t have to get their hands dirty dealing with actual employees. Hire a dud? It’s HR’s fault, not mine. Want to fire someone you just don’t like? Get HR to concoct some legal excuse to do so. Want to fire a bunch of folks? Call in the executioners. Need a bunch of phony metrics so we can pretend we’re measuring the unmeasurable? Get HR on the phone. Unhappy employee? Talk to [del]the hand[/del] HR. And so on.

42

Well, I was going to contribute to this thread, but now that I realize it’s just a pile-on, so carry on!

Seriously, though, take into consideration that if you are a typical manager at a company, you have to manage maybe a few or maybe a lot of people - but chances are, only a small percentage of them are bad workers. If you have no one working for you who takes advantage of time off, or doesn’t pull their weight, or is just a general fuck-up, you’re fortunate.

But HR has to deal with all of them. Your bad employee, the one in the department next to yours, the two in accounting, that guy in sales, and the three in the call center who can’t seem to ever make it to work on time, or on Monday, or when it’s raining hard. You want to fire them, but we know that because you haven’t bothered to document their poor performance, the company will get sued. And our #1 job is legal compliance. We have to know the wage and hour laws. We have to know FMLA, ADAAA, and HIPAA. We have to know how to avoid discrimination claims, work interference claims, harassment claims - and make sure that all the managers in the company don’t get us into a million dollar lawsuit.

And that’s just the big stuff - forget the part about people calling HR because their manager was “mean,” or the woman in the next cubicle smells bad or telling us we’re evil because you’ve run out of FMLA and we have to replace your position to keep the business running.

Last week I was a hero because one of our women managers has a partner who is pregnant, and she thought that because same-sex marriage is not recognized by our state or the federal gov’t that she would not get any leave or paid parental leave. But no! I got to tell her that thanks to a DoL statement of clarification of the FMLA in 2010, I could confirm that she was in fact eligible for baby bonding leave under FMLA, which also qualifies her for paid leave under our company polcies.

But today I was the goat because I told a retail worker in our store that he could not come back to work, even though his doctor released him to, because he still has a 10 lb lifting restriction and his job requires him to regularly lift 40 pounds. I’m sorry he didn’t sign up for short term disability but no, I’m sorry, you can’t sign up now after you’re disabled.

Anyway, HR doesn’t sell anything or make anything, but depending on the size of your company they probably save you thousands or millions of dollars in litigation costs every year, not to mention taking care of those pesky personnel issues that you don’t want to deal with. So how about a little respect? :mad:

43

Best policy I ever worked under…when you start you get 20 Personal Time Off (PTO) days per year. After 5 years you get 25, after 10, you get 30. Accrued at the rate of 20/12’s of a day per month. PTO carried over from year to year until one year the accountants and lawyers told them to cut it off at 5 days carry over, because there was too much liability on the books.

If you get sick, fine–take the PTO. If you don’t get sick and want to use it all as vacation–fine. If Timmy has to go play in a Baseball World Series/Aunt Martha turns 85 and you want to go, fine–use the PTO. You want to go to advanced widget training, fine–use the PTO. If you use up all of your PTO and don’t work–you get docked pay unless your manager signed off on you going negative on PTO.

CEO’s theory was that we not make liars out of people due to some stupid corporate HR policy.

It worked for 90+% of the people, but some would use every last day and in 9 years I only had 2 people go negative (out of ~ 100). As the end of the year approached, I would get a printout of the PTO remaining for my staff. Most had at least 5-10 days left at the end of the year. Christmas to New Years was like a ghost town in that place.

But, we didn’t have to pay an HR department to keep track of these things. Considering most businesses want a 20%+ ROI, then each HR person better be increasing productivity by at least $120,000 per year–or they are not contributing anything.

We were all hardworking geeks.

44

Most of the HR people I’ve delt with weren’t bright enough to do the math so I never had to worry about them tracking anything.

