The author of the article “Why We Hate HR?” does not seem to like HR due to the way it has been handled in organizations. Most of the times employees feel performance evaluations are not fair and although companies seem to have a growing HR division but employees have still felt insecure since its more than evident that the company is using HR as a tool to pretend to care for their employees whereas actually they focus on company goals over individual goals of employees.
The article discusses reasons to why HR being the most important division is not integrated with the strategic goals of the company thus its handled in a flimsy manner in most organizations. People who enter HR are not exactly smartest tacks in the box since the newly graduated students are more into the benefits of the job rather than seriously handling the job. Intelligent people usually do not opt for HR and the few that do are just a small percentage of the lot.
HR is usually all about rules and procedures that aim to limit the creative thinking of the people in this field therefore they feel helpless and as if they are stuck. HR is not about following rules in fact it’s about how to get the best out of the people and raise the value of the firm. Due to these rules people in HR usually go for efficiency and not value that is they focus on the number of activities completed efficiently and not the outcome or the value added to the company.
This makes HR inefficient as a division on the whole. A good example from the article is Time Warner’s HR that lured a young graduate into taking up a post no one else wanted within the organization and as a result she quit the company in a year. These are inefficiencies of HR since companies are using HR to protect themselves from their employees. The government has imposed laws in favor of employees like equal opportunity laws etc and in order to protect the company from the drawbacks of these laws they use HR to protect themselves which is proof of the fact that HR is not working for the people in fact its working for the company and that is not the true essence and motive of pure HR.
HR people are not even given that importance due to these facts and they are hardly motivated to think creatively and come up with new ideas to motivated employees thus benefiting the employees and also adding value to the organization. HR uses a soft approach by pretending to benefit the employees whereas the reality is harder since its working for the company and in fact there should be a balance between the soft and the hard approaches for successful HR.
But people who understand the true essence of HR exist as well. These are honest to their profession and they actually focus on people which are the most important asset of an organization. Very few companies have implemented HR in its true essence. The problem with HR is educated incapacity which has resulted in HR being stuck at one point from where it’s unable to move forward (Hammonds).
The three points that support the main idea of the article are the shortcomings of implementing and handling HR, the reasons to why HR is still not a respectable field and also to why it’s disliked to this degree and the shortcomings of HR and the people involved as a division (Hammonds).
The list of important terms used in the article includes do-gooder, soft approach, hard approach and educated incapacity (Hammonds).
Works Cited
Hammonds, H. Keith. “Why We Hate HR?” Fast Company. 2007. Mansueto Ventures LLC. Web.