To wonder what 'HR' actually do??

[Glennin911]

Just that really. Always get the impression it's a made up department full of busybodies. What can they possibly be doing once payroll has been done and everyone has a contract?

[Pastamancer]

He's been looking for ages but the jobs just aren't out there. He's a manager and pretty much everything advertised is more suited to those starting out and therefore the money is a lot less than he is on now. We can't afford the drop in money so he's stuck.

[Quietwhenreading]

Pasta in that case he should seriously think about moving.

[Pastamancer]

DH has worked for the same company for about 13 years now. The only training he has been given in that time is an afternoon session on customer service. He works in IT and has nothing to do with customers and has been asking for IT training which would actually be useful but they won't do it.

[Oysterbabe]

We have lots of training at my place, at least one formal training session a month.

[treaclesoda]

In almost 20 years in the workplace I have never worked in an organisation, private or public sector, that provided any sort of staff training beyond someone who has been there longer than you sitting beside you on your first couple of days and showing you what screens to use on the computer system. But all the bigger organisations have had large HR departments. I know they were doing something, and were very busy, but it can't have been arranging training.

[Jibberjabberjooo]

I'm NHS and every job I've worked in HR have been awful. Wrong contracts, not being paid (as they never told payroll about me), taking months to give me a start date, not telling me information until I phoned them to ask. I have no idea what they do.

[DoreenLethal]

HR are there to ensure that managers don't get taken to tribunals. They have no other function - everything else, the payroll, the existence of job descriptions, the formulation of policies and all of that is just so they've got something in writing justifying how the company will shaft you if need be

100%. Usually HR do the peripheral to lure the workforce into a dull sense of security. Training, so that it takes up their time and they aren't sat there on facebook waiting for someone to put a foot wrong.

[MovingOnUpMovingOnOut]

Google strategic HR IceRoad.

[IceRoadDucker]

Even after reading this thread, I don't understand how our company (115 employees) needs two full time HR people. We have a recruiter. We have a payroll manager. Policies get updated once a year, and since most of them have no significant changes, it involves altering the date at the bottom. We have no women on maternity leave. We have one employee survey a year, run by an external company.

That leaves training, disciplinaries (and seriously, how many of those can there be a year?), and listening to grievances. How on earth does that take two full time staff?

[cruikshank]

HR are there to ensure that managers don't get taken to tribunals. They have no other function - everything else, the payroll, the existence of job descriptions, the formulation of policies and all of that is just so they've got something in writing justifying how the company will shaft you if need be.

[AugustaFinkNottle]

I once worked in a crappy organisation where a colleague who was leaving gave a brutally honest exit interview - she was taking time out and wasn't in the least bothered about a reference. The boss spent her last day frantically trying to argue with her by email about why he maintained she was wrong. We thought it was hilarious, every time he emailed he showed up exactly why she was right. It also made productivity in our department nose-dive as we had a hilarious afternoon waiting for each email to drop into her inbox and helping her to compose the response.

[SirChenjin]

I wish that were the case in our organisation Rosy. We're NHS, and unless you're turning killing patients it seems like HR just turn the other cheek. Influencing by ignoring is the approach, it seems.

[RosyCat]

SirChenjin the place with a good hr department, two people left a team within a couple of months of one another. Their exit interviews both damned the head of that team (been there just over a year), led to an investigation and she was dismissed. I was impressed both at them taking the interviews seriously and at the investigation bit- they did extra work to corroborate the evidence to make sure it wasn't just score settling.

I actually walked into de facto managing that team (the firing happened between my interview and start date), and they were very, very proactive in supporting me as they knew that the dust hadn't settled/other problems remained.

[bananafish81]

Training and development is massively important for any company

Appraisals. Learning and development plans. Training suppliers and programmes. It's not all tribunals

[SirChenjin]

couple of bad apples were actually gotten rid of due to exit interviews by people going elsewhere

Without going into too much detail, this is precisely what I mean by piss poor managers. Our manager, for example, managed to achieve a 95% staff turnover within 18 months of arriving (we're a small team of 9 WTE) about 10 years ago and has been on the receiving end of 4 negative exit interviews in the last 2 years. What's been done about that? Absolutely nothing. Apparently they were all 'difficult people' (they weren't, they just used the exit interview as an excuse to tell the truth) and 'as a manager you have to accept there is nothing to do when people are unhappy'. HR are doing nothing except siding with the manager and basically ignoring the shockingly bad management and awful team morale.

[TiredButFineODFOJ]

Imagine being in the middle of a divorce, that's what HR is like. Staff and managers fighting each other, you in the middle. But that's not all, oh no you have directors and manager fighting you about how best to sort the staff and managers fight.
HR are not the employees froend, we never said we were. Also we have no friends. Senior management think we tak etoo long sorting stuff out and should just do something - anything - usually the least effective and most risky nonsense, to stop the complaints. We get overruled at every turn before we even get near who looked at you funny this morning or why you don't think your manager is any good at their job.
We are basically your mum feeding and clothing the stroppy teenager who sneers in their face and says they will never end up like us. All day every day you cannot imagine the shit we deal with which we keep confidential.

