The Problem With HR
In April 2018, I spent three days in Austin, Texas, in the company of more than 2,500 people, most of them women, who are deeply concerned about the problem of workplace sexual harassment. The venue was the city’s convention center, and when a man named Derek Irvine took the vast stage and said that there had been “an uprising in the world of those who refuse to be silent,” the crowd roared its support. He introduced a panel of speakers who have been intimately involved with the #MeToo movement: Tarana Burke, the creator of the original campaign and hashtag; Ronan Farrow, who broke the Harvey Weinstein story in The New Yorker; and Ashley Judd, one of the actors who says she was harassed by Weinstein. Adam Grant, the author of many highly regarded books on management theory and a professor at the Wharton School, interviewed them, and their remarks were often interrupted by loud, admiring applause.
The session ended to a standing ovation, which was not surprising, given the moral authority of the speakers. What was surprising, however, was the makeup of the audience: This was a gathering not of activists, but of professionals who work in human resources. The event was a convention called Workhuman, put on by a software company.
For 30 years, ever since Anita Hill testified at Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, HR has been almost universally accepted as the mechanism by which employers attempt to prevent, police, and investigate sexual harassment. Even the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission directs Americans to their HR offices if they experience harassment. That the #MeToo movement kept turning up so many shocking stories at so many respected places of employment seemed to me to reflect a massive failure of human resources to do the job we have expected it to perform. Even Harvey Weinstein’s company, after all, had an HR department.
I went to Texas to get a sense of how the people who work in the field were feeling about this exposure of their profession’s shortcomings. Each morning at the convention, I fished around in my suitcase for something that looked businessy and then clip-clopped across the street to the convention center,
