HR is not there to be your friend. It’s there to protect the company
November 9, 2017

When Susan Fowler found herself on the receiving end of inappropriate chats from her male manager, she documented the exchange and reported him to the company’s human resource department. Fowler, who was at the time an engineer at Uber, thought they would handle the situation. Instead, she was told to either find another team or remain in her current position and risk getting a negative performance review from that manager later on.


This was the first in a series of disappointing interactions that Fowler had with the company’s human resource department. After she left the company, Fowler wrote a widely shared blog about her experience, which triggered an internal investigation and eventually led to the firing of more than 20 employees. It also raised important questions about the way that human resources departments deal with issues like sexual harassment and discrimination. What role should HR play at a company? And why did Uber’s HR department do nothing to protect Fowler?


Turns out, the role of HR was never to protect employees. Their number one priority was always to protect the company. It just so happens that sometimes the two align.


From keeping unions out to being compliance cop

Human resources departments started in the early 1900s when companies were trying to figure out how to reduce turnover and maximize performance through new compensation systems. The HR staff would conduct exit interviews and collect grievances about issues that caused companies to lose employees or led to unionization efforts.


"By the 1930s human resources started to become and be seen as advocates for employees and the reason for that, frankly, was because companies were trying to keep unions out,” explained Peter Cappelli, professor of management at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Center for Human Resources. “The idea of being able to tell people at the top of the company: ‘Hey, the workers are unhappy about this’ really mattered because they cared whether workers were unhappy because they thought they might unionize otherwise. In that period, HR developed this kind of reputation as being the workers' advocate and that's probably true up to 1970.”


Then in the 1980s, union membership began to drop off and companies no longer wanted to hear about what people wanted. They had other things to worry about — like making sure that they were complying with all of the new worker protection laws that were being passed.


"By that period, HR's mandate kind of shifted to protecting the company,” said Cappelli. The main task for HR was — how do we stay out of trouble with the government? “In those periods, we started to see HR becoming much more of the compliance cop and trying to make people behave on issues of sexual harassment, discrimination, those sort of things," he explained.


And while the main mandate was to protect the company, sometimes that also meant protecting employees — like if they were being discriminated against by their line manager or harassed. In this case, HR would want to interfere to protect the employee from their manager in order to prevent a potential lawsuit.


This is also why a lot of the sexual harassment claims in the workplace end up being settled, instead of going to court. Typically, such settlements come with a non-disclosure agreement, which ends up protecting the company’s reputation.


Should you trust HR?

While employees should not think of HR as an employee advocate, there should be an expectation that HR would take employee complaints seriously, according to Cappelli.


“When someone is breaking the law, the expectation should be that they are not going to blow you off,” he said. "They are the company's representative. They are protecting the company. In some cases that means taking what you say really seriously."


However, not everyone trusts HR to handle these types of situations — especially not if they have had an experience similar to Fowler’s.


“I desperately wanted to not have to interact with HR ever again,” Fowler wrote in her blog.


While 61 percent of employees believe that trust between employees and management is important, just 33 percent are actually satisfied with their relationship, according to the 2017 survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management.


Uber does not deny that its HR department failed in its handling of Fowler’s complaints.


“As I dug into several issues in Susan's blog, it was very clear to me that she wasn't well-served by the HR team,” Liane Hornsey, who joined Uber as chief human resources officer just weeks before Fowler’s blog was published, told the Associated Press.


Afterwards, Uber held 200 listening sessions with its employees. Yet most complaints that echoed Fowler’s did not come up during those. Instead, they were submitted over the anonymous “integrity” hotline set-up by the company.


Investors want robust HR ... to protect their investment

Hornsey told the AP that the HR team at Uber was “inadequate numerically” and that junior employees were “given too much to do without enough guidance.”


“What happens is in a startup that is super successful, that is absolutely the business end just growing, growing. Often the processes and the support functions get left behind,” she said.


Uber is an example of how not to do things when it comes to HR, said Raffaella Sadun, a professor at Harvard Business School who focuses on strategy, management and organizational change. According to her, many founders think they can do everything themselves and have a tendency not to delegate even as the company grows.


"Making that shift is not easy because it goes against the primal instinct of the founders, in majority of the cases," explained Sadun.


That might be why Uber did not hire its first official head of HR until 2014. By then, the company already had around 500 employees, according to Recode. Uber employees who spoke with Recode said that Travis Kalanick, the founder and then-CEO, believe HR’s job was “largely to recruit talent and also efficiently let go of personnel when needed.”


