If someone gave you permission to say it out loud, you might admit that you hate HR.

Not dislike. Not distrust. Hate.

And if that's where you are, I'm not here to talk you out of it. I spent decades inside the HR function, climbing the ladder in large corporate organizations, building teams, designing systems, sitting in rooms where decisions got made. And somewhere along the way, I started to understand exactly why you feel the way you do.

Because I felt it too.

This isn't a piece about why HR is actually great and you just haven't seen it done right. It's not a defense of the function or a listicle of reasons to give HR another chance. It's an honest look at what I think happened to HR inside large organizations — how a function that exists for one clear purpose slowly morphed into something that works against that very purpose. And why that matters to you as a founder or small business owner who is trying to build something real.

Your distrust is valid, so let's talk about where it came from.

At its core, HR exists to protect the most valuable asset a company has — its people. Not its intellectual property. Not its revenue. Its people.

The systems, the policies, the processes — all of it was designed to support that. To create conditions where people could do their best work with as little friction as possible. To make sure the way an organization operated actually reflected what it said it valued. A simple concept with a clear purpose.

So what happened?

HR didn't set out to become a bureaucratic obstacle. I think that's important to say, because this isn't a story about bad intentions. It's a story about drift.

Here's how it happens. An organization gets big enough that informal people management starts to break down. Managers make inconsistent decisions. A compliance issue surfaces. Someone gets treated unfairly and there's no process to address it. So HR steps in, and rightly so, to create structure, build consistency and to protect people from the inevitable messiness of humans managing other humans at scale.

And that part? That part is exactly right.

But then something shifts. The process that solved one problem becomes the template for every problem. The approval layer that prevented one bad decision becomes the approval layer for all decisions. The initiative that helped one team becomes the mandatory program for every team. Each addition made sense in isolation. Together, they built something nobody intended — a function so layered, so process-heavy, so focused on doing everything correctly, that it stopped doing anything well.

I watched this happen from the inside. And here's what I noticed - the higher I climbed in corporate HR, the further I got from what I actually believe good HR work looks like. The more senior I became, the more my days looked like governance and process management and risk mitigation, and the less they looked like actually helping people or the businesses they worked in.

That's when I started to understand that the problem wasn't the people inside the function. It was what the function had become.

I want to give you some specific examples — not to call out any organization, but because I think you'll recognize them. And I think recognition is the first step to believing that what you experienced wasn't what HR is supposed to be.

The concept is sound. Create a dedicated moment to give employees meaningful feedback, assess their growth, and align on where they're headed. Important work that is absolutely worth doing.

What it became is something else entirely.

Most organizations run an annual performance review process that nobody, including the employee it's designed to serve, finds any real value in.

Employees are asked to write a self-review, which if you spend any time on LinkedIn in November or December, you already know how they feel about that.

Managers write reviews, increasingly with AI assistance, and employees know it. A second-level manager approves the review.

Then comes calibration, where a room full of people shape individual ratings into a bell curve that supports a predetermined compensation distribution.

All of this happens at year-end, layered on top of quarter-close and every other demand the business is already making. Nobody has the time or energy to do it well. So HR spends weeks dragging leaders through a process that was supposed to develop people and instead produces a document that gets filed away and forgotten until the same time next year.

And we keep doing it anyway. Every year. Because it's what we've always done.

That's not a feedback culture. That's a compliance exercise dressed up as one.

HR stepping in to ensure consistency in people decisions is legitimate and necessary. But somewhere along the way, "ensuring consistency" became "approving everything" — and the effect on managers was slow and corrosive.

When every disciplinary conversation, every performance concern, every time-off exception has to be run through HR before a manager can act, something happens to that manager over time. They stop trusting their own judgment. They stop feeling accountable for their team. They learn that people decisions aren't really theirs to make — they're HR's domain. So they wait. They defer. They send the email and sit on their hands while the situation festers.

And when a founder who came up through that system starts their own company, they carry that learned helplessness with them. They either avoid making people decisions until they absolutely have to, or they go looking for an HR person to hand the decisions to — because that's what they were trained to believe the relationship looks like.

Neither outcome serves the business or the people in it.

This one is perhaps the most well-intentioned and most misplaced of all.