45

Why? HR’s job could be done with a bulletin board, a calendar, and the legal department.

46

You say that, and yet I know companies over a certain size that have tried to go without an HR person or people, and you know what happens? HR issues pop up like dandelions and things go right to shit.

Every job looks easy when you don’t know anything about it.

47

Also, not all companies want to run a large legal department. Corporate lawyers are expensive. HR drones, not necessarily.

48

You definitely get what you pay for.

49

That’s hysterical. Who’s going to send the (legally required) FMLA entitlement notices? And make approval determinations? and send (legally required) approval/denial notices within the mandated deadline? Who’s going to make sure that managers aren’t denying leave because the department is busy or who knows what reason? Who’s going to coordinate the accommodation determination discussion when the employee returns so that we are making every possible accommodation and don’t get our asses sued by the DoL? Who’s going to coordinate military leaves, personal leaves, medical leaves, parental leaves and make sure that the company can still do business?

Who’s going to drive all over the country to job fairs and college campuses to recruit new hires? Who’s going to pour over thousands of resumes to find the handful of good ones? And do the phone screens before bringing them in for an interview so we don’t waste the hiring manager’s time? Who’s going to coordinate the relocation logistics and expense? Who’s going to verify the I9s against the government database to make sure we’re not hiring anyone ineligible to work? Who’s going to manage tuition reimbursement, vacation accrual, bereavement leave, promotions, demotions, transfers, address changes?

Who will run annual open enrollment so everyone can get into the benefit plans they want? For that matter, who will do plan design, evaluate carriers and vendors, do cost analysis and come up with incentives to manage employee costs for benefits? Track enrollments? Verify dependent eligibility? Manage all those data transfers with the vendors?

Who’s going to respond to unemployment claims? Who will represent the company at unemployment hearings? Forecast FUTA and SUTA costs for next year’s budget? Complete state mandated employment and disability forms? Provide income and employment verifications for employees buying a car or renting an apartment or applying for a mortgage?

Who’s going to protect you, the manager, from being sued for wrongful termination by making sure we have our asses covered when we fire someone? Who’s going to do harassment and diversity training to minimize liability?

Who’s going to figure out how the company will be affected by the Affordable Care Act? By Paid Sick Leave laws? Who’s going to remember that the Tennessee employee in the Nashville office gets four months of maternity leave under the law but the one in Memphis only gets 12 weeks because the Nashville office has more than 100 people and Memphis doesn’t? That in California you have to pay out any accrued vacation within three days of termination but in Arizona you don’t have to pay it out at all? Who’s going to calculate how much FMLA an employee gets if they normally work 48 hours per week but now are limited to 20? Can we tell a Muslim employee she cannot wear a veil while working? Can we make a Seventh Day Adventist work on Saturdays?

If it looks like your HR department has an easy job - you have a very good HR department. Because people usually only notice when they screw up.

50

We have more or less the same policy, but the problem is, everyone starts thinking of it as vacation time sooner or later, and starts dragging themselves into work sick as shit, because they don’t want to give up “vacation” time for being sick.

I suppose it’s a control thing ultimately, but nobody wants to possibly have to forego vacations with their families or holidays like Xmas because they got the flu earlier in the year and had to blow 1/3 of their PTO.

51

Who’s going to prevent managers from having access to qualified candidates because their resumes didn’t include the 3 buzz words the HR person was looking for? Who’s going to stand in the way between a manager hiring someone at a competitive rate because it doesn’t fit within the prescribed pay bands? A great deal of your list can be taken care of by a legal department, or barring that one single person with experience in employment law. That person deals with 80% of what you list, the rest is a benefits administrator.

The HR department exists to minimize lawsuits for a company. You don’t help employees, you protect employers, which is what a legal department does. Every HR employee I’ve had the eternal pleasure of dealing with was either borderline retarded or else possibly the slowest person at getting work done on the planet. They convolute processes and cover asses and allow corporations to get away with legally permissible and ethically disgusting behavior.

