HR needs to adopt a mantra similar to medicine’s “First, do no harm”. If there was any question over whether doctors would ever knowingly hurt patients, the entire profession would halve its patientload over night.
Likewise, HR departments are by-and-large good places with helpful and supportive people. However, the fact that they have the ability at all to report your conversations to management means no one trusts them and they become ineffective as a result.
The misunderstanding causing confusion here is that for HR, the business is the patient - not the employee.
From HR's perspective, an employee is a body part of the business. If helping the employee (i.e., healing the body part) is best for the business, that's what HR does. If terminating the employee (i.e., amputating the body part) is best for the business, that's what HR does.
I liked your analogy, and it sparked a thought -- employees are like fingernails: tools to be used, and trimmed/filed down when not needed.
Of course, your analogy is better, because when corporations conduct layoffs to save money to do stock buybacks, that is really much closer to amputating body parts for the sake of a "weight loss" metric.
As long as this is an arm of the company and there is no disinterested third party the incentive will always dictate that HR will place the interest of the company over the employee. As the old adage goes (paraphrased): “It’s difficult to make someone believe something when their salary depends on them not believing it”.
This sounded wrong, so I did some googling and found this criticism of the study that first popularized your stat. Sounds like its a case of poor extrapolation from a biased sample:
"After adding that this extrapolation was surely an underestimation of the actual problem, they concluded that this would mean medical error would rank third in the Centers for Disease Control’s list of causes of death in the U.S. This became the title of their published analysis, which has been cited in at least 1,265 papers according to Scopus, and this memorable idea spread to news articles, television shows, and alternative medicine circles.
Critics of this analysis have pointed out many flaws. It is based on studies whose data was never meant to be generalized to the entire U.S. hospitalized population. For example, one of these studies, by the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was conducted in beneficiaries of Medicare, who are aged 65 or older, have disabilities or have end-stage renal disease which requires dialysis or transplant. The study authors counted the number of deaths in their sample to which they believed medical errors had contributed, and this number was then used in the BMJ analysis to extrapolate to all U.S. hospitalizations. However, this makes the mistake of extrapolating an observation found in one sample to a different type of population. Case in point: if we look at everyone hospitalized in the United States, one patient out of ten is there to deliver a baby. Taking death statistics from a sample of Medicare patients and extrapolating it to all hospitalized patients is like turning apples into oranges, to adapt a popular saying to the current situation."
That quip is less deep and more complex than you think.
Look back to when the leading cause of death was "any slight infection" closely followed by any number of other accidents and diseases.
Health, saftey, and treatment have now become so effective that death is relatively a great deal rarer in developed countries not at war to the point where people have an expectation of friends and relatives being kept alive and strong tendency to sue when that doesn't happen; leading to many "malpractice" cases being settled and covered by insurance.
Would you rather live in a world with or without modern medicine and doctors?
You're lazily creating a false dichotomy to try to make the current US medical system seem better by comparing it to something objectively horrible. Compare it to an equally developed country that exists today and yes I would rather live in a modern country without AMA trained doctors, without perverse billing incentives, and without unnecessarily complex administration gatekeeping access to effective and timely medical treatment which frequently leads to reduced quality and length of life.
I get what you're saying, but it's a dizzying problem - the proximate problem to HR in these scenarios isn't that people think HR is bad or worry they'll relay the complaint, it's that HR has no teeth.
At Google, I had an...unusual...de-facto manager for 2 years. After declining their offer to join their team, they spent six months engaging in behavior that violated company policies - though not in obvious ways like sexual harassment or violence.
Going to HR seemed futile. Even assuming they could keep anonymity, their role is simply to investigate and report to management three levels up. Without clear-cut violations, it becomes a credibility contest. Since upper management selected the middle managers, they're inherently biased toward defending their choices.
The situation came to a head between December 1st and January 1st. My performance rating plummeted from "O" (top 10%) to "MI" (bottom 10%) and a technically separate formal warning. Things came to a head because they were nominally leading work that was a huge political warzone between organizations, and they didn't really want to do anything. After I politely demurred their invitation to transfer, they hired a childhood friend as my replacement - they're still launching "new" features with the code I wrote two years ago.
I documented various incidents over those six months that violated Google's code of conduct. But even in the best-case scenario:
- HR confirms the violations.
- They report findings to my third-level manager.
- My second-level manager (who chose my de-facto manager) blames me.
- The third-level manager (who chose the second-level manager) defers to their choice.
I entered Google wondering how they handled professional disagreements. (I was a young CEO for the 5 years prior) Seven years later, I realized they don't - disagreement itself is seen as inappropriate. This dynamic inevitably hurts those lowest in the hierarchy. It's not malicious; everyone believes they're acting appropriately. But once anyone decides to prioritize comfort over strict policy enforcement (a natural human tendency), standard human politics take over. I honestly, swear to god, saw this in abundance at Google in ways I never saw at a fast food job.
What I once dismissed as complaints from underperformers now seems depressingly accurate.
Likewise, HR departments are by-and-large good places with helpful and supportive people. However, the fact that they have the ability at all to report your conversations to management means no one trusts them and they become ineffective as a result.