A few years ago, when the #MeToo movement was in full swing, we learned that many employees with concerns about sexual harassment issues at work were not happy with their HR departments. They thought that HR was supposed to be on their side, advocating for their accusations, and were disappointed when the staff seemed more focused on following procedures. In this context and in others, HR saw its role as investigating claims, judging the evidence, and then drawing conclusions that might lead to discipline.
More generally, the idea that HR is not an independent agent but is an arm of the organization comes as a shock to many people.
That takes us to a story from HROToday.com about a survey done by MyPerfectResume on employee attitudes toward HR. Among other things, it found that 85% of employees hesitated to talk to HR about work-related problems. That sounds like a bad thing. Equally bad sounding was the finding that when individuals had reported an issue to HR, 90% felt that it wasn’t addressed adequately.
All this reminds me of an article I wrote a few years ago called Why We Love to Hate HR. That is inevitable because HR is trying to make people behave, and it has to play a delicate balancing act with employee behavior where there are almost always two sides of a story, even when one is more right than the other.
Take the finding that 90% of employees feel the complaint they brought to HR was not adequately addressed. That’s another way of saying that employees did not get what they wanted. Lawyers tell us that their hardest task is trying to persuade clients that their complaint and case for it is not nearly as strong as the client thinks it is. That is because the clients are far overconfident in their position, and that is true for employees in workplace issues as well. Our complaints are not as justified, our perceived wrongs are not as severe, and the remedies we want are not as reasonable as an objective observer would think. We are not trained to take the perspective of the other side—or that of our employer—to see how the situation might look to someone else. It’s not surprising that we don’t feel we got what we think we deserved because what we expect is unrealistic.
A related finding in the survey is that 71% of employees think that HR is too involved in office politics. No doubt HR is more involved than it wants to be. The reason this happens is because the problems employees bring to HR are mainly complaints about how someone else is behaving, why didn’t I get the promotion, and so forth. In short, office politics.
Here’s a finding that will certainly surprise most people in HR: 86% of those surveyed report that they “feared” HR. Who knew there was such power in HR! One not-so-good reason for the fear factor is a perceived concern about repercussions from approaching HR about problems. Repercussions that come from simply complaining would be a bad thing. But there are also repercussions that come from the fact that conversations reveal wrongdoings. That is not HR’s fault. Serious complaints about serious issues inevitably have consequences. For example, if I complain about someone else’s behavior and I want HR to investigate, it is hard for the other person to not find out, and that can be unpleasant.
In short, these unhappy survey responses stem from the tricky role that HR has to play. But I think it also suggests three practical steps we could take to make things better.
First, what influences employee views of HR really seems to be employee relations issues—how their individual problems get dealt with. My sense is that our focus is much more on developing policies and practices despite the fact that these day-to-day complaints and issues are really what drive employee impressions. We should be spending more time figuring out how to deal with these individual complaints.
Second, employees seem to have a systematic misunderstanding as to what they should expect from HR. They eventually discover that the department is not an advocate for employees nor like a union shop steward whose job is to take up their individual complaints. But by then, employees are disappointed. It would be far better for them to know that up front, at new employee orientation: Here’s what we can do for you, here’s what we cannot. We tell them a lot about policies but very little about the day-to-day practice of the office and the challenge of dealing with their perceived problems.
Third and probably most important, employees really want someone to hear them out in a context that is both confidential and not judgmental. It is extremely difficult to imagine that happening with HR staff because the primary obligation of the staff is to the organization, not to that employee. How often do we hear someone say, “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, but…”? If an employee tells HR something in confidence that is clearly bad for the organization—“please don’t tell, but I’m pretty sure Bill is embezzling” —HR has an obligation to not keep it confidential.
Given that, I wonder whether something like an ombudsman role should be used more regularly, someone operating without a reporting arrangement to the organization whose job is just to listen and give personal advice. Years ago, Deloitte had a version of this where it paid coaches who were independent of the company to provide confidential career advice to employees. It proved extremely helpful to employees, and I suspect reduced some of the complaints that otherwise would have been directed at HR for its inability to play that role.
Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management and Director of the Center for Human Resources for the The Wharton School.