Just my humble opinion, of course.

52

Brilliant. I wish SDMB allowed votes up or down. You’d get a thumbs up from me.

53

:rolleyes: Lawyers can help with compliance issues, but they’re not going to recruit for you or design competitive benefits & compensation packages. And an HR department full of lawyers will kill your bottom line pretty quickly.

You say that like it’s a bad thing.

We do both. My department helps employees every day to understand their benefits, develop career skills, or access resources to deal with personal tragedy.

It’s possible that your company has an HR department of fuck-ups; it’s the same company that hired you, after all.

54

Sounds like a place I worked at for a few months. It was a call center that did outsourced tech support for a popular photo editing program. To even do the tech support, we had to do like 3 weeks of training to learn the program inside and out.

Not only did we have performance reviews EVERY day, we also had no sick days. Miss a day? Verbal warning. Miss twos? Written up. Miss three? Your ass is out the door and don’t come back. This was over a year’s time. The policy used to be no more than 2 unplanned absences every 6 months, and they also accepted doctor’s notes that would make it where the absence didn’t count against you. But they changed it right before I got there because it was being ‘abused’. As with the company you were at, turnover was horrible. And it made NO sense. If you were spending 3 weeks just to train new hires, wouldn’t you want to make it more enticing for people to stay? Don’t even get me started on their parking policy :expressionless: Damn ‘officer’ out there with a freakin measuring tape.

55

Oh yeah, call centres are pretty horrendous. Mandating that employees work sick leads to what is known as “presenteeism” (Mann and Holdsworth expand on this concept), where everyone works at a depressed pace and everyone else gets sick. Employee stress is usually high at call centres due to emotional labour too.

I’m guessing the problem the OP encountered is due to an actuary chart: I happened to look through one recently and it had the statistical likelihoods of the chances of contracting different illnesses in a given time period (I think for the English population in 90s at any rate). So they determined that the OP was significantly unlikely enough to warrant suspicion, when he was just an anomaly. The list of equations they had to use was pretty impressive, it included the Smoluchowski model for Brownian motion. Not sure why though… maybe burns or vomiting? Shame they have to use their talents to do the bidding of corporate masters… :stuck_out_tongue:

56

Oh gosh burn. :rolleyes:
Actually, my boss hired me with the help of a recruiting agency before we even had an HR department. Now that we do, they are living exactly up to expectations. The company I’m referring to is not my employer any longer.

57

To defend both **Skammer **and Ladyfoxfyre, I’ve worked at companies that have both types of HR departments.

I spent six years working for a small-to-medium sized tech company that grew from around 70 employees when I was hired to a shy under 500 by the time I left. When I was hired, they had a part-time HR person (contracted out) that handled benefits, hiring, etc. It was moderately effective, but since there weren’t many of the problems that Skammer noted around FMLA, complaints, etc, the HR person and the CEO were able to deal with them fairly effectively.

Around my 3rd year of employment there, the company was hitting 150-200-ish employees and they went with a “full-fledged” HR department of 3-4. There were 1-2 people dedicated to recruitment full time, 1 benefits/HR generalist and the head of HR who mostly did everything but recruitment (determining compensation/bonus brackets, setting up a formalized performance review cycle, etc - it was time for the company to “grow up”). It was a great little department. I was a low level manager at the time, responsible for having to hire a few people and deal with performance. The entire HR team was great - the recruiters knew the tech side of things, were somewhat experienced, and - most of all - listened to our feedback when we were seeing resumes. My position was a little hard to recruit for, so they worked with me to screen out the worst of the resumes and then would send me everything else. If anything, they were erring on the side of caution and sending me more unqualified candidates than qualified, making a little more work on my part - but I had requested it, so they were all for it.

