Tl;dr: my small company only has one person in our HR “department”. Is this normal? How to advocate for adding another person to the department?
I (25F) work at a small company that is nearly 50 people. We only have one person in our HR department and I’m not sure if this is normal or just another quirk of my company. I read a headline saying the Society of Human Resource Management suggests at least 2 HR people for companies with more than 25 people but my company likes to run lean.
I guess the one person wouldn’t bother me as much if I felt like they were someone I could go to with issues. I realize “supportive HR” might be a bit of an oxymoron but at my company the situation is made worse by the fact that this person is a longtime friend of the CEO. There have been multiple occasions where I felt like they did not stand up for or even heat out employees in the face of blatant wrongdoing on the part of someone in leadership. They’ve said that their relationship to the CEO won’t affect their impartiality but at the end of the day we’re all human. Not saying it’s right, just saying I don’t trust them to be truly impartial (especially when many people have a problem with how the CEO acts).
I’ve already got one foot out the door but want to secure another job before I leave, but for the sake of my coworkers that still want to work here and those that will work here in the future my questions are:
1. Is a close personal relationship between people in HR and the CEO normal?
2. Should we have at least one more person in our HR department?
3. How should I go about bringing up this topic in a way that will actually bring results? We have a monthly team meeting where we can submit anonymous questions but they normally just skirt around any substantive answers.
4. Any examples you all can give of positive experiences with HR would also be appreciated 🙂