How often should HR touch base in general with employees?

[Puddingwombles]

I’m curious to know what your thoughts are? Especially if you work somewhere where morale is known to be low.

Never had mine touch base and wouldn’t expect them to. With the second post it’s too vague to know? But no I’d expect that to be addressed by manager/the director

No, id expect the Director to speak to HR if they needed any support with dealing with the issue

Reach out and touch base 🙄
Would you expect HR to reach out if issues had been raised to a director?

Would HR contact me personally if there were issues with my own director or one in the company- umm no. Or do you mean if I'd personally raised issues with the director?

What is your real question OP???

Other than basic admin type stuff (issuing employment contracts, arranging interviews, solving problems with holiday allowances) done by the lower graded HR people, most HR have little direct contact with non-management staff.

Never unless someone is in serious trouble!

No
they just deal with hiring and firing keeping it legal
all the ones I know don’t even socialise with staff , due to confidentiality generally suits a lone worker antisocial type person

Our HR us outsourced. We rely on managers. If they're crap you're on your own

HR’s job is to protect the company.

Morale isn’t really something HR would ‘touch base’ on. That’s for the senior leadership team. They might work with HR on initiatives like staff surveys and culture change programmes, but I wouldn’t expect HR to be the ones to address this with colleagues.

I only ever went to HR if I had issues I needed help with.

Never would suit me. Nothing good comes from HR

I'm sorry that's been your experience but that doesn't make it universally true.

The type of proactive intervention you seem to expect would not be HR’s role. If you were in a union and raised something with them it might be different.

Your line manager is the person that should be checking in with you.

Never. Anyway, our precious HR team all went permanently WFH (not even hybrid) ages ago.

To you? No. If the Director chooses to reach out to HR with a personnel issue, they will advise them if appropriate.

If you have a specific HR issue, you can contact HR to ask for advice. They will be able to advise if it's something they can help you with or not.

Thanks for the feedback all

As and when needed. I had a question about my payslip, and another about my holiday allowance, and these were answered. All good.

Our company every so often does information sessions on "well-being" and to be honest they are superfluous and patronising. Wish they would just cease.

Nobody should "reach out" unless they are in the Four Tops. 🕺

We do loads. We’re involved with wellbeing initiatives. Employee volunteering, induction, learning and development activities, events and to support leaders and employees with all sorts.

i hate the “hr” label. We really try to be more employee engagement focused, create a positive healthy culture and then the less pleasant things are quite rare.

we are not the work police. Most people approach us fairly readily and we are visible on a daily basis if needed

Never? HR is an admin/legal function. Management are responsible for managing the people.

If you reported concerns to a specific individual Director I wouldn't expect HR to get involved.

Maybe if what you reported could be interpreted as raising a complaint then Director might ask HR to ask if you understand process? 🤷‍♀️ But generally people react badly to being contacted by HR directly as does tend to imply something bad like disciplinary or redundancy.

The only time HR 'reached out' to me was a welfare call during Covid which freaked me out and didn't get any further calls😆

HR are there to work for the company not for the benefit of the employees.

Not at all where I worked.

We have a monthly company update where HR will normally have a small slot, mostly to promote the use of the EAP or company events/initiatives. I wouldn’t expect to have any direct contact from them unless there is a specific problem to address.

Never routinely! I do chat to hr colleagues in the kitchen while making a coffee - work in a medium sized organisation with about 250 staff and hot desking with about 65 desks in the building, and they happen to be in on the same floor on the same day as my team. But that’s about it

We get emails from HR about mandatory trainings and things, employee benefits and so on which go to all staff. Most recently was a nice one saying we were all getting an extra bank holiday day for the World Cup!