The Dark Side of Human Resources

I’ll never forget the first time my career collided with something awfully human. I had been recently promoted to an Employee Relations Analyst and although I knew the general comings and goings of closed door meetings and white noise machines outside of offices in our department, I had not come face to face with the darkest underbelly of my favorite career.

It was almost mesmerizing for me to see one of our HR team members handle this awfully human moment. The typically cheery, smiley teammate was somber and calculated and I was uncomfortable. I watched her walk a terminated employee out of the building in front of others and thought, “There’s got to be a better way to do this stuff.”

It took me a few years, so much coaching, a phenomenal mentor and a lot of wine to realize the darkest parts of Human Resources are my most treasured parts of this field. Every HR professional has a niche, a specialty they lean into more and know more about. Perhaps it was my relentless passion for people, or my deep need to see tangible evidence that I was making a different, but Employee Relations became the space I leaned into most.

Let me start by presenting this humble opinion - there is only one right way to handle Employee Relations. I do not believe in a multi-faceted approach, nor have I seen other strategies work in my career. The only approach I have ever seen that produces growth out of the darkest places in HR is an approach where dignity and justice are the ultimate goals.

There are thousands of ways to conduct legally sound, policy-upholding investigations. There are incredible and useful practices for mediation, coaching and motivational interviewing. There are best practices on leave with pay during investigations and Performance Improvement Plans.

None of these tactical strategies will work or produce growth in pruning moments for employees and your organization if dignity and justice aren’t the focus of it all.

Let’s start with Dignity -

I have watched, been part of, and led horrible terminations. The terminations were legally sound, ethically right, and still downright terrible. These termination meetings had emotional outbursts of anger, sadness, and even violence, and the common thread to their demise was a lack of dignity.

Terminating an employee for any reason results in one of the darkest days of that employee’s year. Regardless of how passionate we are that this employee should exit the company, that employee is still a human.

And let me be very candid with you - whenever you back any human being into a corner, they will lash out.

We as HR professionals must resolve ourselves to the non-negotiable fact that we will provide every employee with dignity at the time of termination.

The terminations I’ve been part of that went terrible wrong were because the process wasn’t well thought out, personnel weren’t well trained, and the terminated employee was the last thought.

I get it - terminations are an excruciating process consumed by paper and legalities. Legal requirements for final pay, benefits, company property and a hundred other issues flood this process and the human soul we’re going to sit in front of and remove their way of life from is totally forgotten.

It’s not just terminations that require a resolve for dignity, but any type of Employee Relations experience. Employees on PIPs, employees with poor communication and bad work product are all still humans. And with that awfully Human part of “human resources” it’s our ethical mandate to give these humans dignity in the process.

I’ve sat in PIP meetings with managers that have asked me to draft a PIP just to confide in me later,

“I was just doing this PIP so we can have the paperwork to terminate later. I know this person can’t meet these requirements.”

Shame on us.

There is no dignity in counting an employee out before we’ve given them the tools and options to shine or sink.

It’s atrocious to believe it’s okay to create work plans that assist in stepping employees out the door instead of inviting them into a space where success is possible.

It is inevitable that employees will not meet our standards, that they are in the wrong workplace and we will have to separate employment; it is not inevitable that they have to feel subhuman during that process.

Justice -

I read a provocative article once that states “A Human Resources Career is Not for Nice People.” The premise of Mr. Walker’s article is that HR isn’t for nice people, but fair people. (Give it a read, then give it to your CEO).

There’s something to be said about having a reputation as a “fair” or “just” person in your organization. All too many times I’ve wanted to be the nice one, the liked one, the smart one, the needed one.

Now all I want is to be the fair one.

Fair means actively pushing out my own bias, refusing to be pressured by the bias of others including the C-Suite, and doing our jobs as legally and morally just as possible.

Fair means knowing that the physical and emotional safety of women is equally important to the reputation and possible slander of a man. Innocent until substantiated guilt, always.

Fair means putting yourself in the shoes of a transgender employee on a bathroom break.

Fair means saying the hard things to the C-Suite when retention rates are at unacceptable levels.

Fair means having enough professionalism to not allow yourself to have favorites on your team or in your company.

It’s been my experience that being just and fair to our workforce is harder than giving them dignity. Purposing to be just is purposing to lay down your own emotions on an hourly basis in order to ensure equality throughout every interaction you have. It takes a patient, purposed, relentless HR professional to resolve themselves to being fair 100% of the time. It takes a realistic HR professional to resolve themselves to the fact that they will be fair 90% of the time, and learn from the other 10%.

Let’s be known as the fair ones.

There was a time in my career where I didn’t know if I wanted to do this anymore. It was during a sexual harassment case that turned into a sexual assault case and it was taking my breath away each day. More substantiated facts about women being touched, pushed in closets, and told to get on their knees to keep their jobs was wrecking my personal head space. I lived at the office and pulled 15-20 hour days trying to get to the bottom of things. I drew maps and recreations of assault accusations just trying to wrap my mind around how it all happened. I spoke with countless attorneys, perfected my notes and made a case file that would impress a supreme court judge. I fought with parts of the leadership team that weren’t in the interviews and didn’t believe this person did what they were accused of. And I wanted to quit.

We terminated the accused employee after all the substantiation. I still wasn’t at peace. There was a victim that had ghosted me and the attorneys for an interview during our investigation. The victim was key and it plagued me that this person, a former employee, had courage to speak out and then never showed up.

Two weeks after the investigation closed I received an email at 2am. I was already awake, honestly tormented by the idea that I might need to leave my beloved career because I wasn’t making a difference and I couldn’t take much more of the darkest parts of HR. I rolled over in bed, opened the email on my phone, and the whole world stopped for me.

The email was from the missing victim. It outlined a horror of experiences and eluded to rape. It was the most difficult email I’ve read in my history of Human Resources.

That day I went into the office and printed out her email. Parts of it were already substantiated and other parts I’ll never get to prove as she wouldn’t talk with me over the phone or in person. In a moment of extreme vulnerability I went into the office of the accused employee, the office I had emptied weeks before, and closed the door. I sat in the former employee’s chair, right where a predator forced employees to do sexual things to keep their jobs, and I read the email out loud. I even wept.

Then I wiped my face, got out of that office, and knew this was the career I’ll be with forever.

The dark side of HR holds these treasures of life that few of us get to see. It holds these nuggets of gold where scared employees come forward, where deficiencies are improved and communication is prioritized. These messy, awfully human parts are the parts that fuel powerful legislation that improve working conditions for the kiddos I’m going to raise one day. The battles of consistently providing dignity while maintaining a fair and just HR practice are the battles where heroes are forged. These are the spaces where impact is felt.

In the next hundred years of my career (that’s right, I plan to be an HR Hero forever), I hope I stay flexible in my Employee Relations methods, but strong in the outcomes of dignity and justice. I hope the lessons I learn, and the immense amount of teaching I’ve still to be taught all point to the two strategies that have enveloped my already beautiful career.

I don’t know what your specialty is, or what experiences you’ve had with the dark side of HR - but I do hope you're willing to share in some of those experiences with me as we navigate these dark, but treasured waters.