HR Departments: A complete waste of money? A left-wing, socialist, nanny-state ideology that has no place in the private sector - or a powerful tool for management to use to control the workforce? Can firms function effectively without a HR department? [i]Should[/i] well-run firms function effectively without a HR department? What value does a HR department add? Or do they destroy value (salaries and running costs greater than benefit of HR department output)? Discuss.

Value of HR, well from an employee perspective advice with regards to benefits and pensions that's probably about it. Also useful starting point for grievances!Value of HR, from a manager's perspective they give guidance on performance appraisals for the unclear corporate babble, great place to go to facilitate redundancy meetings, and are of course the "independent mediators" ......... bull$£"I!Overall smaller firms tend to only need one representative and that's to deal with recruitment ad's and undertake screening interviews which is understandable. Larger corporate's have a very heavy HR presence which is often overkill and I won't go into detail but I have seen some fairly interesting behaviour from them when I was auditing a client.

Without giving anything away, can you give some additional information as to the nature of the "interesting" behaviour you observed?

Let's just say I came across a document produced by HR which listed current and prior staff and their potential for leaving the firm - yes it was a RAG status! In itself not so much of a discovery but the next column then listed potential reasons to have them out the door .....Now I'm all for succession planning but it was not only bizarre but in my mind unethical to start a shortlist of "see you laters" whilst trying to second guess them. Worst part of it was it wasn't even a consulting firm but an industry firm!

Classy

HR are there to look our for the interests of the firm you are working for.