Kalanick is not the only one to think like this.


While investors are concerned about compliance with anti-discrimination and equal employment opportunity regulations, their main concern is whether the company they are investing in has the right talent to be competitive, said Bill Filip, who advises investors as a co-founder and managing director of Delancey Street Partners.


“If you do not have a strategic and thoughtful HR capability I think you're at much bigger risk of literally being uncompetitive or irrelevant in your market space,” he said. “I honestly think that the companies are winning today are winning because they understand that they have to have the best talent. I know that sounds really trite but it is absolutely true and there's so many great market examples of that.”


Investors should insist on robust HR departments at startups because many modern entrepreneurs have never worked for big companies and as a result “never learned this stuff,” said Cappelli.


"It's fair to say that the kind of people that start companies, typically are people who don't know much about management,” Cappelli said. "Then you start seeing companies like Uber where they think it's perfectly normal to fondle people in the office and do shots as part of company meetings," he added.


https://www.marketplace.org/2017/10/30/business/human-resources-protect-employee-employer

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The Year-End Employer Check-In: 7 Areas Worth Reviewing Before 2027

November 9, 2026
By November, most businesses are already looking toward year-end. Payroll teams are preparing for final reporting, employees are thinking about benefits and holidays, managers are planning for the coming year, and leadership is often trying to finish 2026 while simultaneously preparing for 2027. It's also a useful time to look beyond individual deadlines and ask a broader question: Has anything changed in the business this year that our current processes, policies or partners have not caught up with yet? Changes rarely happen all at once. A company adds employees, someone takes on a new responsibility, a manual workaround becomes part of the normal process, or a system that worked well at 30 employees starts feeling different at 60. By year-end, those small changes can add up. Before another year begins, here are seven areas worth reviewing. 1. Is Your Employee and Payroll Information Still Accurate? Year-end is an obvious time to review payroll information, but the most useful check is often broader than verifying a final payroll. Take a look at whether employee names, addresses, tax information, compensation changes, employment statuses and other important records are current. Employers should also make sure changes that occurred during the year actually made their way into every place they needed to go. This matters because one outdated piece of information can affect more than payroll. The same employee data may also support benefits, retirement plans, reporting and other administrative processes. The IRS continues to emphasize accurate withholding, reporting, timely employment-tax filings and maintaining appropriate payroll records as core employer responsibilities. The goal is not simply to “finish payroll.” It is to start the next year with cleaner information. 2. What Manual Work Has Quietly Become Normal? Some of the best process improvements begin with a very simple question: What does our team have to do manually every week or every pay period that feels like it should be easier? Maybe someone enters the same employee information into multiple systems. Perhaps HR maintains a spreadsheet because the information they need is difficult to report elsewhere. Maybe managers still email changes to payroll, or one employee has become the unofficial bridge between several vendors. These workarounds are easy to accept because they usually develop gradually. They may only take five minutes at a time, but multiplied across employees, payrolls and an entire year, they can create a surprising amount of administrative work. Year-end is a good time to write those processes down rather than automatically carrying them into another year. 3. Did Your Workforce Change Enough to Revisit HR Practices? Think about how your workforce looks today compared with January. Did you hire significantly? Add managers? Expand into another state? Introduce remote or hybrid positions? Create new job responsibilities? Experience more employee-relations issues than usual? Business growth can outpace HR practices surprisingly quickly. That does not necessarily mean every employer needs to rewrite every policy annually. It does mean policies, employee handbooks, manager practices, job descriptions and internal procedures should still reflect how the organization