At some point, culture became an HR deliverable. Engagement surveys. Focus groups. Workshop series. Values posters in the break room. And with it came an expectation among employees that HR is on their side — their advocate, their friend, the function that exists to make their experience better.

There's truth underneath that expectation. HR should deeply advocate for employees. But one department cannot manufacture culture, and it cannot be everyone's friend while also maintaining legal compliance and protecting the organization's interests. Those things are in direct tension, and pretending otherwise sets everyone up for a painful reckoning the first time an employee needs HR to go to bat for them and discovers the institution has other obligations.

More fundamentally, culture isn't an HR output. Culture is the sum of what employees actually experience inside an organization every single day. It lives in how managers behave under pressure. In whether stated values show up in real decisions. In what happens when someone makes a mistake, asks for flexibility, or raises a concern.

HR doesn't control any of that. But when culture is treated as HR's responsibility, the people who actually shape it daily — leaders, managers, founders — are quite literally let off the hook.

Here's an example of this that I find hardest to watch - an organization publishes a value around work-life balance. They create a generous PTO policy to demonstrate the commitment. And then they build an approval process for taking that PTO that requires multiple layers of sign-off. Or worse, the culture is such that employees don't feel they can actually unplug when they're out, or they know they'll return to twice the work and nobody covered for them while they were gone.

The policy said one thing. The lived experience said something else entirely. No amount of culture programming closes that gap. Only leadership does.

Here's why all of this matters to you - the founder or small business owner, specifically.

You didn't just observe this dysfunction from a distance. You lived inside it — as an employee, a manager, or both. And whether you realize it or not, it shaped how you think about what HR is and what bringing HR into your business would mean.

For some founders, the result is avoidance. HR feels like importing a problem — adding bureaucracy, slowing decisions, creating a function that will eventually tell you what you can and can't do in your own company. So you wait. You manage without it until you absolutely can't, and by then the problems are bigger and harder to untangle than they needed to be.

For others, the result is replication. You bring in HR help and unconsciously expect it to look like what you've seen before — approval chains, initiative calendars, annual review cycles — because that's the only model you have. And so the dysfunction that frustrated you as an employee gets slowly rebuilt inside the company you're trying to do differently.

Neither path is your fault. You were working from the only blueprint you had.

I left corporate HR because I couldn't reconcile what the function had become with what I believe it's supposed to be. The higher I climbed, the further I got from the work that actually matters — sitting across from a business owner or a people manager and helping them navigate something hard, building something practical that makes the day-to-day easier, creating alignment between what a company says it values and how it actually operates.

That's what I came back to when I started On Demand HR Solutions. And it's shaped how I approach every engagement.

I don't believe HR is a linear process you can overlay on every organization. I don't arrive with a templated solution and retrofit it to your business. Every company I work with has a different culture, a different stage, different people, different pressures - and the HR infrastructure that serves them has to reflect that. The goal isn't to do HR correctly. It's to do it in a way that actually works for the humans inside your specific organization.

That includes the performance review question. I'll be honest with you, I don't think the answer is to eliminate the feedback conversation. I think the answer is to rebuild it around its original purpose, in a way that fits how your business actually operates. That's work I'm doing actively with clients, and it looks different every time.

If you've been avoiding HR because of what you've seen it become, I understand that, genuinely. But what you experienced was a distorted version of the function, one that grew too large, too risk-averse, and too removed from the actual work of building and running a business.

It doesn't have to look like that. And for small businesses especially, it shouldn't.

You have something large organizations lost a long time ago — the ability to build this function from scratch, without the calcification, without the legacy processes, without the approval chains nobody can remember the origin of.

That's not a disadvantage. That's the whole opportunity.

If you read this far, I suspect some of this landed closer to home than you expected. Maybe it named something you've been carrying around for a while without quite having the words for it. That's exactly why I wrote it.

You’ve built something, or you're in the middle of building it. And the last thing you need is to bring in a function that slows you down, second-guesses your decisions, or manufactures culture initiatives while the real work piles up. I get that and that’s the last thing I want for you and your business.

But I also know what HR looks like when it's working the way it should — calm, practical, aligned with how your business actually runs, and completely in service of the people inside it.

That version can exist.

It's just not the one most of us encountered on the way up.

If you're curious what that could look like for your business, please comment here, I'd love to have that conversation.