Ok, so there are actually a lot of reasons why people hate HR, and today, I’m only talking about one. But its a big one!
It impacts the way internal customers view us (or in most cases don’t) as a business partner. It impacts how new hires feel about your organization in the first hour of their first day with you. It’s why so many HR pros are still just paper-pushing, personnel-minded schmucks.
It has a name: Bureaucracy. Red-tape. “No.” “Fill out this stack of papers.”
Seth Godin wrote about something similar to this today, noting:
I hate going to the post office in the town next to mine. Every time I go, they look for a reason not to ship my package. “Too much tape!” “Not enough tape!” “There’s a logo!”
On the other hand, I really enjoy the few times I have something weird to ship fast… and I bring it to Fedex. The guy at the desk has a totally different approach. He’s not looking for a reason to say no, he’s looking for an opportunity to say yes. “Here’s some tape, we’ll just add it right here…”
Think about how we do what we do in HR. Why does your employee really need to fill out form XYZ before you process a simple address change? Why isn’t a short email good enough? Why does your new hire need to fill out a mountain of paperwork before they start doing something even remotely engaging?
People hate HR because we make simple tasks so effin’ difficult. Instead, think like an HR Renegade: Make it easy for people to take care of the mundane stuff and get back to doing their actual job.
While I agree 100%– we should *always* be looking for ways to cut through the crap– you might be leaving out the most difficult challenge with this: maintaining legal compliance. Would love to hear your thoughts.
@Christina – Certainly a valid point. One of my biggest peeves is that compliance falls under HR’s umbrella in the first place. Strategic, inspirational HR and legal compliance are two ideas that are often (but not always) at odds with each other.
I think strategic HR professionals should find a way to maintain legal compliance with the least possible impact or inconvenience to the employee (even if that means a little more work for us). This could mean getting them paperwork BEFORE their first day, switching to an online system, or spreading paperwork out over several days or weeks and immediately integrating them into the onboarding process.
There’s no single solution.