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?

[seastargirl]

Pastamancer, my exact example of someone who should be an employment lawyer not an hr manager! Personally I am more human relations than human resources! I think there is a big difference.....Maybe why I'm a relatively successful hr consultant as opposed to a millionaire hr director!

[bojorojo]

As a MD of a Company dilys, I would assume you take some responsibility for employing people who cock things up all the time - or are you shirking responsibility? If you have employed the wrong people and have not bothered to train them to understand your line of work, then you get the "wrong" person. I think your HR woes are your fault and you should stop blaming everyone else. Why are HR doing payroll? My DH runs a consultancy that is specialised but the HR Officer does not do the payroll. I think this is why you are not getting the right people. You do not appear to actually want a member of staff who is CIPD qualified. Do you know what this is and how someone with these qualifications can assist the business?

Just get someone from your own talent pool if you want. I assume they know employment law, how to run a disciplinary hearing, how to write contracts, how to update policies to reflect the current legal position, how to train managers on interviewing and recruitment skills (you need this right now)! Plus much more.

[susieb19]

Bojo - you are totally right on the money there.

[dilys4trevor]

I haven't been management for that long so I didn't employer the current team. The head is new so but has a Global as well as UK role so I didn't employ her either (I am UK MD). To be honest though ours is a very big company so as MD I wouldn't be responsible for hiring payroll people or anyone else in the broader HR team anyway; head of HR would do that. I can't meet everyone we employ or that's all I would do.

At our place, yes, the payroll people sit in the HR team and report to head of HR although also have a dotted line into the Finance head.

Maybe it's just this woman who is the issue (the current head) but she seems to not know very much at all about employment law at all and constantly defers to the head of Legal, at the holding company. Very possibly I have started to devalue the role because of the person in it.

[susieb19]

Dilys4trevor you have redeemed yourself imho with the last few lines of your last post.
You need to performance manage her (another hr area not seen) if she's out of her depth and get some strong hr support in. As the md You will benefit hugely from the support of a solid hr director.

[maggiethemagpie]

I work in HR and what I broadly do is support a team of managers with any people issues that they can't resolve without guidance such as performance, conduct, sickness, grievances. Also any redundancies or contractual changes.

I'm there for the manager. They are my clients. It's not that I'm not there for the employee, but I would advise the manager on how to deal with the employee rather than dealing the employee myself directly in most situations.

That's just my role, there are many other roles in HR so this is not intended to be a summary of what the profession does just my role within it (HR/ER advisor)

[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'.

[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.

[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.

[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!

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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...

[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.

[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.

[bananafish81]

Training and development is massively important for any company

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[MovingOnUpMovingOnOut]

Google strategic HR IceRoad.

[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.