A lot of us have our struggles with human resources at a job at some point in our working lives.
You might think they’re on your side as a working stiff when you’re young and idealistic, but if you’ve ever had a bad experience with them, you know they can be downright brutal.
Folks on AskReddit shared their “HR is not your friend” stories. Let’s take a look.
1. Huh?
“Pulled into a meeting with two HR reps in the middle of my shift. Taken to this really nice boardroom, which was confusing because I was just a grunt and this is literally floors above where I should ever be.
They sat me down and said basically what do you have to say for yourself. Me, still confused, tells them I have no idea what they’re talking about. Everyone is really quiet and serious and I’m scared sh*tless. And they say you know what you did, this is cause for termination, blah blah.
I’m literally thinking this is really excessive for being a few minutes late sometimes. I insist I don’t know what’s going on. One of them maybe realized something was wrong and flips open a file and says you’re xxx right? Turns out they got me mixed up with someone else who has the same name.
On the elevator ride down by myself I was still sweating. Don’t know what that other person did but man, HR does not play.”
2. Ripped off.
“I went to HR to report that my team’s manager was illegally shorting all of our paychecks. HR’s response was to adopt a new, company-wide policy addressing the paycheck issue and back-paying most people for a certain amount, and also to frame me for work avoidance.
HR and IT disabled part of my login account to a tool we used, and then fired me a few months later after failing to fix the problem and allowing me to actually do my job.
They tried to deny my unemployment claim afterward. Told the unemployment rep that they “had logs” showing that I did something to break the tool I don’t even have access to break in the first place. They also didn’t think to disable my email access in a timely manner, so I was able to back up all my emails with IT documenting exactly what went down.
Unemployment approved my claim and hit them with a major penalty to their insurance.”
3. Shady.
“HR ordered me to downgrade my three excellent employee reviews to satisfactory because management didn’t recognize their names. I got written up for telling my employees this.
HR denied that they told me anything, even though I had the emails from them documenting it. Totally worth it. My employees were excellent and got the raises they deserved.”
4. Stabbed in the back.
“HR hired consultants to run morale building employee input sessions.
Basically saying “We’re not from the company. You can tell us all the things you don’t like about working here and would like to see changed and we’ll put it all into a report for management. Don’t worry, everything is anonymous, we just need material for our report and you guys get to have your say in improving things around here.”
Turns out HR and the consultants recorded all the sessions and played the highlights for management. People were disciplined for criticizing the company or their immediate superiors and any shred of faith or trust in management that the employees may have had was instantly incinerated.
Managers now complain that they don’t know what’s going on in their teams because nobody tells them anything. I wonder why.”
5. Don’t go to her.
“I worked at a smallish company that grew big enough to hire an HR person. Her office was down from mine so in the mornings I’d swing by and say hi.
That turned into grabbing a cup of coffee she had just made, the into having a pastry and talking about life. I found that if I mentioned someone’s name in passing, a few minutes later she would spill the beans about that person’s life.
What work issues they had, health issues, family issues etc. I learned really quick any issues I had not to take them to her. She made it like 6months before she got fired.”
6. Speakerphone.
“I asked my boss for a desk phone with a speakerphone function because sometimes I need it at work to conference people on the phone with people in my office.
We had these old, yellow phones. So he told me to make a request to him and CC our office manager, and he’d send it to the HR department of our region via e-mail.
So I put forth a nice e-mail outlining what I am requesting, and why I need it for HR’s request. My office manager replies all and asks HR “per lazarus870 request, should I order the phone through the same channels I have used before or is there a new policy?”
HR responded livid. She demanded to know why I needed this phone (it was in the e-mail…) and then accused my office manager of going behind HR’s back in ordering phones before without approval.
My office manager told my boss, who called HR and chewed her out and I could hear yelling. My boss came out of his office and yelled at me, “See what you’ve caused?!” He was fired up but I know he didn’t mean anything malicious by it. I just laughed.
HR had to apologize to office manager for accusations. Turns out, after everybody yelled their f*cking lungs out for an hour, the speakerphone I needed was literally free and we had boxes of them in storage. I had it for a month before HR rolled out new fancy phones that were actually expensive and convoluted, requiring training to set up and use…
At the company picnic we had to wear f*cking name tags and I had never met HR lady face to face and she came up and said, “Oh we haven’t met, what’s your name?” and I was trying to hide my nametag but she read it and didn’t seem happy to see me.”
7. A terrible place to work.
“At my last “real” job before striking out on my own I had an exit interview with the HR lady who was actually just someone who was friends with the company president who was filling in because the actual HR lady with a degree in HR and everything quit.
A lot of people at this place quit. It was a terrible place to work with out of touch management and delusions of grandeur limping along building websites for a business niche that was mostly old people who thought the Internet was magic.
