The HR Paradox: Your Company’s Most Efficient Human Shield

So, someone on Reddit, struggling with mental health for years, discovered a fundamental truth about Human Resources: as the top post put it, “HR are there to protect the company. Not their employees.” This, of course, isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s also not complete. Like many things that seem straightforward in corporate life, the incentives get… tangled. The naïve micro-model might suggest HR is for humans, which is true if those humans are viewed as potential vectors for non-compliance. It’s less about hugs, more about Liability Abatement Through Proactive Personnel Management.

One commenter, colin_staples, offered a useful clarification: “Sometimes HR protecting the company is achieved by HR protecting the employee.” This is what we might call Defensive Employee Advocacy – a sort of corporate immunological response. The original poster’s story of “begging for help” only for disability to materialize as a resolution fits this model rather neatly. From a certain corporate perspective, providing disability and medical support (as AureaTempestas noted, thankfully) isn’t just compassion; it’s a strategically sound off-ramp before the situation escalates into, say, a lawsuit. (For a corporate entity, the liability for certain kinds of employee distress can be, shall we say, rather clear-cut under statute.)

WoollyMamatth, a former HR professional, provided a historical footnote that’s practically a syllabus item in ‘Corporate Structures 101’: “Originally we were the link between staff and management to be fair to all. When my team wa…” [presumably, it changed]. This is the ‘Personnel Department Era’ – a simpler time when a “human resource” was perhaps less of a liability to be managed and more of, well, a human. Today, however, the HR function might best be understood as the corporate immune system’s front-line defense, tasked with identifying and mitigating “human-capital-related vectors of non-compliance and reputational exposure.”

This brings us to the delightful corollary: if HR’s job is to enforce rules for the company’s benefit, what happens when an employee uses those rules for their benefit—specifically, in a way that creates a new kind of corporate headache? This is the domain of Procedural Reciprocity Malpractice, or what the internet affectionately calls ‘malicious compliance.’ vacuousintent’s suggestion to the original poster – “Did you expense your mileage and gas? Also, you should have been paid as you drove to and from the doctors office, since work was demanding you do it…” – highlights this perfectly. This isn’t about fairness, it’s about leveraging the company’s own rulebook. As Isolated_Hippo noted, HR “know[s] all of every single rule. They control around those rules.” And occasionally, those rules can boomerang.

So, the lesson here isn’t that HR is evil, or that companies are heartless. It’s simply that organizations, like biological systems, optimize for survival. When an employee’s well-being aligns with the company’s risk profile (or lack thereof), it’s a happy convergence. When it doesn’t, well, the system finds an equilibrium, sometimes through disability leave, sometimes through a carefully documented process for expensing mileage to your therapist. It’s not personal, it’s just… efficient. For certain values of efficient, anyway.