The head of HR and the generalist worked very hard to figure out a good benefits package and set up a workable performance review cycle. Over the next couple years, it was different every year - but that’s because they kept taking the feedback of each cycle and making huge improvements. The first year, as managers, we had something like 25 points to rate employees on and provide feedback to each of them. This took forever if you had more than 3-4 employees (I had 14 I think at the time), since it was a lot of thinking and writing to make the whole thing worthwhile. The following year, due to feedback, they cut back on the “paperwork” side - giving us 5 areas we actually had to write about, but encouraging lengthier write-ups. It made it easier to do and, based on feedback from that cycle, more useful to the employees themselves getting reviewed.

All in all, I think that HR department was very good, and represented the epitome of the discipline. I think that Skammer probably falls more into that group.
Flash forward a couple years, and I’m working for a tech department inside a large, multinational corporation of 30,000+ employees. HR there was a nightmare, much closer to Ladyfoxfyre’s description. I’m not sure if it was a case of “we’re here to protect the company” as alluded to in previous posts, or just a case of “they’re virtually ineffective but we need an HR team cause everyone has one!”

To give one example, around hiring, the “recruiting” department was … loose at best. I can’t swear how many resumes they filtered out before it got to the hiring manager, but it definitely seemed like a random collection of horribly good, mediocre and the occasionally great resume made it to the hiring manager to select for interviews. I’m not sure if this was due to an active effect of the recruiting department, but it either came out of sheer laziness (I’m going to send everything!) or sheer incompetence (I have no idea what this job requires!)

On top of it, the hiring practices at this company were very close to illegal (as least as far as I understand it based on hours of “how to hire” training). There was a lot of nepotism - “I’m going to hire XYZ because they’re the friend of ABC”. There was a lot of useless interviews - “Okay, you’re going to come back this time to meet with my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss” or “Now we need to do a panel of 4 other employees” that was wasted a lot of interviewee’s time.

And there was a lot of blatantly weird feedback from the manager to the recruiters /HR (I got to know one of the recruiters fairly well - I’d like to think one of the better ones, but still not great) when a candidate wasn’t selected, stuff like “even after 4 interviews, I didn’t connect with this person” … because the candidate was talking about their work history and clients they had dealt with (it was for an account management position) and not talking about their kids or family or what they do outside of work. It was surreal to hear some of these stories.
As an editorial comment - I’m going to make the sweeping generalization that the effectiveness of an HR department is inversely proportional to the size of a company. The bigger the company is, the easier it is for less-than-stellar people to slip through the cracks and get hired, and the easier it is for them to hide within the bureaucracy and not be noticed enough to be fired … and then they just sit there, doing a less-than-stellar job day-in and day-out, and when “you” have to deal with them, it’s how stories get generated. Sadly, from my experience, this isn’t just HR though - it’s big companies in general.

I miss the good HR department when I was working at that tech company, they were a delight to work with.

58

All I have to say is: I thank Og every day (maybe not quite) for the benefits I get.

59

Um, I accrue 1.25 paid sick days a month. That’s why I only take one day if I have a cold or similar illness that leaves me miserable but able to work.

(Yes, technically that means I can take more than 1 sick day a month, but then I go BUT WHAT IF SOMETHING HAPPENS IN 3 MONTHS I NEED MULTIPLE DAYS FOR?!)

60

My personal pet peeve is with the recruiting area of HR, particularly with larger companies. An example:

I had a good relationship with a company who knew the value of getting students to work for them during their degrees. The students provided value, and the company could give them a “4 month interview” and then make offers to the good ones upon graduation.
Then the HR recruiters decided that I should not deal directly with the managers.
So, flash forward a few months. The company was not sending me job descriptions. I emailed the HR recruiter. Nothing. I called them - left voice mail. Nothing.
Finally, I called one of the managers (who I was now not supposed to deal with). His comment? “I’ve been trying and trying to get a student, but HR is not doing anything about it.”
Turns out that HR thought that hiring students was a stupid idea, and a lot of work for nothing, so they were just stalling the two of us.