It is a continued struggle with my logical mind to deal with Human Resources. It doesn’t matter what company it is, Human Resources is the quintessential inefficiency expert. That must be the only private sector area in which the government still reigns on high. The formalities requires to interact with Human Resources are mind-boggling.
You may be wondering what should spark such a flame, so I’ll tell you. I was only reminded of the HR pains when I became a full-time employee for CheckFree (not effective until Monday) recently. I’m immediately frustrated by the low-quality forms with limited space to write the copious information requested. I mean, really! Do they fax these forms a few time between offices before running it through the copier to hand you? In this day and age, I expect a paperless process for forms. I could, at the very least, receive first-generation prints of said forms so that I might be able to read the small print. I don’t just mean that the forms are obnoxious or that they’re hard to read so it irritates me. I see blood when I’m going through forms like this. I wrote my name, address, birthday, and social security number so many times within the same sitting. Can we just go ahead and make the assumption that the person who started filling out the bundle of forms is the same person who finishes them? Is it too much to ask that I only write this information once? I’ll bet that if they digitized the forms, I’d be filling them out in Acrobat – no ability to copy and paste, and no shared content. I’m annoyed by all redundant questions. If I answered the question once, I’m inclined to write a reference into any subsequent questions of similar nature (e.g. see Form A, section II, Question 4).
I understand, and even respect, that HR is just doing their job by fulfilling the requirements put to them by the government. We all have to do that in our lives and it’s completely expected. However, HR is the only area of the private sector in which the governement still holds rule over this process. All the rest of the business sector would simply fight back and nag enough to get them to let up. Not HR. We’re still following the same asinine rules put in place when our great-grandparents were working. There are so many formalities that make zero sense. You can’t even speak to them as though they’re human.
can’t write…falling asleep at the keyboard again. Zzzzzzzzzz…
Yep, HR departments have to deal with a lot of state and federal issues that generate tons of work for the HR staff as well as the new hire (And all HR software is by nature a pain in the ass by the way.) I am thinking about testing out Microsoft Infopath to automate some HR forms here. Have you worked with Infopath before? I do not any Infopath users and the MS demo has the “too good to be true” look to it. I played around with Acrobat forms a couple of years ago it seems but took the quick and dirty Access 97 app route instead. I chruned out a few apps for our HR dept here to help ease their burden – that works almost as good as giving them chocolate in terms of getting along with the HR folks.