If you had to say what the HR department in your company does, how would you describe it in a few words? For most people, HR is still about hiring and firing. When Crucial Learning asked working adults about their attitudes toward the human resources departments at their workplaces, only one in four said they trust their HR leaders and believe they care about the employees.
If you frequent online communities like the r/antiwork subreddit, a common sentiment is that HR is never your friend. The Crucial Learning survey responses echo that sentiment: only 9% of employees believe that HR professionals would advocate on their behalf, and 37% say that they would prioritize the well-being of the company.
Essentially, employees just don't trust HR. This might be a symptom of employees feeling a lack of motivation at work overall, as 17% of employees actively disengage. As Gallup reported in 2024, total employee engagement in the U.S. was only 31%. So, people are less and less inclined to believe in a good workplace culture and in those who cultivate it.
But here's the kicker – the HR people know this. Many HR professionals are under no illusion that they're the beloved in the company. When an HR systems provider, Cezanne, asked HR professionals about how they think they're perceived, many agreed that employees view them as "reactionary enforcers" or "the bureaucrats that sit at the right-hand side of the executives."
It's quite ironic, actually: employees usually go to HR when something goes wrong. That's why they associate their colleagues from HR with something negative. HR professionals believe they are disliked because some employees might not understand what they do, as 15% of the respondents in Cezanne's study articulated.
This distrust and lack of support from employees if one of the worst things about working in HR. The thing HR professionals hate most about their jobs is engaging in manual and disjointed processes. A lack of respect and distrust from managers and employees comes in second. Also, some HR specialists find it annoying to do repetitive, unrewarding tasks, and to deal with incompetent managers and a lack of modern HR technology.
Not all HR people are bad, and Bored Panda learned that when we interviewed digital creator and HR specialist Jamie Jackson last year. Jamie is not only an HR professional, but also the mastermind behind the Humorous Resources and Millennial Misery meme pages. She told us how working in HR is often a thankless job: "HR is a very lonely profession. Many people hate you just because of what you do. Many do not fully even understand what the HR role is in the company or I should say, they think they know."
However, good HR professionals care about the people they work with. As Jamie explained to us last year, some HR departments truly do think about the well-being of their employees. "It's not just about Zoom meetings and Slack channels; it's about fostering real human connections, no matter where your team is. We've shifted from focusing on 'how' people work to 'how they feel while they work,' and that's where the magic happens."
