Twenty years after Keith Hammonds’s famous Fast Company broadside, the complaint has barely aged. HR remains the corporate function with the greatest theoretical potential and the most consistent underdelivery. It sits at the center of talent, culture, performance, and risk—yet too often feels like a bureaucratic force that enforces rules, resists creativity, and protects the organization more than the people inside it.
The core problems have not vanished. Performance reviews still consume time and produce little insight. Processes multiply paperwork instead of removing friction. Standardization is treated as fairness even when exception-making would better serve high performers and business needs. Many HR teams still struggle to speak the language of the P&L, arriving late to strategy conversations or being handed compliance tasks after decisions are already made. Employees frequently view the function as the company’s lawyer rather than their advocate. Leaders, in turn, treat it as a necessary cost center rather than a driver of results.
The reputation gap is stubborn. Surveys continue to show employees hesitant to approach HR, citing fears about confidentiality or repercussions. Many executives still see the role as administrative rather than strategic. Meanwhile, the scope of the job has expanded—DEI, hybrid work policies, mental health, AI-related workforce shifts—without always expanding the authority or business fluency required to handle it well.
What Business Leaders Recommend
Across conversations with leaders who have lived both sides of the relationship, several practical fixes emerge repeatedly.
Make people strategy inseparable from business strategy.
HR must sit at the table when decisions are formed, not after they are announced. That requires CHROs and their teams to own clear metrics that connect talent outcomes to revenue, productivity, retention of critical skills, and execution speed. Speak in the language of the CEO and CFO: capability compounding, performance velocity, cost of attrition, time-to-productivity. When HR can show how a hiring process, leadership program, or culture intervention moves those numbers, the “seat at the table” stops being aspirational.
Hire and develop for business fluency first.
The strongest HR leaders often come from outside pure HR tracks—operations, finance, strategy, or general management. They understand how work actually gets done. Organizations that continue to staff HR primarily with process specialists or compliance experts reinforce the old stereotype. Leaders urge rotating high-potential operators through people roles and requiring HR professionals to develop genuine P&L and operational literacy.
Stop treating consistency as the highest virtue.
Uniform policies feel safe and equitable on paper. In practice, they often punish excellence and ignore context. The better approach is principled flexibility: clear guardrails on fairness and legality, with room for managers to reward distinctive contribution and adapt to real work. Leaders note that the best talent stays when organizations acknowledge difference rather than flatten it.
Reduce the administrative load so HR can do higher-value work.
Much of the resentment comes from friction—forms, approvals, slow responses, and processes that exist more for audit trails than for outcomes. Automation, clearer ownership, and ruthless pruning of low-value activities free capacity for the work that actually matters: diagnosing performance problems, building leadership capability, designing roles that fit how work is really done, and intervening early on toxic managers.
Clarify whose interests HR serves.
The dual mandate—protect the company and support employees—creates inevitable tension. The most credible HR functions are transparent about it. They earn trust by being consistent, confidential where promised, and willing to challenge bad management decisions rather than simply enforcing them. Leaders stress that HR cannot be effective as a pure enforcement arm; it loses legitimacy with the workforce and becomes less useful to the business.
Focus on real work, not just people processes.
A recurring critique is that HR often studies competencies, engagement scores, and individual attributes while remaining distant from the actual activity of the job. Understanding how tasks are performed, where friction occurs, and what intelligence employees apply in practice changes the quality of interventions. Observation and analysis of work itself, not just surveys and frameworks, produce better hiring, better role design, and better support.
The Path Forward
Hatred of HR is rarely pure animosity toward the people in the function. It is frustration with a structural mismatch: a critical capability treated as peripheral, measured by lagging or soft metrics, and frequently underpowered relative to the problems it is asked to solve.
The leaders who have moved past the old dynamic share a common pattern. They treat the people function as a strategic lever, staff it with people who understand the business, give it real decision rights, demand measurable impact, and insist it stays close to the work itself. When those conditions are met, the function stops being the department everyone loves to criticize and starts becoming one of the primary ways the organization actually improves.
The diagnosis from two decades ago still holds. The prescription is clearer now: less process theater, more business partnership, closer contact with real work, and the authority to act on what is learned. That is how the reputation finally changes.