Oh, the humanity

Over the years of my career, it’s been my observation that one constant in every organization is that human resources is just baffling.

As in: I cannot for the life of me grasp how these people stay employed.

I get it that despite using the term “human” in the department title, their sole function is to protect the interests of company management. (Calling them “People Operations”, “Employee Success” or “Employee Experience” doesn’t change that in the least.) Their only interest in actual humans is to ensure that they do not sue the corporation for violating any laws, while disbursing the absolute minimum in the way of monetary outlay they can get away with.

Because shareholder value.

This has been my experience in multi-national corporations of tens of thousands of employees and very small start-ups. The only ones that haven’t fallen into this pattern are the ones too small to have a human resources department. As soon as someone with the letters SPHR after their name is hired, we’re on the slide down to bafflement.

(And the only department to rival HR in that wonder is Marketing. Honest to God, in so many places, Marketing cannot find its way out of a paper bag with a compass and a seeing eye dog. And I’ve worked in Marketing, and I still can’t figure out why it collectively screws the pooch.)

The denizens of HR here are certainly upholding the honor of the profession. I’ve mentioned before how they touted with great fanfare that they were creating an “Employee Downtime” area by replacing several tables in the employee lunchroom with a couple of couches, three TV monitors and a foosball table, for which no one asked. I don’t like to think how much money that cost—money that could have gone into coffee- and tea-making facilities.

But apparently the effort to stand up the down-area plumb wore HR out, because you practically have to file a FOIA request to get any information about your healthcare benefits. The one person in the department who has that remit never replies to a query the first time around; it’s only after multiple emails and voicemails that she’ll graciously condescend to give you an ort from the table—like…the group ID number for the dental plan.

Seriously—why offer the benefit if you’re going to block people from using it?

Oh, wait—never mind. I answered my question back in graf 3 above.

The question for which I do not have an answer is: to whom does one report HR?