Eight Most Evil Hr Policies
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I saw this interesting article on linkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/eight-most-evil-hr-policies-liz-ryan
How many of you have experienced things like this? What do you think about the article.
Personally two of my IT jobs have been ones that will not provide references they will only verify time of employment as their HR policy. Granted I have gotten around this at one of them by having someone that was not my supervisor give me a reference. Such as the Chief of Police. But unfortunately they can only provide information on how well I was able to implement things and provide support for them from an end user prospective, and the overall behind the scenes. I'm not sure how much help a reference like that really is which is why I hate that policy.
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Of all of those, only the no reference one have I ever seen in person and it wasn't followed, it was only used to keep from giving bad references. Good references would still be given.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Of all of those, only the no reference one have I ever seen in person and it wasn't followed, it was only used to keep from giving bad references. Good references would still be given.
The lawyer at both the government localities I worked at recommended them not give any references. The one I could not get around in any way has been sued over it before. The one I use other department heads as references has never been sued for that. and even though they are department heads they are considered co-workers so they don't stop it.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
What do you think about the article.
I hate it.
"At U.S. Robotics we had close to ten thousand employees and we didn't count personal days. We said "Take the days you need." There was a high level of trust. Here's how many employees misused their paid time off: zero. They didn't do it, because they were treated like adults."
I call bullshit on this statement. I guarantee that in any workplace of 10,000 people, many will take the piss. If you're a manager and you're not aware of this, it probably means you need to come down from your ivory tower from time to time.
The author's profile states "We're reinventing work so that it works for humans."
I translate that as "We're reinventing work so that I can make a fortune selling books and consulting"I may be harsh on this person, but I'm pretty cyncial about all these "consultants" writing articles and selling books in a new-age, touchy-feely, American kind of way. Or maybe I'm just in a bad mood this morning
On not giving reference other than stating facts ("X worked here for N years and on a salary of Y"), this has been common practice now in the UK for years. I'm in favour of it. Old skool references were too subjective, and often reflected whether or not the manager likes the person rather than reflecting their ability. The danger was references could fall in to the territory of "I really liked this person because they are white, middle-class and liked a drink, just like me". I've managed competent people who I disliked, and incompetent people who I liked - there is a danger my cognitive biases could have influenced my reference writing in an unfair and unethical way. I'd rather not take the risk.
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It was a good article. I agreed with pretty much everything she wrote.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
"At U.S. Robotics we had close to ten thousand employees and we didn't count personal days. We said "Take the days you need." There was a high level of trust. Here's how many employees misused their paid time off: zero. They didn't do it, because they were treated like adults."
I call bullshit on this statement. I guarantee that in any workplace of 10,000 people, many will take the piss. If you're a manager and you're not aware of this, it probably means you need to come down from your ivory tower from time to time.
I've worked at several places that use this policy and the abuse levels are super low when dealing with professional shops. If you have any number of people taking the piss on this, you're hiring poorly.
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I'll agree with CB that it's likely that US Robotics did probably have some people who abused it, but it was such a low percentage that it's considered non existent.
I really did like the idea mentioned that Conversations need to take place. This is definitely something that's missing in a lot of SMB environments today.
I was confused about the personal time thing for non-exempt salaried employees. Don't count them? It's one thing to not count leaving for a few hours to go to a Dr appointment, child's play, etc, but if you take a full day off isn't that vacation?
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@Dashrender said:
I was confused about the personal time thing for non-exempt salaried employees. Don't count them? It's one thing to not count leaving for a few hours to go to a Dr appointment, child's play, etc, but if you take a full day off isn't that vacation?
Taking a day off is not the same as not coming to work. If you take vacation, you assume you are out of touch and unable to work. Take a cruise and drop off the grid. For a salaried person, if you don't come to work it doesn't mean you want answer if someone asks you a question or you won't attend a meeting if one is needed. Traditionally a professional salaried person has always meant that you only show up to work if you feel you need to. Salaried people are supposed to, in theory, be judged on their output, not on how they did it. They are paid to get things done, not to sit at a desk or be in an office.
You only need to worry about concepts like showing up to work if you care only about the appearance of work and not about the actual work itself.
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True, but assuming that your normal process is to go into the office and say sit down and code all day, or push paper, etc... being gone for personal reasons yet not an official vacation (hell when was the last vacation you took that you didn't get a call during? - short of the cruise portion when I was unreachable, I've never been on one) why wouldn't this count against your vacation time? or PTO time, etc?
I've seen most companies around here get rid of the concept of sick time and vacation and change it all to PTO (Personal Time Off). This gives the employee more flexibility to use what was suppose to be designated as sick time in any way they choose, and not something simply lost if they weren't ever sick.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I was confused about the personal time thing for non-exempt salaried employees. Don't count them? It's one thing to not count leaving for a few hours to go to a Dr appointment, child's play, etc, but if you take a full day off isn't that vacation?
