That’s a very narrow view.
Improving things for other people is something that many of us are motivated by.
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Again. It saddens my that this is such a common experience.
It’s not mine. Sure. When push comes to shove, corporations will sell your mother to make a buck. But this isnt a zero sum game, making things better for employees frequently creates value for shareholders.
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You must not be in USA #1?
What’s the current thinking on cover letters? Complete waste of time? Let’s say hypothetically this is for a position that you once held at a company you left a few years ago. Even less necessary?
Just email the person you have the best relationship with and attach your resume?
Lol Cover letters
Yeah I would do that normally. I have (possibly dumb, overthought) reasons for submitting it to the website to see what happens. CL doesn’t seem to make sense here - they’ll see my name and decide one way or another to engage and a CL won’t change that.
Cover letters to me go in the same bucket as thank you notes. They are pointless but necessary (sure in some situations the person reviewing may ignore them, but you have no way to know that in advance). They also will never get you the job, but could cost you the job - so best to go with something fairly generic.
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Seems like something that would be valuable to most organizations. Almost posted in memes thread.
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I have my doubts about this, although I’m willing to hear the evidence. “Jump the gun,” for example, comes from track races, where they used to fire a pistol to start the race. A runner who started too early jumped the gun. So the saying itself isn’t about violence.
I agree, Riverman is really overly jaded here.
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I think in practice it’s pretty hard to unpack the malicious intent of corporate overlords from the good intentions of middle managing types. Plenty of the kinds of HR people that most of us run into in the wild (usually “HR Business Partners”) are not actively and consciously trying to oppress the workforce on behalf of the shareholders and C suite. The direction from senior leaders is a more typical sounding business problem - deliver this result (high and trending upward “engagement scores” and low turnover rates) and do it within this budget. Direct, explicit oppression of the workforce won’t solve the business problem because if you just relentlessly hammer the workforce with more work, less pay, stricter rules, etc., then you don’t get high and increasing engagement scores and you get high turnover.
The conflict between shareholders/management and the workforce are more subtle than that in large organizations. Everyone has to adopt the posture that there is a real solution here - some magic center of a Venn diagram where the right amount of snacks in the break room and training supervisors about empathy will deliver a workforce that produces profits but also is adequately satisfied with their surroundings and get along with their colleagues well enough that they feel “satisfied” about work.
How does one characterize this? Is it a really new, kinder, gentler corporate work environment? Is it all completely phony surface level kabuki theatre that just masks the objectively obvious bad deal that workers have compared to management and shareholders? You can reasonably assert that either of these statements are true, you could reasonably assert that they are both true. Are these workers really “happy at work”? Does it count as happiness if you’re basically duped into satisfaction? These are pretty darned philosophical matters that don’t yield easy answers.
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Right I think kindness and empathy are still good things even if they are means to an end and not completely altruistically motivated. I don’t see it as being duped.
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I think this gets at the real problem. I’m more optimistic than you about the possibility of creating truly healthy workplaces, but HR has zero ability to contribute to improvements on this front. Positive change can only be driven by leadership.
Sure, but a vector of positive change is the HR department. The leaders establish tone from the top, but the HR team are execution partners on making that tone/culture come to life through policies and stuff. They’re a participant even if they’re not a driver.
You’re definitely correct that it’s a good thing even if it has ulterior motives. Some people are duped by it, it’s not an either/or situation, it’s a yes/and situation. I have definitely seen people naively walk face first into bad outcomes because they took leadership’s “niceness” at face value. It doesn’t mean that we don’t want leaders to be nice, but I think it is good to have some awareness in your tool kit when it comes to this stuff. It’s a sometimes fine line between embracing empathy and kindness and getting taken advantage of.
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Huh… We never noticed.
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Interesting example of a lot of these themes.
My company just rolled out a pretty amazing parental leave policy. This was led by HR.
Basically 5 months of paid parental leave for either parent, irrespective of what the other parent is doing.
Plus a bunch of other cool stuff that’s pretty specific to how Australian pensions work.
On the one hand. This is clearly a big positive. It’s great for women, and was market leading enough that it made the news and will challenge other big corporations to follow.
On the other. Pay rises are way below inflation, and this is clearly a way to improve retention and engagement of staff at the lowest cost.
Is this a good thing? I think definitely yes and definitely no. It’s that tension that we are talking about here.
If people in an organization feel threatened by the language, even if their feelings are not reasonable, it seems an easy fix to just not use it.