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..

Depends on the organisation really. At my last place I was being harassed and they told me that mediation was required. I said I was too scared to be in a room with him so it was either mediation or drop it. I've never got over that. As it happened, he had mental health issues that had contributed to it so he later took steps himself to resolve it and we became friends but I have never forgiven HR for that.

In my current workplace I'm a manager so I work with HR more and the lady in charge actually does care about people. She regularly states her opinion that an unhappy employee very quickly becomes an ex employee so it's important to have things like inflation based rises, staff training, etc. She's fantastic!

I've worked in a place with a wonderful HR department.

However, I swear my current one employs a tame black hole as it's filing system. Things go in and come out again at random times, changed beyond recognition. My institution were part of the pilot for the registering of European workers in preparation for Brexit. I've lost count of the number of times I was targeted to complete the process. Yes. I'm foreign. However, I have settled status and, most importantly, I'm NOT European. This subtle distinction had to be explained slowly in words of one syllable or less on many occasions. I began to feel like I was in the Macarthy era trials "Is New Zealand now, or has it ever been, part of the European Union?"

A colleague of mine moved into HR in the same organisation (in admin role) and within a month said she could not believe what went on that 95% of the business hadn’t a clue about (and rightly so as it was confidential). She was referring to poor performance, hissy fits, general incompetence and laziness of staff that HR then had to try and deal with.

Before seeing it from the HR side she said she would never have known a lot of it went on as it wasn’t under her nose and HR did their job well in terms of dealing with those issues in the appropriate way.

Interesting that so many people who don’t work in HR seem to think they know so much about the job, I think they’d be very surprised with the amount of crap HR have to deal with on a daily basis

Dorsetdays - a friend of mine is a lawyer, specialised in HR and rights in the workplace. She deals often with both sides, depending who the client is.

She said the things she learned about HR does make her appreciate a good HR department a lot better but she also said there is a lot of crap out there.

Reluctant. Absolutely, there are crap employees in every single sector.

Interesting though that posters will say “...and HR did nothing”. Generally if an issue is raised, people won’t have a clue what action is or isn’t taken as, rightly so, it should be confidential.

slug lol at the tame back hole as a filing system