Everybody hates HR. Employees hate HR because they always seem to take the management side. Management hates HR because HR is always saying no, or requiring documentation, or making demands on their already busy schedule.
Usually, when we understand why someone behaves the way they do, we accept their requests and their decisions more readily. And one of the big reasons why people feel so negative about HR is that they misunderstand why we act as we do. There’s a big belief that the Human Resources department is an internal customer service department. It’s our job to make things right and to make the customer–employee or manager–happy.
It’s not.
HR expert Alyssa Hernandez shared a story where a boss told her that if she was going to go into HR, she needed to learn to sugarcoat things if she wanted to be in HR. She disagrees and wisely clears up the misconception:
To keep reading, click here: Human Resources Is Not A Customer Service Department
I’m in an HR function and believe that we frequently function as a liaison between individual employees and management. Frankly, the result can often be not that one party or the other leaves encounters with us unhappy, but that both do. In fact, an HR veteran maintains that if we are properly doing our jobs, a lot of times both sides will be unhappy with us, and that we should be skeptical of our own performance if one side is persistently more pleased with us than is the other.