Show of hands: who’s fed up with human resources?
Maybe you’re irked by the endless flow of memos and forms, many of which need to be filled out pronto. Maybe you’re irritated by new initiatives that regularly emerge from HR, which never seems to run out of new initiatives, not all of them necessary or especially wise, in your opinion.
Or you’ve got some problem with management and you don’t trust that HR representatives will actually help. They sure are friendly, but they get paid by the suits. In a crunch, it’s pretty clear whose side they are on.
The HR department bugs a lot of employees and managers, and, since the pandemic began, it seems to have more detractors than ever. That’s when HR began to administer rules about remote work and pay transparency, programmes to improve diversity, equity and inclusion, and everything else that has rattled and changed the workplace in the past four years.
But if the HR department is bothering you, here’s a fact you might find perversely consoling: you are not as irritated or bummed out as the people who work in HR.
In 2022, LinkedIn found that HR had the highest turnover rate of any job it tracked
That was obvious at Unleash, an annual three-day conference and expo held this year in Las Vegas. The event brought together about 4,000 HR professionals from across the United States. It was billed as a place where “global HR leaders come to do business and discover inspirational stories”.
It was more like a place where the HR department came to complain.
“Everything feels like a fool’s errand,” said Kyle Lagunas, a former HR executive at General Motors who now works at Aptitude Research, an HR advisory company based in Boston.
He had just finished a highly animated presentation about HR tech in front of an audience of about 50. Now he sat in the designated media room and ranted a bit about the maddening challenges of running HR during and after the tumult of the pandemic.
“For years, we have been fighting fires with cans of gasoline,” he said. “And now, here we are, after literally giving everything we could, and it’s like: ‘Oh, thanks for everything, but’” – and here’s the G-rated version – get lost. “‘Don’t make too much work for me. I’m not going to dot those i’s and cross those t’s. I’m the business, and you’re HR.’”
Part of the frustration is that office behaviour post-Covid-19 has become notably less civil, which means that HR is being called in far more often to referee disputes. Everyone at Unleash had a story about explaining basic etiquette to boorish colleagues. No, you can’t microwave fish at lunch. Stop cutting your toenails on your desk.
HR knows that employees and managers are annoyed by its memos, by its processes, by just about anything that interrupts life as it was. When an email is sent nudging everyone to take that 45-minute online course in, say, data security, HR can almost hear the eye rolls.
That said, don’t expect apologies. The consensus at Unleash was that most of these new ideas, such as greater diversity, for instance, or standardised workplace reviews, are designed with the goal of a more equitable workplace.
So, get used to the memos.
People in HR tend to be very compassionate, very empathetic. But a lot of employees look at us as inherently evil
— Hebba Youssef, chief people officer at Workweek
In quieter settings, attendees lamented the low pay, the churn and the increasing workload. One discussed a work-induced mental breakdown. There was a lot of fretting about artificial intelligence, which seems poised to take jobs on the recruitment side of their business.
Many HR executives have left the field in recent years, or they are looking for better offers. In 2022, LinkedIn found that HR had the highest turnover rate of any job it tracked.
“Everybody hates us,” says Hebba Youssef, chief people officer at Workweek, who has a podcast and a newsletter for HR professionals called I Hate It Here. Posts have included Why Does Working in HR Feel So Lonely? and Everybody Hates Their Jobs, Right?
Youssef especially bemoaned the mistrust employees feel toward HR. It’s dispiriting, she said, because most people go into the field to be helpful. “People in HR tend to be very compassionate, very empathetic,” she said. “But a lot of employees look at us as inherently evil.”
The HR department was born more than a century ago, and it had an unlikely father. John Henry Patterson was the founder of the National Cash Register Co of Dayton, Ohio, which pioneered mass production of a newfangled money-tabulating machine.
After customers in England returned $50,000 worth of faulty machines to the Dayton factory, he had a revelation. Patterson concluded that his workers didn’t care about the quality of the company’s products because they assumed that he didn’t care about them.
He moved his desk to the factory floor and took other measures to “humanise” the company, as the Times put it. National Cash Register offered benefits such as day care and lunchtime entertainment at the company cafeteria.
HR workers bristle at the invisibility of their best work. When HR lays off employees, word gets around. When HR prevents lay-offs, nobody knows
“It was initially known as ‘welfare work’ because it was employers demonstrating an interest in the welfare of workers,” says Gary Hoover, executive director of the American Business History Center in Texas. After the second World War, when the model of lifetime employment became the norm, the job was to ensure that workers stuck around.
“That starts to fade in the 1980-81 recession,” says Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “Executives started laying off people and, in downsizing mode, you don’t care too much about keeping employees happy.”
By then, “personnel department” had been rebranded as “human resources”.
“The idea was to stop thinking of employees as people that needed to be taken care of,” says Cappelli. “People became resources, assets like any other, like machinery. The priority wasn’t to help people. It was to help the business.”
The question of the HR department’s priorities and purpose has festered ever since. When the #MeToo reckoning began, many wondered why HR hadn’t forestalled many of the worst misdeeds with timely, forceful interventions. Critics contend that the department’s first mission has long been the quiet and smooth operation of a company, and before the epidemic of sexual harassment became a national scandal, that often meant quashing conflicts.
More recently HR has been in charge of dealing with the fallout of epochal events.
When offices closed down because of the pandemic, HR administered remote-work rules, which kept evolving as back-to-work dates were pushed into the future. Tens of millions of workers quit their jobs starting in 2021 in what became known as the Great Resignation. HR found replacements.
Many of those at the Unleash event say they struggle with the divided allegiances that are built into the department’s design. They also bristle at the invisibility of their best work. When HR lays off employees, word gets around. When HR prevents lay-offs, nobody knows.
“It’s a thankless job,” said Lagunas, of Aptitude. “That’s why we come to conferences like this.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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