(Published May 11, 2009)
The most frustrating people we have to deal with are the ones who don't really understand what it is that HR does, and get angry with us for not doing what they think we should be doing.
Over the past week, I had contact with an employee who had an inaccurate perception of HR's function. He honestly believed — and we've all had this conversation at some point in our careers — that it was HR's job to be the employee advocate and to settle any disagreement, however minor it might be. He also did not understand that employee relations is only one of a long, long list of things that we do.
Unlike some employees, this fellow was at least willing to admit that he had a misconception about HR and acknowledged that he was mistaken. His point, however, was that in every company he had ever worked for, he was told to take all his problems to HR. And I have to admit, I've certainly done my share of directing employees with problems to talk to their HR departments.
Maybe we need to make it a little more clear to our employees what kinds of problems we should be involved in. Certainly if a law is being violated, HR needs to be in on it from the word go. The sooner we know about it, the sooner we can do something about it.
If a company policy is being violated, we may or may not need to be involved. The way I expressed it to him was, if the affected employee's manager is the problem, or has been unable to resolve the problem, then HR should be involved.
But if the manager is not the problem, then managers need to be doing the managing. It is not the place of HR to manage the employees; that is the responsibility of the supervisors and managers. That's what they are paid to do — supervise and manage their employees. What we, as HR, need to be doing then, is teaching the supervisors how to manage.
Ideally, we should be able to do this before problems come up, but we do not live in an ideal world. Some of our managers and supervisors are fine, and know perfectly well how to manage. Others are fine for day-to-day situations and only need some guidance in exceptional circumstances. But there are some, particularly new managers, who need to be led more or less by the hand. If we hear from an employee about a problem with one of these managers, we need to take the manager aside and teach him/her how to handle the situation.
Too many employees think that either HR is there to be an employee advocate or HR is always going to "take the company's side." The truth is something in the middle. At least for the point I've been discussing, we are there to guide the supervisors through the maze that is employee relations. How we do that depends on the company culture and the situation.
Catherine Bannon is an HR consultant in Marshfield, MA (catherine.bannon@gmail.com). Bannon worked for 10 years in HR management before starting her consulting practice.
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