Why You Should Never Trust HR

Today’s case study: Uber HR allegedly repeatedly dismissed complaints of sexual harassment against female engineers.

[quote]After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn’t. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn’t help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.
Uber was a pretty good-sized company at that time, and I had pretty standard expectations of how they would handle situations like this. I expected that I would report him to HR, they would handle the situation appropriately, and then life would go on - unfortunately, things played out quite a bit differently. When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man’s first offense, and that they wouldn’t feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to. Upper management told me that he “was a high performer” (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn’t feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.
I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that. I remarked that this didn’t seem like much of a choice, and that I wanted to stay on the team because I had significant expertise in the exact project that the team was struggling to complete (it was genuinely in the company’s best interest to have me on that team), but they told me the same thing again and again. One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn’t be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been “given an option”. I tried to escalate the situation but got nowhere with either HR or with my own management chain (who continued to insist that they had given him a stern-talking to and didn’t want to ruin his career over his “first offense”). [/quote]

It’s blowing up in the media. The cover-your-ass has begun

This is an awfully extreme example, but obviously you should never trust HR. They represent the interests of the company, not yours. You are replaceable. You must work and cooperate with HR, but trust them at your peril.

The interests of the company align with the employees in most instances including this one. If they had handled it appropriately Uber wouldn’t be drinking this shitstorm.

Ha, expecting HR to side against management, possibly reprimand or even fire them based on complaints from staff? You will find water in the desert before you find a company that would do that without having their hand forced by exactly this kind of action.

Yes, much like infosec nobody lifts a finger until it’s too late.

How shocking that Uber, the “take no prisoners, do whatever we want, regardless of whether it’s ethical or legal” company would have such a fucked up internal culture.

I’m sensing sarcasm here, @wumpus!

But as to the overall thesis, yeah, HR is not your buddy.

There was a situation like this at one of my old jobs. My boss was getting sexually harassed by this one guy at our company (who didn’t have much common sense at all but that’s another story). She told them what he was doing and said that HR needed to deal with it. They hemmed and hawwed until finally they said they’d just move him to the first floor. She was furious, so she printed out every email she had from him, threw it on her desk and told them she’d sue if HR didn’t get rid of him.

They didn’t blink an eye before firing the guy.

That is some seriously shit HR.

Sadly, this is not surprising. And just as stusser said, a moments thought behind the immediate would have told any intelligent HR person that the course they ultimately followed was foolish, as well as wrong. And as wumpus notes, yeah, Uber. This company is reaping what they sow.

I guess I have been fortunate to work for some places with some really good HR. But yeah, you also have to have good top management to have good HR.

You know where you find the strongest HR departments? At the companies with a strong union presence. No wonder the Republicans want to destroy unions.

This. HR exists as a literal CYA for the company you work for. Never forget that. Yes they might be on your side in a peer vs peer situation if there is documented evidence of wrong doing. But in a direct report vs management situation? If you are the direct report you are going to get fucked.

This made national news tonight, reported by Lester Holt on NBC’s Nightly News. All because some idiots in HR wouldn’t reprimand the manager and let her transfer out.

Delicious.

To be precise, this is an example of ineffective HR, not one in which HR made it worse (at least based on what I’ve read). As others have posted above, HR failed to serve the interests of the company here—not just the employee’s.

HR employees can be bad employees, just like any other. Fowler did the right thing here by reporting to HR. If not “trusting” HR means staying silent, that’s the wrong move. Keep seperate documentation, but still report to HR.

Did you read the post? That’s exactly what they did do. They reprimanded the manager and offered to let her transfer to a different group.

It’s never clear if they ever reprimanded the manager for his repeated incidents of harassment, at least according to her account.

[quote]
In my meeting, the rep I spoke with told me that he had never been reported before, he had only ever committed one offense (in his chats with me), and that none of the other women who they met with had anything bad to say about him, so no further action could or would be taken. It was such a blatant lie that there was really nothing I could do. There was nothing any of us could do. We all gave up on Uber HR and our managers after that. Eventually he “left” the company. I don’t know what he did that finally convinced them to fire him.[/quote]

Also, they offered her the transfer initially, she refused because she wanted to work on that department’s project, and thought HR would have her back. Once that project was done and it was clear HR wasn’t going to punish that guy, she requested the transfer and was denied.

[quote]
Once I had finished up my projects and saw that things weren’t going to change, I also requested a transfer. I met all of the qualifications for transferring - I had managers who wanted me on their teams, and I had a perfect performance score - so I didn’t see how anything could go wrong. And then my transfer was blocked.[/quote]

Thanks Telefrog, wasn’t going to be fun proving Stusser wrong on mobile.

So, who didn’t read it? :)

Reprimand: They gave him “a warning and a stern talking-to”.

Transfer: "I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, "

So they initially offered a transfer, but then didn’t allow it later on.

A transfer is usually considered a negative job action when the transferee doesn’t initiate it. You don’t take negative job actions against the victim, you take them against the perpetrator. Also, if you give one tinker’s dam about the liability of the company, you don’t just move victims out and let the manager continue to stack up more harassment complaints. Pretty much everything they did was incorrect, but transferring the victim is a textbook rookie mistake.