actually operates. A policy that technically exists but no longer matches day-to-day reality can create just as much confusion as not having a policy at all. 4. What Did Employees Actually Experience With Their Benefits? Benefits should not only be reviewed at renewal. Once enrollment activity begins to settle, employers can learn a lot by considering what employees and administrators experienced throughout the year. Were employees confused about where to find information? Did HR spend significant time answering the same questions? Were enrollment changes difficult to coordinate with payroll? Did employees understand the benefits being offered? Are there benefits available that employees rarely use because they do not understand them? It is also worth looking beyond medical coverage. Retirement, ancillary benefits, financial wellness and other offerings all contribute to the overall employee experience. You don't necessarily need to make immediate changes, but it's important to capture what worked and what did not while the experience is still recent enough to remember. 5. Has the Business Changed in Ways That Affect Risk? Businesses rarely look exactly the same at the end of a year as they did at the beginning. New locations, vehicles, equipment, employees, job responsibilities, revenue growth, work performed in new states or changes to operations can all affect the risks a business faces. Those changes are worth discussing with the appropriate insurance and risk professionals rather than assuming the existing structure automatically kept pace. Cybersecurity also belongs in this conversation. Employers increasingly hold sensitive employee, payroll, benefits and financial information across multiple platforms. Reviewing who has access, removing outdated accounts, using multifactor authentication where available and confirming how sensitive requests are verified are practical year-end housekeeping steps. Federal guidance for employee benefit plans also continues to emphasize formal cybersecurity practices, risk assessment and strong access controls around sensitive plan information. 6. Do You Know Who Owns Each Important Process? Many operational problems aren't technology problems, they're ownership problems. When something changes with an employee, who is responsible for updating it? If an issue touches payroll and benefits, who coordinates the two? If a manager has an HR question, where do they go? If something looks wrong before payroll runs, who has authority to correct it? The answers may seem obvious until something urgent happens. For each important administrative process, employers should be able to identify three things: Who owns it internally? Who supports it externally? What happens when something goes wrong? Clear ownership can eliminate a surprising amount of back-and-forth. 7. Are Your Business Partners Making Work Easier? Year-end is also a useful time to evaluate the relationships supporting the business. This doesn't have to mean shopping every service every year. Instead, consider the experience you are actually having. When you have a question, can you reach someone who understands your business? Are problems resolved or repeatedly patched? Do your different providers work well together, or does your team coordinate between them? Are you using the technology and services you are paying for? Has your organization changed enough that your current setup deserves another look? A business partner can't eliminate every challenge, but the relationship should make it easier to navigate them. If your internal team has become responsible for connecting all of your systems, providers and processes themselves, that is useful information to carry into your planning for next year. You Don't Need to Fix Everything Before December 31 A year-end review doesn't need to become another enormous year-end project; the purpose is just to identify what deserves attention. Some items may need action before the final payroll, while others may become priorities for January, your next renewal, a midyear review or the next time you evaluate a provider. Write them down and assign an owner. Decide what actually needs to happen now and what can be intentionally planned for later. The businesses that enter a new year in the strongest position are not necessarily the ones that changed the most. They're often the ones that took the time to understand what was working, what was creating unnecessary friction and what should not simply be carried forward because “that is how we have always done it.” Before 2027 begins, a thoughtful review of your people, processes, systems and partnerships can give you a much clearer starting point for the year ahead. If your year-end review uncovers areas that could be working better, Simco can help you take a closer look.

