1d ago

Double standards

114 comments

I'm surprised so many people still don't realize that HR exists to protect the company, not the employee. Yes, since a bad or reckless manager can put the company at significant risk, sometimes they will take the side of the employee, but not because it's their charter.
- Somewhere along the lines a lot of people in HR and upper management in some companies (cultures) forget that you need people and that you need to listen to then to make it all work
- Also if someone says something fucked up and you clap back and they report it. YES HR WILL SPEAK TO YOU!
  If you want to nail someone with the rulebook you cant respond like two people talking shit on twitter. You have to call them out on what they said respectfully and professionally, preferably with witnesses or go straight to HR.
  
  Yeah, that's a good point.
  
  Its also a big contributor as to why a lot of people think HR are useless. Once you respond in any way that could be considered unprofessional you just made it messy and increased the risk to the company of doing anything other than issuing slap on the wrist warnings.
  Take the meme for example, now the company has to make a morality decision on whats worse, an unprompted and inappropriate but not deliberately hurtful comment from a manager vs a deliberate and highly personal barb from an employee to a manager... I can see the warning letters for both of them from here.
  
  What's worse between a manager who's supposed biggest strength is soft skills being fucking terrible at soft skills and being higher in the liability hierarchy or a rank and file employee who clapped back.
  Maybe it's just the system always leans towards the company having no wrong doing rather than any kind of sane logic.
- Everyone uses this cliche. Nobody seems to understand it.
  a bad or reckless manager can put the company at significant risk
  Yes. In this circumstance, the manager opened the company up to a lawsuit with his comments. It would have protected the company to punish him or have him take some sort of class.
  You can just say that HR is usually bad at their jobs. "Protecting the company not the employee" is completely meaningless here.
  
  No, there's more to it than that. Immediately taking the manager to task gives more credence to an employee lawsuit. Their "best" first approach is to talk to the employee, even scold them. What they want is for the issue to go away without the company getting bad press or a legal issue. It's not that they're bad at their job, it's that their job has zero to do with being an employee advocate.
  They might also scold the manager, but that will happen off the record and behind closed doors.
- The fact that it's called human resources instead of something less dystopian should be a hint. If you want an actual ally as an employee you gotta unionize.
- Humans are the resource.
- Exactly. They're not there for you.
- I'm kind of surprised (yes, naively) that some people aren't even aware enough of the wider culture to think twice about saying things like that.
- That's right. Just imagine that you start a business and you start hiring employees and at some point you have so many employees that it becomes difficult to manage and sometimes the employees start fighting or doing other inappropriate things. So, you hire some other employees to to create an HR department to make sure that your employees don't become a liability for your company. See?

114 comments