Because HR lies and say the opposite in the majority of companies. "Come to us with any problems, it's safe and anonymous, we are here to help you".
From personal experience I have reported gross treats by senior leadership to an HR rep who was shocked about hearing their HR employee evals being suppressed by only allowing score between 8-10 in a 1-10 score.
The HR rep confirmed it personally that it was happening and a few months later appeared on the other side of the desk with the leadership as they fired me for budget reasons.
This is corporate default. Don't stick your head too much, don't make too much noise, vent off someplace else ie via some cool sports. Doesn't matter how righteous, how correct and good for the company, it will very easily back fire you. Its kafquesque catch-22 all over the place, be a good boy and accept the paycheck with crap it comes along. Or move, but its not always greener on the next site.
Just to add a followup to my story.
If you can't find it, find people and create it!
What I did was to build my own grass field(started company with my team) and it has been fucking great.
We made a better product and made enough of a name of ourselves, that while I lost the battle that time with the former leadership, I fought long enough to see them all lose their jobs.
As a CEO myself now, I choose not to have an HR rep and try to do better for my people.
Also this is in EU so as a warning to others,like me then, who thought HR in the US could do this but not here.
Even if the people working in HR genuinely want to do the right thing for the employees, and company policies support them doing that, interactions with HR are inherently adversarial.
The people within HR may be friendly, they've probably got friends :). It can be a very people-oriented role. But they are incapable of being your friend when you're interacting with them in their role as representative for the company.
I greatly appreciate my employer's HR folk, they're really lovely, very good at their jobs, and want to help. But if I have to have a formal meeting with them, I would definitely bring along my union rep.
Entirely this. When you are interacting with HR, that person on the other side is trying to protect the company from whatever claims you are about to make.
I have had multiple friends sexually harassed or had a coworker talk about sexual exploitation in front of them and when they went to HR, they were fired and the offending person not held responsible. This is very common. Never tell HR anything or go to them for help ever.
While this isn't necessarily true at the individual level, HR as an institution is this way. The first HR departments were developed to defuse feminist agitation against sexist workplace environments at Sears.
Work as a Manager in a large tech org and you will see very quickly how the company operates (HR / HRBP). The higher you go up the quicker you see that employees aren't looked at as people, but as numbers or dollars.
My first manager job I was very naive, I went to HR to get help with directs. It was a bad idea, it put me and my direct at risk... never again.
The sad truth is that the managers who actually care and want to solve problems for people (personal and technical) usually get the wrong end of the HR stick first.
I am a manager. I have those conversations regularly (its my job). I have had tough conversations about if we should burn out an entire team or not, likely losing them, so i get it.
My question was not about if it is true or not, but why people like saying it so much.
Nobody else bit, so I think it's a shared bitterness that unifies a naive group who challenged someone with real power through HR and lost.
Through multitudes of anecdotes, this group often apparently holds that conflict could be solved by going around someone, their supervisor, say, and invoking HR as if they had authority over the situation and would obviously correct the injustice. Having misplayed their hand, they end up feeling victimized through organizational discipline or firing and abandoned by the would-be savior HR. With the moral injury now upon them, they tell everyone this warning as if it were a great lie to be exposed.
Our bosses tend to be the primary relationship to manage in organizations. Just the way power works, and it mostly poses a problem when one party doesn't realize it and thinks relationships are optional.
people say it often because people don't learn the lesson. The messaging is human centric and there to make it sound like they are there for you. They aren't.