New System, Same Problems? Why a Payroll Transition Should Start With an Assessment

October 14, 2026
Changing payroll or HCM providers can be a major decision for any employer, especially for small and mid-sized businesses where payroll touches nearly every employee, every pay period, and many of the systems that keep the business running. That is why a successful transition should involve more than simply moving data from one platform into another. A new system can offer better technology, stronger reporting, improved employee self-service, and more efficient workflows. But those benefits are not automatic. If an employer simply recreates the same workarounds, outdated data, and disconnected processes in a new platform, the result may look different without actually working much better. A payroll transition should be an opportunity to step back, evaluate how the business operates today, and intentionally build a better environment for the future. Start With How the Business Actually Works Before configuring a new payroll or HCM system, it is important to understand what is happening in the current environment. That means looking beyond payroll processing and examining how information moves through the organization from onboarding and timekeeping to benefits, HR administration, reporting, and eventually separation. For many growing businesses, processes develop gradually. Spreadsheets, manual approvals, and duplicate data entry may have been created to solve individual problems over time. Together, those workarounds can create unnecessary administrative work and increase the risk of errors. Before moving into a new system, employers should identify where information is being entered more than once, what still depends on manual follow-up, where managers or employees routinely get stuck, and which reports are difficult to produce. That creates a much stronger foundation than simply asking how to make the new system look like the old one. Separate What Works From What Has Simply Become Familiar One of the easiest mistakes to make during implementation is assuming that every existing process should be preserved. Familiarity does not always mean efficiency. A payroll workflow, approval structure, or reporting process may exist simply because that is how the previous system was configured. A useful question to ask is: If we were designing this process today, would we still do it this way? Some processes will absolutely make sense to keep. Others may be creating unnecessary effort because of old system limitations. The goal should not be to change everything. It should be to preserve what works while improving the areas that create friction, confusion, or risk. Clean Up the Data Before It Becomes New-System Data Payroll and HCM systems contain a significant amount of information, including employee data, tax setup, earnings and deductions, departments, locations, job information, permissions, benefits, and timekeeping rules. Over time, some of that information may become outdated, duplicated, or structured in a way that no longer reflects the business. Moving that information into a new system without reviewing it first can preserve those same issues. A thoughtful implementation should include time to validate employee records, review earning and deduction codes, confirm tax setup, evaluate organizational structures, and identify information that should be cleaned up before migration. The objective is not simply to move data successfully. It is to start the new environment with information that is as accurate, organized, and useful as possible. Payroll Should Not Be Evaluated in Isolation Payroll may be the system that processes the paycheck, but the information it relies on comes from many different parts of the business. Hiring, timekeeping, HR, benefits, retirement contributions, employee status changes, and other workforce processes all intersect with payroll. When those areas are managed independently by different vendors or disconnected systems, employers are often left responsible for making everything work together. That can create duplicate entry, manual reconciliation, inconsistent data, and more opportunities for something to fall through the cracks. A better implementation looks at the entire administrative environment, not just the payroll engine. Why the ASO Model Matters This is where an Administrative Services Organization, or ASO, model can create meaningful value for small and mid-sized employers. Traditionally, businesses often purchase payroll, HR, benefits, retirement, and commercial insurance from separate providers. Each provider may do its individual job well, but the employer is still left managing the gaps between them. Those gaps matter because these functions are highly interdependent. A new hire can affect payroll, benefits eligibility, workers’ compensation exposure, retirement participation, and HR compliance. A termination can trigger payroll changes, benefits administration, HR documentation, and additional follow-up. An ASO approach is designed to bring those functions into a more coordinated model. Instead of asking the employer to act as the connector between multiple vendors, the goal is to create greater alignment across the services that support the workforce. At Simco, that means looking at HCM technology, HR advisory, employee benefits, commercial insurance, and retirement advisory as part of one broader business environment. The value is not simply access to more services. It is creating a more connected administrative structure with fewer handoffs, clearer ownership, and better visibility. Build Around the Employee Lifecycle, Not Just the Payroll Run A well-designed HCM environment should support more than the moment payroll is processed. It should help manage the full employee lifecycle, from onboarding and timekeeping through compensation, benefits, HR administration, retirement, and offboarding. Looking at implementation through that lens often reveals opportunities that would otherwise be missed. Onboarding may still be manual. Managers may submit changes through email. Benefit information may need to be entered in multiple places. Employee data may not flow consistently between systems. These may not seem like payroll problems, but they directly affect how efficiently payroll and HR administration operate. That is why implementation conversations should include more than pay frequency and tax setup. They should also examine how employees enter the organization, how managers interact with the system, how changes are communicated, and where administrative work tends to pile up. Leave Enough Time to Build It Correctly A thoughtful assessment takes time, which is why employers should avoid waiting until the last minute to begin a payroll or HCM transition. There is a significant difference between getting a system live and building a system well. A well-planned implementation creates room to evaluate processes, validate data, configure the system, test workflows, train users, and correct issues before employees depend on it. For employers considering a January transition, beginning the conversation in the fall can provide valuable runway and allow for more deliberate decisions before year-end pressures increase. Why Simco Starts With the Blueprint At Simco, we believe implementation should begin with understanding the business, not simply collecting files. Our Simco Blueprint assessment is designed to look at how an employer is operating today before the new environment is built. We review current processes, identify what is working, uncover areas of friction, and look for opportunities to improve how the organization uses its payroll and HCM technology. That assessment also considers how payroll interacts with HR, benefits, commercial insurance, and retirement. The objective is to make sure the system supports the business as a whole rather than solving one problem while creating another. A successful transition should leave an employer with more than a new provider. It should create a stronger foundation for how the business manages its people and administrative responsibilities. A New System Should Be an Opportunity to Work Better Changing payroll or HCM providers is a significant project, but it can also be an opportunity to improve processes that may have been creating frustration for years. The key is resisting the temptation to simply recreate the old environment. Before moving data, employers should understand their current processes. Before configuring workflows, they should decide whether those workflows still make sense. Before going live, they should make sure the different pieces of their administrative environment are working together effectively. A new system should not just be a different place to do the same work. It should help make the work easier. If your organization is considering a payroll or HCM change, Simco can help you evaluate your current environment, identify opportunities for improvement, and understand what a thoughtful transition could look like. Ready to take a closer look at your current setup? Talk with the Simco team .

