> While Breslow didn’t get into the specifics of the exact differences, he wrote on LinkedIn last year that, “HR is the wrong energy, format, and approach. People ops empowers managers, streamlines decision making, and keeps the company moving at lightning speed.”
> “We need a group of people who are very oriented around getting things done, and there is just a culture of not getting things done and complaining a lot,” he added at the Fortune conference.
I like this phrase!
- Recruiting - Onboarding - Payroll / Insurance - Culture development - Team building - Legal compliance - Offboarding
We (~120 employees) have worked with some massive conglomerates and retail enterprises too, and HR is wholly necessary for those formats. Where the line blurs between white collar and blue/brown collar collar is where HR becomes mandatory. For a purely white collar company? Absolutely useless and not worth it.
The people who do the list of tasks you described are literally the HR team.
Regardless of what you call that group of people; that’s your HR team.
You still have to do the same job, just now with team who is less qualified to do that. But if you guys are all happy about that, you do you.
I checked their careers page and see they operate in Europe. I’ve found it very common for American execs to be surprised and exasperated by the fact that there are actual worker protections there and they can’t just fire people on a whim.
Given the volume of the whisper network, I'm surprised it hasn't come out already.
When we were acquired by a F500 public company with >10k employees, they had more HR staff than my entire company. I do wish the TFA had more details on the issues this CEO experienced but I don't think he's exaggerating. My biggest issue was that BigCo's HR dept was the source of a lot of disruption and distraction for my people. Several of my top engineers complained about all the mandatory training sessions, compliance paperwork and online "learning modules" with nanny robo-quizzes. It was a lot.
The thing is, before being acquired we were in full compliance with all state and federal regs, yet somehow there was ~5x more HR burden at BigCo. And managers got all that plus an extra side of mandatory "managing people" training sessions and robo-quizzes. Then managers had to enter detailed quarterly evals and everyone had to participate in a pointless "360" peer review process that couldn't help feeling vaguely dystopian. And BigCo was proud to be the sector leader in employee satisfaction and retention. Everything was first-class, top-quadrant and 'industry best practice" yet my startup had substantially better satisfaction & retention numbers with an "HR Team" of 0.5 people and a tiny fraction the cost, time and cognitive burden on everyone.
Weirdly, this can actually cause companies that didn't do the bad thing (bribes, etc) to voluntarily, proactively adopt widespread, comprehensive, mandatory, highly-audited training to tell every single employee NOT to do that bad thing. That way, if some rogue employee(s) do that thing, having the audited paper trail proving how very hard the company tried to NOT do that thing, can be invaluable in defending the company. In the event of prosecution it can lower the penalties but even better, it helps in diverting potential prosecution into a settlement / consent decree - as well as negotiating lower penalties and settlement amounts.
This was actually the source of one onerous training requirement at BigCo, which I learned about over drinks with our Chief Legal Officer. Apparently, one company (not us) having an extreme punitive penalty slapped on them generates scary WSJ headlines every compliance training vendor uses on Slide #1 in their sales pitches.
Been through this and it was all for compliance. Legal checkboxes. So the corp can say 'we did what was required'. For the quizzes I had to take (refreshed yearly) I was given the answer key. Whoever took the test first in a given year would jot down the keys. Since it was all for 'compliance' no one gave a hoot. All theater and HR only cared that you took it (their checkbox). In the tech world vendor compliance comes closest to this. I no longer ascribe blame - it is the bigger legal system and framework that drives this. Change has to come from without.
Is that stock for 'influencer marketing credits'??? Even more scammy than equity for OpenAI tokens...
While I'm not a big fan of HR - I suspect the current problems at Bolt are more fundamental in nature - apple/google pay/ banks getting their act together leaves little space for a dedicated app.