During the exit interview she asked why I was leaving. I told her I liked my coworkers a lot, but hated the company. She got this exasperated look and got genuinely upset, and told me that she’d been getting that same line from everybody else who quit and had their exit interview recently.
It boggled my mind that they could hear the same thing over and over again from so many people putting in their time until they could go on to something better and not stop to think they should change something.”
8. Creeper.
“I worked in the bakery at a Fred Meyers for about 6 months when I was freshly 19.
There was this like 45 year old guy in meat/seafood who was super creepy and all of the women in my department and even one woman who was previously in my department but was moved to another TO GET AWAY FROM HIM warned me about this man from day 1.
Somehow, any time I was on my break, he would “be on his break too” and he’d follow me into the break room and try to flirt with me the entire time.
Not only did he follow me on my breaks and lunches, but if I had to walk to another part of the store to get anything he would run to catch up to me and walk with me, he followed me to my car a few times after I got off shift and the scariest time was when I was closing by myself and he came into the back of the bakery and kept following me around the long table, trying to grab me while telling me how much he liked me and how badly he wanted to be with me.
I told him no and to leave me alone CONSTANTLY while managers just shrugged and said “that’s just how he is”. My boyfriend threatened him when he got off work one time hell even my father came in and threatened him because NO ONE was doing ANYTHING.
The final straw for me was one night when I was closing alone again he came into the back area and followed me into the freezer and tried to kiss me and he grabbed my *ss. I pushed him and f*cking ran to the closing manager who also functioned as HR. He said he’d “watch the store footage” and talk to me the next day.
Next day comes and he pulls me into his office and says that he saw the video and saw this man stalking me inside and outside of work and that he “talked” to him about his behavior to which the man responded that it was just a “misunderstanding”.
I replied that this had been going on for months and I wasn’t going to take it anymore and he had the f*cking NERVE to tell me that “He just does this to all the new girls. As soon as another girl gets hired he’ll leave me alone.” I told him he was a bastard and quit on the spot.
Turns out the creep was the brother of the stores owner who had been to jail in the past for s*xual assault and R*PE but was now “cleaning his life up”.
9. That sucks.
“I reported s*xual harassment to HR at a large international company when I was 21.
They notified my harasser (an older VP) before I even made it back to my desk.
I was fired a few days later, despite an excellent performance review the week before he propositioned me.”
10. I believe I deserve a bonus.
“The HR/Payroll manager at a small hospital I worked at had a bad habit of not paying out the sign-on bonus that was paid out incrementally in three payments through the course of a year and sign on bonuses for picking up extra shifts. After repeated request to be belatedly compensated, I took it to corporate who addressed my issue immediately.
A couple weeks later I was terminated on what amounted to a technicality where I forget my badge one shift and my relief was late to take over sitting with a patient, causing me to receive more points against me than if I had called out for that shift.
When I was called in to receive my notification, the director of nursing was shocked but ultimately not much she could do.”
11. Fender bender.
“A co-worker accidentally backed his company truck into my personal car while it was parked. He alerted me and our local manager immediately, we took photos, filled out the incident report, yada yada yada.
Everyone in our office was in agreement about what happened, that it was an honest accident and the company’s insurance should cover the cost of fixing my car.
Then the HR director got involved. First he tried to get me to assume liability since it was my personal vehicle that “caused” the accident. My car was parked in the parking lot and I was inside at my desk when it happened. When I pointed this out he backed down and said he would file the claim.
Next I got a call from a hostile insurance adjuster from my company’s insurance demanding that I provide my insurance information or they would be pursuing legal action. It turns out the HR director had filed the claim saying that I had run into the parked work truck with my car and tried to flee the scene but was witnessed by a co worker who reported me.
I informed the adjuster what had actually happened and emailed her the photos and signed incident reports and witness statements that we had filled out and she changed her tune pretty quickly and said she would get back to me.
The next day I get a “settlement agreement” from HR asking me to accept $1100 for repairs and to sign a form releasing the company from any further responsibility. I had only just dropped my car off at the body shop and hadn’t even gotten the estimate back yet. I declined and was told that I either had to accept their offer or be out of luck.
At this point I reached out to my own insurance and told them what had happened. As I went through the sequence of events I could hear my agent getting almost giddy about all the blatantly illegal tactics HR had tried on me. In the end they processed my claim and pursued my own company’s insurance through subrogation. He also mentioned that they would probably be seeking additional damages due to falsification of statements in the initial claim. Don’t f*ck with USAA.
In the end the damage ended up costing over $4,000 to fix but I didn’t have to pay a cent, not even my deductible. I don’t know if the HR director experienced and consequences, but there was a comment in our finance VP’s year end report about needing to “reduce extraneous costs due to reporting delays and inaccuracies in liability claims.””
Have you ever had any bad experiences with human resources at work?
If so, please tell us all about it in the comments.
Thanks in advance!