[Quietwhenreading]

Glen what the hell do you do for a tech company that you don't know what HR do?

Reading your intranet might give you a clue...

[RosyCat]

first few places I worked had medicore to ok HR departments. They kind of kept stuff ticking over.

Then I worked somewhere with a good HR department and somewhere with outsourced HR back to back.

In the place with the good HR department, things ran a lot smoother. People had exit interviews (couple of bad apples were actually gotten rid of due to exit interviews by people going elsewhere) and there was protection and advice for people who were having difficulties. They gave me a lot of advice and support when someone I was managing developed a serious mental health issue- the person tried to attack a colleague during a psychotic break, then had a lot of time off before needing to come back gradually and with support like reconciliation meetings/workload adjustments etc. During a merger and restructuring process, people actually received decent settlements and support (both the people leaving and the people having to make decisions about who needed to leave). There were also a couple of cases were people who weren't performing well due to the circumstances of the merger (i.e. they had performed well at one of the two previous places but couldn't adjust to the new merged organisation), were given the opportunity to leave with a belated redundancy settlement and a good reference as "it wasn't their fault" rather than either be managed out or forced to try find another job whilst struggling. It wasn't perfect, but people did get a fair deal.

The place with outsourced HR was a nightmare. The (newish) CEO basically did whatever he wanted re hiring and firing and covered his arse later, they were always being dragged into employment tribunals, there was a huge pattern of people being let go just before their probationary period ended/legal rights started, so staff turnover was ridiculous. People were pushed out and bullied all the time. There was a small group of favourites clustered round the CEO who fawned over him (including gifts, invitations to sporting events, flirting and in one case, sexual favours). I lasted about 5 months, handed in my notice and never looked back.

[MovingOnUpMovingOnOut]

I dunno op. What do IT, legal and finance do?

Sorry to all of you who have had shit HR people departments. It makes me really cross because I work really hard to make sure my people are well supported to manage all the people aspects of their jobs.

I ended up in HR after encountering some spectacularly shit practices and people. I like to think I'm helping to make the places I work better. I'm a contractor though so I'm usually going in to fix a problem or set something up to avoid a future problem/s. I like my job. I like my clients. Sometimes what I have to do is horrible, really bloody horrible and upsetting, but I know that doing things properly and in the interests of all concerned it does make a difference. Even if that difference is just not making a bad situation worse.

But mostly my job is common sense. Doling out common sense and thinking about the implications of decisions and then diplomatically talking people round or helping them to find the solutions they need to their problem or giving an evaluation of various options to achieve an objective.

[CadleCrap]

My old HR team were really good at organising training.

Except the training had no bearing on our jobs and Every single course involved role play. I fucking hate role play.

[Mistigri]

I work for a large manufacturing company and have often asked myself the same question!!!

In our division their main function seems to be to create pointless paperwork (like appraisal forms that are completely irrelevant to our jobs and that I refuse to complete). If you ask them to do something concrete like assist with recruitment they are bloody useless.

[dilys4trevor]

I am to be fair hugely scarred by my own experience of her recently. My husband died and we had both worked there in senior positions.

Without hijacking or going into it too much, she was awful: ringing me up pissed late on a Saturday night days after it happened, making suggestions for the funeral and then not listening to my response when I said 'I'll handle it.' Then messing up H's pay and not admitting it (trying to explain it away as 'policy' when it clearly wasn't). Final straw was when she sent me a formal letter the week after the funeral implying I had gone underground and talking about my personal legal affairs around my late husband's estate (mentioning his life insurance, which is nothing to do with the firm). Just awful. I rang the CEO (my boss) in tears and she got a bollocking and apologised but it really upset me.

Prior to that there were other blunders but these affected me less personally.

As she is Global there isn't that much I can do although I am discovering I am not alone in my view of her.

As I said, I know a couple of very senior HR people who are friends and I know they are excellent at their jobs. Part of the problem at our place is that what we do is quite specific and the current HR head has no real understanding of it, and so she ends up making suggestions or decisions that don't work for us.

I think we need to find an HR talent who specialises in our field; who knows employment law and policies inside out but who also 'gets' the field. Anyway I had better belt up now as if she is reading this she will have a strong suspicion I am talking about her!

[StealthPolarBear]

From reading threads on here I'd assume they take the role of teacher in a playground, they're the people you go running to when someone at work has been a bit mean to you.
My experience from my work environment is very different.

[MashesToPashes]

I wrote policies, interpreted law and identified when we needed specialist advice.

I did investigations when disciplinary issues arose and quite frequently turned them around on the managers who wanted the employee bollocked because actually it was the manager's fault.

I sat in rooms with horribly distressed employees and tried to help them when dreadful things had happened to them and on one memorable occasion sat for hours in a room with a person with mental health issues who'd gone of their meds and was having hallucinations.

I once fired someone on their birthday, I several times had to tell people that they smelled.

That's not the half of it and I wasn't the HR Manager, I was just a member of the team.

It's like any role, it depends on the HR people and the respect or lack of it in which the role is held within the organisation.

[SirChenjin]

HR in our organisation appears to do little else but protect piss poor managers from grievances going any further than the file marked 'bin'.