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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31264 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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That's a fair point. I admit I have an axe to grind with HR and that's skewing my perceptions. It's useful for me to air it out and get some pushback--thank you.

That's big of you.

That said, can you describe what value HR brings to a company?

At its core, HR applies or enforces management's decisions regarding their employees. This is a very broad scope, and the exact borders change depending on the organization - smaller organizations will include payroll in HR, for example, while very big ones may separate even employee well-being to its own department. In most cases, though, they'll have to handle everything to do with e.g. promotion policy, PTO for individuals and for the entire org, hours worked (sometimes offloaded to payroll, which may be a separate entity), insurances & benefits (including negotiations with whoever supplies those, maybe annually), internal transfers according to company policy, and of course compliance with the law (i.e. external policy). HR is a bit like the police or the court system in that it actually makes sure that the decisions from higher up are carried out, as well as keeping track of those decisions. Otherwise management's decisions are meaningless, like an unenforced law.

For a small organization, you can get away with not having HR, or handing it all to one person such as the CFO. For a big organization, HR is essential, otherwise you get chaos.

For an example that I'm closely familiar with, if an employee wants to relocate from one branch of a large organization to another (this could be inside a country or even between countries), then the person who actually manages everything will be from HR. They'll take care of visas if needed (or hiring a law firm for it, much more likely), they'll make sure the employee gets whatever relocation bonuses they're do, they're in charge of the actual numbers f what those benefits are - all according to the policy that the company's management decided on. Or if your company offers tuition assistance, someone from HR will authorize it.

It's mostly bureaucracy, but I honestly can't see how an organization functions without it in any meaningful way.

Perhaps something like 1:25 or even more, since you get economies of scale as the number of employees grow.

Absolutely. I think for my local branch of a globe-spanning org, it's closer to 1:100. (I actually just went ahead and counted, and got to ~1:250, but I think I'm missing a few). Spit-balling, I'd say over 1:50 even is overkill.

Thanks, that's illuminating. Now I just have to adjust my monkey brain.

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