Worst HR Practices

My last blog inspired me to address some of the worst HR practices I have seen during my career. I hope that some have been done away with by now. I do know that in some cases people still cling on to them.

The practices are not in any given order. They are all equally destructive, in my view.

1. Force-ranking. Evaluating employees against one another might be an interesting exercise by the compensation folks, but it is demeaning to a person to be told that he/she is at the bottom of the totem pole. If you are selective in your hiring, you should not have bottom-feeders. If you are good at performance management, you might have already addressed performance issues. Bell curves, again an interesting comp exercise, have a tendency of encouraging mediocrity.

2. Complicated Staffing. Putting people through unnecessary hurdles to demonstrate your selectivity slows down progress, creates unnecessary bureaucracy, and rewards patience over speed of action. Experience has shown that multiple interviews often result in a composite rating that is inaccurate of the individual's potential. Line managers need to play a more active role in recruiting.

3. Cumbersome Policies & Procedures. In today's fast-paced world, minimum specification empowers managers and accelerates decision making. Minimum does not mean no specification, only necessary or value-added specification. Managers need to exercise their own judgment, not just follow the rule book. You want managers to make good decisions, not decisions by the book. I realize how important it is to provide proper guidelines for the inexperienced manager.

4. Culture Police. Culture does have an impact on behavior, and behavior has an impact on culture. But, you want to avoid "vigilante" groups. They morph eventually into something akin to the secret police of totalitarian systems. They become informers on their colleagues, thus reducing trust. I have seen many career derailments based on the action of the culture police's determinnation that someone does not fit the culture. This is a pet peeve of mine. I do not see how an outside consultant with casual interaction with an individual can decide whether an employee fits or does not fit the organization's culture.

5. Storm Trooper Layoffs. We all know that business conditions require, on occasion, the rationalization of work force levels. But how you go about implementing reductions in force, for whatever reason, is key. You do it professionally, and with care and respect. You do not use heavy handed methods; methods that embarass the individual; methods that might chip away at his/her own sense of self worth. Terminating employees are not enemies, they are potential customers. You might need them back too. It is not a sign of strength to use Gestapo-like tactics when discharging an employee.

6. Mandatory Performance Reviews. Reviews are an excellent opportunity for a manager and a subordinate to have a periodic dialogue about objectives, career aspirations, development planning, and accomplishments. As a paper exercise per se they have little value, in my view. The value is in the conversation that should be encouraged. Too often, reviews are used for documentation purposes, to protect the organization later on, and to comply with policy. I have always had a problem with this myopic use of performance reviews.

The above list is not complete. I am sure that there many other practices that should be added to the list.

It is the job of HR professionals to identify and eliminate practices that do not contribute to the advancement/usefulness of the HR process.

Whenever someone bashes the HR department, I have found that they bring one or more bad practices up for ridicule.

Have fun ... hopefully, things are not as bad as I might have made them to be.