In my management role, I have to juggle these responsibilities. I think a HR department should generally exist, even if management is really fair and only wants the best for the world, we promise (not bad faith, just humour).
It would not surprise me if most HR departments are set up as the result of lots of political pressures from various special interests within orgs, and that they are mostly useless at their “support” role.
With more confidence, I’d guess a smart person could think of a far better way to do support that looks nothing like an HR department.
I think MATS would be far better served by ignoring the HR frame, and just trying to rederive all the properties of what an org which does support well would look like. The above post looks like a good start, but it’d be a shame if you all just went with a human human resources department. Traditional companies do not in fact seem like they would be good at the thing you are talking about here.
Unless there’s some weird incentives I know nothing about, effective community support is the kind of thing you should expect to do better than all of civilization at, if you are willing to think about it from first principles for 10 minutes.
I’m not advocating a stock HR department with my comment. I used “HR” as a shorthand for “community health agent who is focused on support over evaluation.” This is why I didn’t refer to HR departments in my post. Corporate HR seems flawed in obvious ways, though I think it’s probably usually better than nothing, at least for tail risks.
In my management role, I have to juggle these responsibilities. I think a HR department should generally exist, even if management is really fair and only wants the best for the world, we promise (not bad faith, just humour).
It would not surprise me if most HR departments are set up as the result of lots of political pressures from various special interests within orgs, and that they are mostly useless at their “support” role.
With more confidence, I’d guess a smart person could think of a far better way to do support that looks nothing like an HR department.
I think MATS would be far better served by ignoring the HR frame, and just trying to rederive all the properties of what an org which does support well would look like. The above post looks like a good start, but it’d be a shame if you all just went with a human human resources department. Traditional companies do not in fact seem like they would be good at the thing you are talking about here.
Unless there’s some weird incentives I know nothing about, effective community support is the kind of thing you should expect to do better than all of civilization at, if you are willing to think about it from first principles for 10 minutes.
I’m not advocating a stock HR department with my comment. I used “HR” as a shorthand for “community health agent who is focused on support over evaluation.” This is why I didn’t refer to HR departments in my post. Corporate HR seems flawed in obvious ways, though I think it’s probably usually better than nothing, at least for tail risks.