SHRM’s HR Troubles

MESSY IS JUST THE BEGINNING

You don’t want your racing team to have race car troubles. You don’t want your lawyer to have legal problems. And you definitely don’t want your HR association to have HR issues.  

Last week, a judge refused to dismiss a case against SHRM for racial discrimination. The case appears on track for a jury trial, which SHRM has said it will vigorously defend. 

Ashley Herd recently broke down the lessons from the SHRM lawsuit on YouTube in a way that really hits home for any work leader. Imagine being a part of an organization dedicated to HR excellence, only to find yourself at the center of a "messy employment discrimination case."

What happened? Here’s what the lawsuit contends:

• The employee received positive feedback on her work, which made her termination almost immediately after for "performance issues" especially confusing. 
• The employee's boss required her to CC every email, which only increased her frustration and distrust. 
• When the employee raised concerns about racial discrimination and unfair treatment compared to her white colleagues, her complaints were not properly escalated. Instead, she was placed in an uncomfortable confrontation meeting with the very person she was complaining about. 
• The HR investigation lacked neutrality and experience. The person investigating the discrimination claim had never investigated a racial discrimination claim before and was the same individual drafting the termination paperwork, which compromised the process.
• Termination paperwork was drafted on the same day the employee made a retaliation complaint, which created at least the perception of retaliation. Such timing, even if coincidental, can be damaging. 

It's no wonder the judge saw this as a messy situation. Of course, SHRM has made other missteps in treating its employees well. 

A year and a half ago, CEO Johnny C. Taylor Jr. bragged to the Wall Street Journal about outsourcing an employee’s job to India when she asked to move from Virginia (where SHRM is headquartered) to North Carolina. If you don’t have Google Maps handy, North Carolina is an adjoining state in the same time zone. The 40% labor cost Taylor Jr. bragged about will get eaten up in the onboarding, training, and communication challenges of working with an outsourced provider on the other side of the globe. 

Ironically, many of SHRM’s own resources would’ve helped him make a more objective, less emotional decision that didn’t come off as just throwing some red meat to remote work haters. 

SHRM, the self-proclaimed “voice of all things work, workers, and the workplace,” doesn’t represent me, many of the folks I know in HR, or the type of workplace that I would ever want to work in. As I said last time I wrote about SHRM, though, it obviously represents some people’s view of what HR should be. Their membership doesn’t seem to be struggling to the level where they need to change course. 

Maybe this time will be different. I’m not holding my breath, though. Work leaders who disagree with SHRM have moved on. And honestly, that’s fine too. 

"YOU CAN'T SPEND A LOT OF TIME HIRING GROWN-UPS AND THEN TREAT THEM LIKE CHILDREN"

That quote from Spotify CHRO Katarina Berg in an interview with Raconteur really captures the essence of the split between remote work haves and have-nots.  

What I appreciate about the interview is that Berg doesn’t shy away from the challenges of remote and distributed teams. She said we all struggle with collaboration in a virtual environment. But she also talks about the impact on the business, including a look at what Spotify’s round of layoffs did to the organization.  

All in all, a good read. 

QUICK HITS FROM AROUND THE WEB

• Reimagining Work as a Product via Harvard Business Review
• Here’s How AI Can, and Can’t, Disrupt the Hiring Process via Fast Company
• Dreamforce Darling to Security Nightmare: Disney Abandons Slack via Reworked
• What 60 Million Conversations Can Teach Us About the Candidate Experience via ERE
• How 7-Eleven Is Combating Its Biggest Hiring Challenge via C-Store Dive
• Managers Are ‘Glossing’ Over Workplace Issues And Pushing Toxic Positivity, According To Report via Forbes
• The Argument for Just Not Talking About Politics in the Workplace via Marketplace

DO WOMEN GET MORE LENIENT FEEDBACK?

Imagine my joy when I saw an interview with a professor from my alma mater, Washington State University’s Carson College of Business, about performance reviews on TLNT. 

Associate professor of management and associate dean for equity and inclusion Leah D. Sheppard, PhD (referred to as Leah Williams in the TLNT article) recently published research showing that leaders might be giving women inflated feedback in performance reviews: 

In a clear case of HR professionals being careful for what they wish for, she asserts that feedback providers feel so much social pressure to avoid showing bias, that they tend to “over-correct” when delivering performance feedback to women – which comes with its own set of problems.

She suggests that rather than correcting bias, this behavior has the potential to exacerbate workplace gender inequities if women are routinely not receiving the feedback they need that identifies areas for improvement. 

Lenient feedback, as Sheppard points out, isn’t good. We all need honest, unbiased feedback to become better workers and better people. Performance inflation is harmful, especially to women who do break through to the top levels in organizations. 

That's it for this week!