To ask what your HR department are like?

[chxm19]

Honestly just curious.

Whenever I've had to deal with HR at my work I've had nothing but unpleasant experiences and generally find them to be very inconsiderate and unhelpful.

Got signed off work sick for anxiety and depression and got hounded when I finally went back as it "wasn't fair" on the rest of the team..

I work in HR and don't really care what the staff on the ground think of me. They're not the ones paying my salary, the managers are. So long as they think I'm shit hot, which they do when I help them get rid of someone who's crap and costing the company money, I'm happy that I'm doing a good job.

HR are not there for you, they work for the management. If they are nice to you, they are stalling - otherwise they’re hurrying you on your way out.

This is just your personal experience though? Do you think the same of every teacher, doctor, police man/woman or shop assistant who has annoyed you?

HR work WITH management to ensure they make fair and transparent decisions. We are there for advice and guidance. There are senior managers who have power trips along with other people in HR who can be the same unfortunately. It doesn’t mean every single SM or HR employee is the same.

@VanGoghsDog if you're referring to my post, I didn't once blame them in my post, what I was saying is because of the way HR are in general - in protecting the business and not the employee - I was too scared to go ahead and tell them all the things that have happened. That and the impact it may have on my everyday working life with my line manager. Have worked for the company a while and had problems with HR before.

Stepford-y. Right down to similar clothes.
I avoid them like the plague.

My suspicion, and I’m sticking to it, is that ours are overworked. If that isn’t true then there really isn’t an excuse for how inefficient and generally incompetent they are.
For example, my birthdate (even though i wrote it correctly on the application form and they have seen my ID) has been recorded wrong, not a big issue, until you want to find out about your pension and you’re asked to confirm your date of birth - which I couldn’t do because they’d submitted it wrong!
Useless people.

Ours are shit. Every dealing with them has been negative. When I started they lost my references so it pushed my start date back, so it meant I missed a trip to Berlin, which I was furious about.

When a colleague started they lost her DBS details 3 times.

I’ve had issues with my attendance (Mental Health related) and never received any copy of the documents I’m supposed to in relation to triggers and warnings.

They caused an absolutely catastrophe with a recruitment process we went through for new staff (meaning we were without vital posts for months).

But I do think they are a very very small team for the size of the organisation and need more investment from top down.

Ours are ok, seem to get things sorted. Nice enough people.

Not much else to say really.

Ours are mostly good. They've had some good initiatives around staff benefits and so on. I do quite a bit of voluntary work work - school outreach and so on, and I've had some good support for that, which has also meant over the years, I've worked with most people in HR at some point or another, and been to the pub with some of them.

However, there have been one or two things they have majorly screwed up - including stuff covered by employment law, so you'd think there wasn't such opportunity to deal with it badly. I have had reason to be glad of being a union member, but equally they've done good stuff for me. I am hoping this will be a year without any disciplinaries or HR investigations, though...

Our HR are very very good. Scandi company.

Absolutely terrible. No problems with the company apart from HR. If it’s too hard they won’t work a solution, they’ll just say no and screw employees out of benefits. There is no recourse.

Once they cancelled our health insurance and I only found out when booking an appt or something. It hadn’t been cancelled for about 6 weeks. We live in the US. When DH told them they laughed and thought it was funny. Yeah real funny, me and 3 kids including a NB in the US with no insurance. Haha.

Ours are slooooooow at everything. And rude when you ring them.

I share an office with the HR staff in my organisation. My mind is blown by the number of calls they get from staff who expect them to be complete skivvies. Eg all absence is recorded online, we all have a log in and we select the date etc, it's very straightforward. Day and daily, someone rings the HR manager (a more senior staff member than they are) to say that they're very busy and don't have time for that, so she'll have to log in and do it for them. She is no pushover so always says no, and if they persist she refers them to the section in their contract where they agreed to adhere to company rules. But the fact they have the nerve to do it is incredible.

They advertised a job recently which had a huge salary and was very specialised. They fielded calls for a week from people arguing that they wanted the job but didn't want to go through the recruitment process because they were too busy.

The only other witness was another management level bloke, so guess what he said (“oh I didn’t hear anything for those 30 minutes”). In our company we have a lot of awful men in management tbh, and HR “clean up” their “problems” ie cover for them every time they screw someone over

^^yep

That was in response to treacle

In my previous organisation (public sector, 2000 employees) they were really good - some really lovely, helpful and exceptionally helpful individuals worked in the department. And I say this as someone who was made redundant by the same organisation. They treated me with respect and the utmost courtesy and sympathetically.

My current organisation doesn't have a department (small org) but does have an HR manager, who is lazy and untrustworthy.

Incompetent, unhelpful and totally uninterested in employee welfare.
And that comes from a senior manager

I work for a huge national company and we've recently had a round of cuts and redundancies. HR was in house for each branch. All gone now. I have no idea who you'd go to for a grievance problem tbh. Most stuff has no fallen on the shoulders of line managers.

One colleague had to have a disciplinary meeting which he disputed - the manager was brutal and he said he felt like he was being questioned by the police. There's a few instances like this.

They did seem to have a nice time of it in their office so were a soft target for cuts I guess, I wonder if its a matter of time before something really fucks up.

DH's HR seem amazing. But that's public sector though.

We are a big organisation so mine are generally fine, but I know the bottom line is their job is to protect the interests of the company rather than the individual, so I’m always a bit wary.

Falling to bits. 40+ staff in HR and over half have left in the last 6 months whilst trying to sort out massive restructures throughout the rest of the company and so nothing is getting done. Those that remain are snowed under with the day job and going off sick with stress.

Just incompetent.
Can't follow simple instructions.
I had a simple change of job title, they cocked that up by adding a second lot of London weighting to my pay slip. Took a month to sort out and I was expected to calculate the pension, tax and NI to keep the right amount to one side so my standing orders etc weren't effected.
Errrr. No. You fucked this up, you have the tools to figure it out. I'll wait.
Holidays, fucked up by being double input.
People getting away with assault and not being sacked because the paperwork wasn't processed correctly, meaning people had to work with a man that physically intimidated them.
Absolute shit show.
Lots of self congratulation in company news letters and time for lovely charity coffee mornings though.
Unprofessional idiots.
We are an international FTSE 100 company

Wow! As an HR Manager this thread is depressing.

HR will be different in every company based on - size, number of employees, quality of management, structure, values etc

My job role will be completely different to another person with the same job title in another company.

We don't have an HR department. To be honest, ive never felt our company needed one.

Incompetent, self-serving, bastards.