Friday, January 23, 2009

Why Employees Don't Go to HR - continued

Employment attorney John Phillips provides great insight on why employees don't go to HR.

This is a core subject for HR professionals and should be periodically discussed.

2 comments:

Hoots said...

Six out of seven BINGO's. After decades of being the boss (My operations were too small for an HR department. The HR department was ME.) I worked five years in a big organization with an HR staff of several people.

The only item they didn't get wrong was the gossip thing. They didn't do that. But all the rest of the list described them perfectly.

I came to the conclusion that the problem had more to do with subordinate supervisors than the poor HR people who usually had to clean up the mess after some hot-head failed to follow progressive discipline and/or documentation requirements. Too many supervisors are short on training, patience and balls -- in that order.

Sadly, the few times problems were handled correctly but the problem employee got some feathers ruffled, HR often failed to be supportive of the subordinate supervisor who actually did the right thing. Which, of course, fed into the cycle described in your link. See #2.

Michael Wade said...

Hoots,

Great comment!

"Too many supervisors are short on training, patience and balls - in that order." That's hard to dispute.