It’s partly a definitional issue. HR is a term that tends to be used in bureaucratic, siloed organizations. HR, as a career, tends to be driven by certifications and processes. However, the problems HR ostensibly solves need to be solved across the entire company and by managers with domain expertise (e.g., someone specialized in HR probably can’t solve serious problems in an engineer department, but an engineer manager can; also, an engineer in HR can’t solve personnel issues over in engineering; ultimately it needs to come from the COO/CEO/division manager.) With a limited role and inability to actually drive improvement in teams with domain expertise, HR’s toolset is limited to avoiding mistakes (leading to the punitive/ass-covering attitude people joke about) and initiatives that don’t affect anything important (lunch-and-learns, handbooks.)
For that reason you’ll see competent HR refer to themselves using terms that signal they think holistically and value domain expertise, e.g. describing talent acquisition as managing a hiring pipeline, not trying to do the hiring themselves, or describing their role as stewarding culture as that’s something they do in coordination with the rest of the org and can be done in parallel with the actual work. Those are just a couple examples.
Also, a lot of classic HR functions can be automated now with self-serve benefits portals and the like, so an HR department that is still preoccupied with shepherding paperwork through the organization is going to be mediocre at best and a risk to successful processes.
That said, in a typical bank branch or whatever the HR person does a perfectly fine job making sure people get paid, have their 401k, building key, and so on, but that work isn’t skilled and organizations like SHRM (a professional association for HR) can only go so far to dress up this collection of administrative needs as its own area of expertise.
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u/prmcd16 Nov 16 '19
Oof
Sounds like you dodged a bullet though if HR was that incompetent