Help!!! My Employees Hate my HR Team.

Should I care?

In a nutshell yes, you should care for several reasons including turnover, lawsuits, management inefficiencies, union organizing efforts and increasing workplace discord

When your employees hate or disregard your HR team, this can easily lead to:

• Unnecessary turnover. Your company will likely lose great employees it has invested time and training into.

• Unnecessarily large lawsuit payouts for hostile work environment, harassment, discrimination or retaliation claims, because employees don’t alert HR of their concerns about unlawful conduct, instead making complaints to managers who are usually unable to navigate the complex labor law landscape.

• Management Burnout: Your managers will be overwhelmed with common HR issues leading to burnout or the inability to meet the demands of their primary job responsibilities.

• Your employees attempting to form a union because they lack trust that HR will protect their rights when advising management.

  Poor employees morale, leading to decreases in productivity and self-accountability and increased workplace discord..

How do I know if employees really hate HR?

There are many signs, below are some of the most obvious ones.

The first and most obvious sign is that your employees openly complain about or malign HR.  These may not be direct statements, but instead manifest as employees:

• Questioning or maligning HR’s competence

• Painting HR as the bogeyman such as saying “you can’t trust HR” or “HR is only there for management.”

• Challenging HR policies or initiatives, usually with a tone of distrust or resentment.

Other signs include:

• Avoidance—employees go out of their way to avoid interacting with HR, instead eating up management’s time with HR issues.

• Employees use informal or indirect channels of communication to complain about managers or other workplace issues instead of going to HR such as elevating issues to executives or to their manager’s supervisor.

• A workforce culture rife with petty complaints, gossip or quiet quitting.

• An increase in employee resignations or transfer requests, particularly if you compensate your employees well.

How Did This Happen?

Usually the problem does not lie exclusively with your HR team but often results from a combination of factors within your control.

HR’s primary job is to protect employers and carry out their initiatives.  Protecting employers requires HR to effectively ensure that workers’ rights are protected.  Carrying out employer initiatives usually leads to increased financial stability and growth that translates into higher wages, better job security and opportunities for advancement.  So, if HR is carrying out their job effectively, they should not be hated by the workforce.  Below is how things often go wrong for HR Teams:

• You have inexperienced HR staff but expect them to perform like an HR pro with, with little to no guidance or oversight.  If you are paying way below market for your senior HR positions, they probably lack the experience needed to perform their job effectively.  Similarly, if you have an HR Generalist with no senior HR position overseeing or guiding their work, you lack experience in your HR team.

• You have an experienced HR manager/director, but they have no subordinate staff to carry out the labor-intensive work such as recruiting, payroll, audits, benefits management, onboarding, and filing, so they cannot perform their job effectively, simply because they don’t have the time or bandwidth to do so.  A general rule of thumb is that if you have more than 75 employees, you will need one HR team member and a fractional team member with significant labor law compliance experience.  If you have 225-250 employees you need a recruiter, a generalist and a manager or other HR lead with significant experience in labor law compliance and organizational management.  After this and up to 1000 employees, you can get away with 1 HR team member/150-250 employees depending on your turnover and organizational challenges.

• Your HR staff take HR advice from your management team instead of the other way around.  This again boils down to inexperience or may be a result of a conflict-avoidant personality style.  It is HR’s job to coach and guide managers on performance management, discipline and employee complaints.  Too often however, HR will defer their authority to managers, or managers will hound HR into taking the action they want taken without regard for the employers’ interests which often align with the employee’s best interests.  This results in inconsistencies in discipline and performance management within your company.

• Your HR team lacks professional distance from the rest of your employees.  This can happen when you transfer employees from non-HR roles into HR, particularly if they had strong relationships with their former coworkers. It can also occur when your HR staff form close friendships with other staff or if members of the HR team gossip to coworkers about HR matters or otherwise fails to keep sensitive information confidential.

• HR is unresponsive to various employee requests or complaints jeopardizing employee civil rights particularly in relation to statutes with prescribed time limits such as the FMLA.

• HR is tone deaf in their workforce messaging and personal interactions—this again usually stems from inexperience.

Can I Rehabilitate my HR Team’s Image?

The good news is that you have the power to fully drive this rehabilitation effort

First and foremost, you should understand your employees’ perception of HR.  To do this, you should hire an outside HR consultant to conduct anonymous stay interviews or other surveys.  Obviously, you cannot assign this task to your HR team. You then need to assess how to support your HR team based upon the consultant’s findings.

• Generally, if employees report favoritism, retaliation, that HR is not there to help them, is tone-deaf, or a lack of confidentiality then chances are you have an inexperienced HR team and you need to provide them with experienced support either through hiring a new HR leader or by outsourcing this function to a fractional CHRO or experienced HR consultant.

• If employees report that HR is unresponsive or drops the ball frequently, chances are your HR department is understaffed.  Here you need to hire another HR team member or outsource some functions such as leave administration, performance management, or employee relations.

• Recognize the role that HR must play in ensuring uniformity of discipline across your company.  This means that discipline must be centralized in HR with management having limited authority to issue discipline without HR’s prior approval.  If Management is pushing HR around, the executives need to clearly delineate the scope of management’s authority in relation to HR and provide HR staff with an avenue to raise issues about management’s conduct, particularly if it appears to be unlawful.

Rehabilitating your HR Teams image requires executive involvement and leadership. Replacing your HR staff will not help if the C-Suite has not clearly delineated roles and expectations among the workforce. Nor will it help if management does not understand that their obligation to the employer requires them to take guidance from HR on disciplinary matters and workforce investigations. The only time replacing your HR team will help is if you replace them with significantly more experienced HR staff or reorganize the department to hire additional staff which may result in one or two lay-offs.

If you need assistance in supporting your HR team or understanding your particular HR challenges, please contact us for a free consultation.