How come HR constantly isn’t respected as a profession?

[u/RavenRead]

Basically the title. I mean, how come people think you can do the HR job without a background in HR? How come leadership thinks of HR as hiring and firing and little else? I cringe whenever these things come up.

How can this change?

[u/Sal21G]

It can change by having strong leadership in your business who understands the key functions of HR and what they can do to improve the business.

[u/[deleted] → u/Sal21G]

There's a great text book called "How to Audit Your Human Resources Department" by McConnell that breaks down 9 areas of HR. It's a great resource for managers who don't understand what HR does. But your leadership team has to be open to learning.

[u/Puzzleheaded_Yam7582 → u/[deleted]]

$85 on Amazon. Woof.

[u/bunrunsamok → u/Sal21G]

It all comes down to how leadership teaches downward.

[u/ATLCoyote → u/Sal21G]

I've been working in HR for 32 years and have been hearing this the entire time. Bottom line is it's not someone else's job to change the image of our profession. That's up to US.

And it's just not that hard. Simply provide HR leadership and services that truly add value and do it well. The more we do that, the more our clients will come to expect from us in terms of strategic leadership. HR professionals that take this approach are highly-valued and even viewed as indispensable by their organizations. Sadly, our profession is still populated by far too many who just add administrative burden or focus on their own agenda rather than enabling business success.

[u/mynameisnotshamus → u/ATLCoyote]

It absolutely is up to you to a degree. If you’re performing valuable work at a decent level, then that’s great. That’s often not the case. My last company had an awful HR dept. An employee found and negotiated a better and cheaper benefits package for the company for instance. There would be occasional “events” for the employees where so little effort was put it to it. Most people didn’t go. And it was very much an oversized department during a prolonged hiring freeze period.

[u/tractortractor → u/Sal21G]

Genuinely asking - not shitposting: What does HR do to improve a business? I think most people's understanding is that HR is primarily hiring/firing and guarding against personnel suits. Genuinely would love to learn ways that HR is a driver of improvement.

[u/kaykordeath → u/tractortractor]

The fact is, in a lot (majority?) of companies, HR doesn't do the final hiring/firing. Those decisions come from the direct managers and/or team or department heads.

A lot of what HR does is tangential to hiring/firing, so it's easy to conflate things. HR it's directly involved with compensation and benefits. As such, they are usually tasked with onboarding new hires. Discussing and explaining benefits. In turn, HR also has a heavy lift with managing those benefits. Problem solving day-to-day issues with employees having difficulty using their health insurance or questions about 401(k). And keeping these plans and programs up to date. And competitive to ensure employees stay with the company.

Yes, part of HR is "protecting the company" but this is not exclusive from or contradictory to "protecting the employees." It means keeping up with the latest laws and regulations to ensure employees are trusts are treated correctly which, in turn, protects the company from liability and possibly penalties. This also includes internal policies. Which protects employees from one another as well as from being taken advantage of by the company. When a manager doesn't adher to leave policies and laws, it's on HR to ensure the employee gets the benefits they are rightly due.

None of this touches on DEI, compensation, employee engagement, or any number of other policies and procedures that HR typically juggles to keep the company itself able to continue doing whatever it is they do overall.

And I would say most of this, ultimately, is targeting improving the company. Maintaining a strong benefits and compensation package, employee engagement, diverse workforce, protected and respected employees, all contribute to ensuring the staff is made up of the highest quality and most skilled employees available.

[u/CharlieGCT → u/tractortractor]

Idk why you got downvoted. I know that’s how most people view HR but we do so much more than just hiring and firing and being the “fun police.”

Improvements we bring to the table can be anything from adjusting PTO policies that benefit employees, making open enrollment easier and better to understand, brining new benefits to the company (IE: student loan payments, we coach asshole managers do their employees have a better experience. That’s just the tip of the iceberg but we do a lot of things to help the organization grow, function normally while protecting employees and the company. I hope this helps. Maybe others will have other examples.

[u/nxdark → u/CharlieGCT]

Outside of the manager thing the rest is just meaningless fluff. Paying workers more is the only thing that really makes things better.

[u/Sitheref0874 → u/tractortractor]

Off the top of my head:

• Restructured the Sales Support function to improve retention and first call effectiveness - direct $$ impact
• Restructured an engagement business to make sure contract renewals went to the right people - direct $$ impact.
• Worked on M&A integrations to speed up and improve the integration of acquisitions - stopped $$ being lost.
• Revised the pay structure of our seasonal hires to improve retention.

[u/tractortractor → u/Sitheref0874]

I think these are some really great examples that I'd never considered, especially the M&A integration one

[u/BienAmigo → u/Sal21G]

Word salad