Taking a day off is not the same as not coming to work. If you take vacation, you assume you are out of touch and unable to work. Take a cruise and drop off the grid. For a salaried person, if you don't come to work it doesn't mean you want answer if someone asks you a question or you won't attend a meeting if one is needed. Traditionally a professional salaried person has always meant that you only show up to work if you feel you need to. Salaried people are supposed to, in theory, be judged on their output, not on how they did it. They are paid to get things done, not to sit at a desk or be in an office.
You only need to worry about concepts like showing up to work if you care only about the appearance of work and not about the actual work itself.
Totally agree with this.
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We have good HR here at Webroot. I was in the elevator this morning and the head of HR was joking around with the head of support about whether she'd already started drinking this morning
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My HR at Change is amazing. They do so much work to make me able to live in Texas (they have no office here to handle local payroll) and to let me move around the world. That's not something most HR departments will do.
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I'm hoping my next jobs HR department is better. The ones I've had have been clueless as to how to do anything. And If you asked them questions about your benefits they usually just told you they have no idea. Contact X company yourself.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
I'm hoping my next jobs HR department is better. The ones I've had have been clueless as to how to do anything. And If you asked them questions about your benefits they usually just told you they have no idea. Contact X company yourself.
Ouch that sucks. We have a 1 person HR department here. She generally goes above and beyond for things like that. She is still working on a billing issue from January when I was in the hospital.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
"At U.S. Robotics we had close to ten thousand employees and we didn't count personal days. We said "Take the days you need." There was a high level of trust. Here's how many employees misused their paid time off: zero. They didn't do it, because they were treated like adults."
I call bullshit on this statement. I guarantee that in any workplace of 10,000 people, many will take the piss. If you're a manager and you're not aware of this, it probably means you need to come down from your ivory tower from time to time.
I've worked at several places that use this policy and the abuse levels are super low when dealing with professional shops. If you have any number of people taking the piss on this, you're hiring poorly.
Indeed, this is our policy as well and we've only had one case of abuse, and it was a receptionist and she was fired a long time ago. Valuing talent and treating people well makes them want to come to work... plus tons of free snacks, coffee (about 10 different flavours of Torani syrups, most of which cannot be found at regular grocery stores), soda, even paleolithic and v*gan compatible snacks, plus we sometimes get lunches and crap.
It costs a fair amount, but we get better performance out of employees than MSPs I worked at years ago, that's why I run mine differently. I still have sales data from two of those MSPs and I've compared a lot from time to time, and in the amount of refunds, miscalculated (under-calculated) work time, etc they still lost way more than we lose in snacks or more days off for people.
A lot of business owners think grabbing someone by the base of their snarglees and running their lives, draining the happiness out of it, and controlling them like they're teenagers is the best way to get performance out of people, but I can say freedom and treating people well works a hell of a lot better.
I didn't even know this would actually work when I implemented these policies (I bought an MSP I had worked for when I sold another company) and was more than willing to stop if it didn't work, but it only got better, and some people who had played hookie from work before, began coming in earlier and staying later, and closing more tickets or committing more code (depending on job).
Crazy!
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@tonyshowoff said:
A lot of business owners think grabbing someone by the base of their snarglees and running their lives, draining the happiness out of it, and controlling them like they're teenagers is the best way to get performance out of people,
What if they are teenagers? When I was younger I needed a boss to kick my ass at times. I was reasonably committed to my job, but I was also committed to bars and girls and the three would sometimes conflict. There were times when I was given too much freedom, when I actually needed more structure and discipline. To a degree, the same is sometimes true of me now.
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@Dashrender said:
I'll agree with CB that it's likely that US Robotics did probably have some people who abused it, but it was such a low percentage that it's considered non existent.
What annoyed me was she said "zero". I get really annoyed by people treating the world as binary like that. "Employ me as an HR consultant and you will have ZERO problems". Like Scott saying "If you have any number of people taking the piss on this, you're hiring poorly." The world is not binary like that. HR in a 10,000 employee organisation is more complex. When consultants on LinkedIn or wherever makes claims like this, it just destroys their credibility in my eyes. I just think it makes them sound like snake oil salesmen.
And its unnecessary. What I'm really interested in is achieving net benefits from HR policies. For example, implementing homeworking may result in 40% of staff becoming less productive, and 60% becoming more productive. So even a massive number like that can still result in a net benefit in productivity, and make the policy worth implementing. There is no need to reduce the world to binary (ie Homeworking = Good, Officeworking - Bad) and wish people would stop doing it.
/rant
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@tonyshowoff said:
A lot of business owners think grabbing someone by the base of their snarglees and running their lives, draining the happiness out of it, and controlling them like they're teenagers is the best way to get performance out of people,
What if they are teenagers? When I was younger I needed a boss to kick my ass at times. I was reasonably committed to my job, but I was also committed to bars and girls and the three would sometimes conflict. There were times when I was given too much freedom, when I actually needed more structure and discipline. To a degree, the same is sometimes true of me now.
F[moderated] that I don't hire teenagers. Plus it's murky for us anyway since we have an entire adult entertainment division so we just keep it 21+
