HR is an Experience Game

Business Owner: ‘An employee was in a bar fight last night, was arrested, and we saw it on the news.’

Manager: ‘An employee has brought bed bugs into the office.’

President: ‘I’m pretty sure my CFO came in drunk today.’

Employee: ‘My sister called into payroll pretending to be me and changed my direct deposit to her bank account.’

Each of these is a true story.  I was the one who got the calls.  Welcome to HR.

I had the privilege of presenting to several different groups this year, primarily in HR-focused events.  One question I have been asked regularly is how does someone best prepare for a career in HR?  Here’s my answer: HR is an experience game.

College degrees are great.  Certifications are great.  Attending webinars, conferences, training courses – these are all wonderful resources to aid someone’s knowledge.  I’m all for them.  However, these are not the end all, be all to prepare for a career in HR.  To be a great HR practitioner, you have to have hands-on practical experience. 

There are just some things you cannot truly appreciate until you actually experience them.  This is true of most life experiences – falling in love, getting married, getting divorced, having children, buying a home, starting a business, receiving a cancer diagnosis, having a special needs child, losing a parent, etc.  It is difficult to truly understand any of these situations until you personally live them.  HR is the same way.  No course or book is going to fully prepare you for what to do when a terminated employee walks into the building with a gun.  Or when the company founder suddenly passes away.  Or when the organization is acquired, and employees show up for work only to be locked out of the building.  (Again, all true stories.) 

So how does someone prepare for a career in HR?  Take any experience you can get and run with it.  I started in unemployment – processing claims, researching terminations, reconciling charge benefit statements, attending hearings.  I learned so much.  Was it always fun and glamorous?  No.  It got tedious.  I would be frustrated with managers who did a horrible job with the termination.  I had one business owner go rogue during the hearing – I called him afterwards and said, ‘what the hell was that?’  (He obviously lost.)  But I learned a lot.  I took that experience into my first HR generalist role and went from there. 

The New York Times recently published an article about the HR issues happening at Amazon – payroll errors, mishandling of LOAs, delayed response times from the HR department.  (You can read the article here – https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/technology/amazon-employee-leave-errors.html.)  Most of us have heard stories about the poor culture at Amazon, particularly among the HR employees.  This sparked my curiosity as to who is the head of people at Amazon and what’s their strategy?  Turns out the people leaders at Amazon do not have strong HR practitioner backgrounds and their strategic focus for the past few years has been on technology.  Now, I am not suggesting these are the sole reasons for the issues they are having…but it makes you wonder.  Sure, they have great HR tech tools – how utilized are they?  Amazon has a significant population of warehouse/fulfillment center workers/drivers – not a population that tends to revel in technology.  Does the HR team at Amazon understand their people?  Is the leadership team focused on people-first?  It appears not.  Payroll and LOA administration are HR 101, and in an organization as large and financially sound as Amazon, should be seamless.  A lack of true HR experience may also be contributing to this deficit.  Solid HR professionals know the two most important things for HR operations are payroll and benefits – they are the reasons people go to work. 

This really is a shame.  Amazon is awesome!  Whenever you need something quickly or you can’t find something in a store, where do you go?  Amazon!  I want them to do well.  I want them to have an amazing people-first culture as they are the second largest employer in the US.  But they may want to put down the shiny new tech toys and go talk with employees instead.  Culture is more than the commercials you put on TV. 

Thank you to Janette S. Levey on LinkedIn for posting the NYT article: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/janetteslevey_employmentlaw-hr-employeeleave-activity-6858797413436678145-keW6

If you want to be a great HR pro, go get that experience.  Start at entry-level and work your way up.  (Please don’t try to be an HR consultant without experience.)  Try to touch as many facets as possible before you specialize.  And always remember – HR exists to make the workplace better for all employees.  Keep people at the forefront at all times.