HR departments are there to stop the company getting sued. Work from that premise inwards and you wont go far wrong.

moderate amount of confidentiality

Dose that mean.

if the discussion has no value or importance to the directors / mangers / office gossip
then

confidentiality is maintained

else

no confidentiality

geetee1972 – just a thought but maybe ‘the line’ regard you as HR?

Far from it. The one thing we are not is HR and the line doesn’t regard us as such. They see us as being able to help their sales people be better sales people, which is why the world’s biggest companies buy our service. Money talks; the line wouldn’t buy us if we didn’t add value.

Moderate confidentiality means that you can’t cover up if someone is confessing to gross misconduct. It means, for example, that if you have a personal situation at home you can expect that to remain confidential but if you’re disclosing that you or someone else has been on the take you can expect that to get escalated. Everything else is probably somewhere on a blurred continuum between those two extremes.

I think the attitudes towards HR here are interesting; although I still don’t think they’re representative of how the majority of people in large businesses regard HR (based on 17 years experience of dealing with both HR and the line) I do think they are indicative of how many HR teams haven’t built trust with other parts of the business.

Interestingly, if you survey the C-Suite of any Global Fortune 500 organisation and ask them to list the five most important challenges they need to address to remain competitive, they will almost all uniformly make reference to managing their talent more effectively as being one of those five.

If there is one thing I think everyone here can agree with, it’s that the people in your organisation are your organisation and if you haven’t got the right people and the right strategy to manage those people effectively, you haven’t got a (Global Fortune 500) business.

Managing that strategy is HR’s job and should be its prime objective. Not getting sued is part of the mandate but it’s an objective that comes fairly low down on the list of ‘making a difference’ to the business remaining competitive.

geetee1972, it’s good to hear an insiders perspective, but the HR departments I’ve have dealt with struggle with the most basic concepts of satisfactory behaviour, even Global Fortune 500 companies.

Not knowing basic employment law (and getting sued because of it), total incompetency (2 hour interview when HR did not know what position i’d applied for), conflict of interests (shagging married departmental managers), Idiotic behaviour (emailing all managers at her current employer with a job application and covering letter saying how unhappy she was….twice!).

I can understand it’s an important role, but in my experience, i’ve not been impressed with the reality of them. I work for a small company now…no HR dept…..no problems!

And to the O/P…I would not trust them an inch.

geetee1972 you sound more like a trainer than anything like HR and are you dealing with companies HR departments as an outsider and not direct as a company employee? If so you haven’t got the real view of a company’s HR department.

my experience is based on UBS, Fidelity, Standard Chartered, Credit Suisse – all big companies

Raised some concerns about my Line Manager to our HR Dept after they went a step-too-far with some rule breaking, by the time I’d walked back to our building HR had phoned my manager to ‘dicscuss my concerns’ and basically told them everything I’d said.

This is a large public sector workplace with ‘Investor in People’ status & basically confidentiality counted for nothing compared to corporate butt covering and ‘old boy’ allegiances 😥

Why does anyone choose to beceome a HR professional?

Why not finance, operations, sales, IT? Why not an area where they can earn significantly more?

I’ve just recently dated an HR woman for a month or so and she held both management and the ‘normal’ staff in equal contempt, and would do and say whatever was necessary to protect her own position. And not just at work…..

What positions did you get her into?

Why not finance, operations, sales, IT? Why not an area where they can earn significantly more?

All those area have measurable ‘performance indicators’ whereas HR rewards those good with the 3B’s – bullying, blustering and bullshitting 👿

Why does anyone choose to beceome a HR professional?

Someone was telling me the other day that HR pays very well – don’t know if that’s true.

It’s not true. Most places I’ve worked the HR director is on approx. 60% of other directors. Similar disparity, or worse, seen at all levels.

There is also a fairly high turnover in HR departments.

TSY – I tested several options, she coped well with the practical assessment and was rewarded with several merits and always a big bonus to finish off with. Sex was good too.

Every department has a negative stereotype view of every other department. It’s a bit like a school playground in here sometimes.

Finance: bean counters who have no concept of value only of cost and cannot see beyond next month’s management accounts.

IT: populated largely by men with the social skills of a piranha and an inexhaustible ability to justify spending on more IT kit because it keeps them in a job rather than creating shareholder value.

Sales & Marketing: morons who cannot see beyond their next round of drinks in whatever wine bar is fashionable today. Sales will close a deal to make their next commission check and marketing only care about how good their editorial is in Campaign and Marketing Week.

Operations: Similar people skills to IT but at least they aren’t quite as large a cost centre

… and you work in Sales for an IT based HR solution… 😆

well royally pwned etc

should have said earlier – what I have seen introduced at an (american owned) company I worked for was an externally run confidential dob in hotline…

Did not take a huge amount of time for that to filter through after introduction, and for a few well known managers to get transferred outside the business

As far as I can see HR directors are professional sycophants to the CEO and do very little other than sort out compromise agreements to pay off all the middle managers fired when the CEO decides he needs a scapegoat for whatever brain wave he had, which didn’t work out. Or maybe that’s just where I work 😉

… and you work in Sales for an IT based HR solution…

I’m also happily married to the woman of my dreams with a lovely healthy son.

So er I guess..go screw yourself TSY. 😀

LOL… living up to the stereotype just perfectly geetee. 10/10 for being well and truly pwned.

Picture of the wife or you’re talking doo-doo!

geetee, interesting how you speak of “the line” these are people and not soul less robots.

1984 anyone…….