Traditional HR is Too Risky

If you're giving advice to a friend who has an HR issue, especially if that friend is from an underrepresented group, you've probably said, "Remember, HR isn't on your side — they're there to represent the company."

I know I've given that advice, and that weighed heavily on my mind as we figured out how to build a new way to support our team at Glitch, and how to move past traditional "Human Resources" framing in both how we staff our team and in how we create our policies. It simply seems absurd that most companies — and most workers — take for granted that HR will have an antagonistic relationship with workers. What's more, that common tension between employees and HR is a huge risk, and it's the kind of risk that isn't worth betting on when a company is trying to place its bets on being nimble and innovative.

That's why we're hiring a Director of People Experience at Glitch to help us move forward. But first, a little background.

Humans, Not Resources

Like a lot of cultural or social changes, we can learn a lot about the shift in tending to employees by simply looking at how language is evolving. Your coworkers never refer to themselves as "resources". And more fundamentally, they never like how it feels when their employer refers to them the same way that we might talk about how many pencils we have in a supply cabinet.

Those distinctions have become especially clear in my 3 years at Glitch. We're a tech startup, building a friendly community where everyone can code together to instantly build apps to solve whatever problem they're facing. But obviously, we're not going to be able to build a healthy and inclusive online community on today's internet unless we have a healthy and inclusive culture within our company to enable that. Similarly, we're not going to be credible in providing tools for people to solve their problems at work unless we're providing our own team with the tools they need to solve their problems at work. Put simply, we need to eliminate the gap between our stated principles and our actual work practices as much as possible.

A Guidebook to Follow

Since we made that key realization that our company had to embody the values we want to see in the world, rather than just stating some generic platitudes, we've been able to make a lot of progress in better supporting the people on our team. It's just a start, but some key milestones include:

• Sharing a clear, documented salary transparency framework for all compensation at our company
• Publishing a public, visible company handbook that outlines key policies and commitments in a way that's accountable to the outside world and accessible to candidates who are considering joining the company
• Innovating in new areas of leave like Climate Leave, offering paid time off for workers displaced by extreme weather events, as well as best-in-class leave policies for parental leave and other common needs
• Comprehensive health care that includes paying for 100% of employee insurance and deductibles and assistance in managing the paperwork and processes around any necessary billing
• Industry-leading work environment accommodations, including fully remote-centric work practices, documented processes for inclusive meetings, and explicit communications guidelines that result in things like fewer interruptive messages and nearly zero internal company emails (yes — really!)

So, we've made a pretty strong start at a healthy company culture that innovates in the right ways on the typical workplace stresses. And it's yielded incredible results — we've been able to hire amazing talent in a fiercely competitive technical market while substantially improving the diversity of our team across every measure.

But to be clear: we've got a lot more to do. Improving inclusion doesn't mean we've achieved a recruiting, retention, and advancement system that's truly equitable. Introducing salary transparency doesn't mean we've solved compensation in a way that's always fair, predictable and rewarding. Setting a goal of offering comprehensive healthcare is, well, damn near impossible in a time when public health policy is so fraught.

That means we're going to need help.

Looking Differently At Risk

Too often, companies consider it the role of HR to reduce risk by trying to control employees, by trying to sweep problems under the rug, to try to hide when a company makes mistakes, or to simply pressure everyone into cutting costs in the short term by denying many of the benefits and support systems that are needed for people to be happiest and most productive in the long term.

Put simply, at Glitch we have a different view of risk.

We think it's riskier to have an environment where workers don't trust their employer. We think it's risker to deny that there are problems to be solved than it is to acknowledge them. We think it's riskier to inflict policies onto workers in a top-down model than it is to collaborate together on creating and enacting productive policies.

We think most companies increase their risk by setting up HR in an antagonistic position against workers. So we're going to try something different. Our first steps have been successful, which is why we're moving forward with this strategy and bringing in a leader to help us do it.

Now that we've set up some of the basics of our people policies and laid down the groundwork for our future efforts, we need the right person to join our team and help move forward from simply fixing what's wrong to setting a new standard for what's right. We're hiring a Director to lead our People Experience efforts, and if you want to raise the bar on how companies treat people, you should consider the role.

And finally: We want to hear from other companies that are changing HR, because if we all work together, we can make it so that nobody ever has to tell their coworker or colleague, "they're not on your side".