Thinking About a January Payroll Switch? 4 Things Employers Should Know Now

October 8, 2026
January is one of the most natural times for an employer to move to a new payroll or HCM provider. A new calendar year creates a clean transition point for payroll records, reporting, employee communication and internal processes. But a January go-live does not mean the work should begin in January. For employers considering a change, the most important part of the transition often happens months earlier. A successful implementation requires time to understand the current environment, make decisions about what should change, validate employee and payroll data, configure the new system, test it and prepare everyone who will use it. If a January payroll change is on your radar, here are four things worth knowing now. 1. A January switch should usually start well before January One of the biggest misconceptions about changing payroll providers is that the transition begins when the new system goes live. In reality, that is the end of the implementation process. Before the first payroll can run, there are a number of decisions and setup items that may need attention, including employee records, earnings and deductions, tax information, pay schedules, timekeeping rules, direct deposit information, security permissions, reporting requirements, integrations and other company-specific workflows. The complexity will vary from employer to employer, which is why there is no single implementation timeline that fits every organization. But if your goal is to be live at the beginning of the year, October and early November are a much better time to begin the conversation than December. Starting earlier gives both the employer and the new provider room to work carefully instead of trying to force a major system change through the busiest part of year-end. 2. Do not automatically recreate everything you have today Changing payroll providers is an opportunity to fix problems, not transfer them. It can be tempting to approach implementation by simply copying the setup in the current system into the new one. That may seem like the fastest path, but it can also carry old inefficiencies, outdated processes and bad data directly into the new platform. Before building anything, employers should take a closer look at questions such as: Which payroll processes create the most manual work? Are employees or managers struggling with any part of the system? Are there recurring corrections or data issues? Are you maintaining information in spreadsheets because the current system does not handle it well? Are timekeeping, HR, benefits and payroll working together effectively? Are there reports your team needs but struggles to produce? Have your workforce, policies or business processes changed since the system was originally implemented? A provider change should create a better operating environment, not simply give the same process a new login screen. This assessment stage is one of the reasons beginning early matters. 3. Data accuracy becomes especially important at year-end A payroll transition involves more than moving names and pay rates. Employee information, year-to-date wages, taxes, deductions and other payroll records may all play a role in making sure the old year closes correctly and the new year begins accurately. Year-end also brings important employer reporting responsibilities. Employers remain responsible for ensuring payroll tax filings and Forms W-2 are accurate and filed on time even when they use a third-party payroll provider ( IRS ). That makes data review an important part of any year-end implementation. Employers should expect to spend time verifying items such as: Employee names, addresses and Social Security numbers Federal, state and local tax setup Year-to-date payroll totals Earnings and deduction codes Benefit deductions Retirement contributions Garnishments and other recurring deductions Direct deposit information Company tax information and filing setup There may also be special year-end items such as bonuses, fringe benefits or other adjustments that need to be reflected correctly. The goal is not simply to import data. It is to make sure the information going into the new system is accurate and that responsibility for year-end versus new-year reporting is clearly understood. 4. The right implementation should include testing, training and a clear owner Technology is only one part of a payroll conversion. Someone also needs to coordinate the process. A good implementation should establish clear responsibilities, deadlines and points of contact so the employer is not left trying to manage multiple moving pieces on their own. Before going live, employers should understand: Who is overseeing the implementation? There should be someone responsible for keeping the project moving and helping coordinate questions, decisions and outstanding items. How will the system be tested? Payroll calculations, deductions, taxes, time data and other important configurations should be reviewed before the first live payroll. How will managers and employees be prepared? If employees will use a new portal, mobile app, timekeeping process or enrollment experience, communication and training should be part of the transition. What support will be available after go-live? Implementation should not end the moment the first payroll processes. Employers should know who they will contact when questions arise afterward. A well-managed transition gives an employer time to catch issues before they become payroll-day emergencies. January can be a good time to change if you give yourself enough runway For employers who are frustrated with their current provider, January can provide a natural opportunity for a fresh start. However, this decision should not be rushed simply to hit a January 1 date. The better question is: Do we have enough time to evaluate our current process, build the new environment correctly and make the transition confidently? If the answer is yes, starting the conversation now can make the next few months much more manageable. At Simco, we work with employers to look beyond the payroll system itself. We assess how payroll, HR, timekeeping, benefits and the surrounding processes fit together so the new environment is built around how the business actually operates. If you are considering a payroll or HCM change for 2027, now is the time to start mapping out what the transition would involve. A short conversation can help determine what needs to happen, what information you will need and whether a January transition makes sense for your organization. Want to talk through your January timeline? Click here .

Have a question? Get in touch.