Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why am I evil? Well, I'm not, but that's the perception of all of us in HR. Need to fire someone? Come to HR. Need to explain to someone why, even after working their rear end off all year, that their annual increase is 2.7%? Come to HR. Need to come up with new mountains of paperwork? Come to HR. So, come join me on the Evil Side. Oh, and send me your HR questions.
Contributors
Followers
Featured Blogger at
Carnival of HR
The Carnival of HR moves around the web, but you'll always find the latest info here to see what is going on. Shauna Moerke (better known as HR Minion runs the Carnival. And she writes the best reminder notes ever. Remember to support your Carnival! Submit your best posts and read it regularly and you'll be a better HR professional. Really.
HR Links
- About Human Resources
- Ask a Manager
- Ask the Headhunter
- Compensation Force
- Cranky Middle Manager
- Execupundit
- Fortify Your Oasis
- Gautam Ghosh
- Great Leadership by Dan
- Gruntled Employees
- HR Capitalist
- HR Lawyer's Blog
- HR Minion
- HR People
- HR Thoughts
- HR.com
- Human Capitalist
- I/O at Work
- John Ingham's Stategic HCM
- Life at Work
- Management Issues
- Marcum Smith
- National Association of Manufacturers
- PA Employment Law Blog
- Relocation Next Practices
- Resource Economics
- Strategic HR Lawyer
- The Afternoon Debate
- The Benefits Guy
- The Engaging Brand
- The Industry Radar
- The Work Clinic
- The Workforce Blog
- Three Star Leadership
- TLNT
- Vendorprisey
- Workforce Online
- Workplace Horizons
- Workplace Prof Blog
Ask Me A Question
E-mail me!.
There is no way I can answer every question, but give me a try. I admit, I don't know the answer to everything, but I'm mostly willing to pretend I do.
Right now I have 472 questions in my queue, so it might be a little while. (I might be exaggerating, just a bit.)
To increase your chances of getting your question answered, please limit yourself to two-three reasonably sized paragraphs and try to figure out what your real problem is. Punctuation and capitalization are pluses.
Other Things I Read
Blog Archive
- November (3)
- October (15)
- September (15)
- August (11)
- July (16)
- June (14)
- May (16)
- April (15)
- March (17)
- February (17)
- January (16)
- December (15)
- November (18)
- October (14)
- September (15)
- August (22)
- July (10)
- June (16)
- May (18)
- April (12)
- March (16)
- February (12)
- January (9)
- December (7)
- November (6)
- October (10)
- September (12)
- August (15)
- July (9)
- June (6)
- May (7)
- April (12)
- March (4)
- February (7)
- January (10)
- December (9)
- November (4)
- October (9)
- September (11)
- August (12)
- July (15)
- June (17)
- May (15)
- April (16)
- March (15)
- February (24)
- January (29)
- December (28)
- November (29)
- October (26)
- September (24)
- August (36)
- July (28)
- June (34)
- May (28)
- April (28)
- March (28)
- February (26)
- January (25)
- December (18)
- November (11)
- October (23)
- September (23)
- August (15)
6 comments:
It sounds like managers just need to suck it up and act like adults. While I'm sure that hiring and being short staffed is a difficult situation, so is being under compensated and facing a bad work environment.
I think that HR has become over the years the dark side by choice; some years ago it was evident that there were 2 HR responsibilities in a company: a)defent the interests of the corporation and b)create a work environment that maximizes productivity. Well, the (b)part was neglected - mostly because it required a LOT of capabilities from HR managers - and quite honestly, back then, less capable managers ended up in HR... This (b) part included stuff like finding and recruiting talent - and yes, because it was not properly done we now have that talent is an abused word - and as talent has not been recruited, especially at the top, we have more politics than leaders and our businesses in America are underperforming. Also (b) made sure that proper training was executed, that proper KPIs were set to measure performance, and that employees had an alternate power to support them for doing the right thing when asked different by management.
So, turns out that part (b) is gone, they don't even teach it in school anymore. And if HR is now only part (a) - I guess they should be reporting to the Legal function... After all, compliance tasks require less capable and cheaper resources than strategic, value building tasks...
My vote is to downgrade HR roles to truly represent what they are today: an element of compliance and assurance for the corporation.
Anon 4:31 - This is exactly what HR functions in many large organizations are trying to change. Organizations with a compliance-only view of HR are the ones that fail at serving either the business or the employee. They are unable to project strategic workforce needs beyond a few months, unable to chase talent in new areas as the industry changes, and are unable to build consistent internal learning and development opportunities for good employees.
In the end, this leads to high turnover of good employees, low turnover in poor employees, and stagnation of skills and expansion of your workforce and useful organizational memory. In many instances, it leads directly to unionization. HR needs to develop and become stronger, not weaker. I'm very proud to be in a place where HR is learning to speak the language of the rest of the company - ROI, cost, business strategies, revenue per units, etc. This allows one to tie workforce decisions and needs of employees directly to business strategies.
In my industry, a position vacated is often a position lost. I try to be nice about resignations, but it's hard when I know that it will be so difficult to get permission to replace the person leaving.
Scorecards are the antithesis of taking the time to actually judge employees using subjective criteria and to worry more about talent than process. Read Seth Godin's Linchpin -- find out why solutions like score cards are morale killing talent-abusing process bent on making employees replacable cogs (which seems to be the intent of HR organizations).
I refuse to be a cog -- and so should anyone who knows their value to an organization. If my organization and I ever do come to a parting, it will be on mutually agreeable terms because we respect each other and know the value we represent to another.
If the Evil HR ladies (and gentlement) want to stop being seen as evil -- stop focusing on process and paperwork and start focusing on people. That's why the word human comes first, isn't it?
Joe,
Your thoughts are intriguing to me. I like Seth Godin, so I'm going to order and read his book and think about this score card thing.
I admit the reason why I like score cards is that I can have hard evidence on which employee is "better" so when someone claims discrimination or unfair termination or what have you, I can easily say, "look, John scored 122 and Steve scored 97. We terminated Steve because of the low score card not because he's black."
And since when are HR people supposed to like people? :>)
Post a Comment