55 HR Jokes Only Employees Who Have Met With HR Get

The calendar invite said "Quick chat". No agenda. No other attendees besides me and HR. I have not slept since Tuesday.

HR has an open door policy. The door was closed. I knocked. She opened it, then closed it behind me.

We are reviewing the engagement survey results. We have been reviewing them for fourteen months. The results are reviewing us at this point.

The 360 review is anonymous. My manager read three of them out loud in our 1:1 and asked which one was mine.

Your manager and I have been talking. No opening pleasantry. No agenda link. Just that sentence. I closed the laptop and walked to the kitchen for ninety seconds of dignity.

Performance reviews happen once a year, compressed into the second Friday of December, written in the forty-five minutes between two other meetings. The rest of the year my growth is a vibe.

She said the meeting was to introduce a new tool. The new tool was a PIP.

Calibration meeting: a room of managers who have never seen me work deciding whether I am a 3 or a 3+.

We do not stack rank. We do something called talent differentiation. It produces a stack. It is ranked.

We are a family. I have never been laid off by my family before, but I assume it would also start with a calendar invite from a stranger.

Unlimited PTO. The average usage is eleven days. I took fourteen and someone asked if everything was okay.

Mandatory unconscious bias training. Ninety minutes. A quiz at the end. The slides have not changed since 2019. The biases have.

Every all-hands has a fifteen-minute HR slot for values. Nobody can name the values without checking the laptop sticker.

The engagement survey results came back. They have decided not to share them with us. The engagement, presumably, is fine.

The exit interview was the most honest performance review I have ever received. From me. To them.

Termination at 9:00 a.m. Slack access revoked at 9:01. Email at 9:02. Laptop wiped remotely at 9:03. The empathy training, presumably, runs later in the morning.

The layoff announcement was read from a script. You could hear the page turn at the line about how this was the hardest decision.

The severance docs arrived as a single PDF named final_v4_signed_FINAL.pdf. The careful versioning of my dismissal.

The NDA on the way out covers compensation, headcount, internal tools, the layoff itself, the reason for the layoff, the existence of the layoff, and my opinion of the layoff.

The policy update was emailed Friday at 6:11 p.m. The effective date was Monday. The subject line was "FYI".

We rebranded HR to People Operations in 2019. To People Experience in 2022. Back to HR in 2024. The people did not change. Neither did the operations.

The deck mentions psychological safety on slide four. Slide six is the stack rank distribution. Slide seven is a smiling stock photo.

The values poster on the wall is from 2014. Two of the values no longer apply. One of them is the name of a former CEO who left under unspecified circumstances.

We are a family. Three weeks later: due to changes in the macroeconomic environment, we are saying goodbye to fifteen percent of the family.

Wellness webinar at 1:00 p.m. on a Tuesday. It is about resilience. Attendance is tracked. The webinar competes with the deadline that is causing the stress.

The new perk is a meditation app. The thing causing me to need it is still there.

May newsletter: Mental Health Awareness Month. June newsletter: layoffs. July newsletter: how to build resilience after change.

Bring Your Dog To Work Day was cancelled this year due to logistical complexity. The complexity is that the office now allows three people per Wednesday.

Office reopening update number fourteen. The reopening date has been pushed by approximately the same amount of time as the time since the last update.

The return to office mandate is three days a week, in person, no exceptions, effective immediately, signed by a CEO who lives in a different country.

Three months later, the RTO is two days a week. Six months later, four days. Nine months later, five days. At no point did anyone say the previous announcement was wrong.

Manager training is a self-paced course. The training is required. The completion is not. The managers, accordingly, have not been trained.

She handed me a Manager Toolkit. It is a PDF of links to other PDFs. One of the links is broken. It has been broken for two years.

His business card says Talent Acquisition Partner. He sends me one-line emails asking if I am open to opportunities. He does not know what I do.

Twenty-six interview rounds. Four panels. Two take-homes. One presentation. A reference check. A second reference check. An offer at the salary I asked for in round one.

The offer letter arrived Sunday at 11:47 p.m. with a 48-hour deadline. The recruiter went on PTO at 9:00 a.m. Monday.

The start date was pushed twice. The recruiter said it was for onboarding readiness. The onboarding consisted of a Slack invite and a Google Doc from 2021.

We are going through some changes. That is the entire email. No detail. The Slack channel for guessing what the email means now has 1,400 members.

The org chart has been redesigned three times in the past two years. My title has changed twice. My job has not.

Skip-level 1:1 with my manager's manager. He nodded a lot. He took notes. The notes were on a personal pad. Nothing happened. Nothing was ever going to happen.

The diversity numbers report came out. The numbers are unchanged. The report is forty-two pages. The previous report was thirty-eight. We are improving the reporting, at least.

The affinity group meets at lunch, unpaid, with a budget of zero, and is referenced on the careers page as evidence of culture.

The holiday party budget has been reduced this year due to cost discipline. The executive offsite to Aspen, presumably, is a different budget line.

Company-wide town hall Q&A: questions submitted in advance through a form, screened by HR, filtered by legal, answered by the CEO reading from a prepared response.

The values are: bold, kind, transparent, scrappy. We are not allowed to share compensation. That falls under scrappy, I think.

We do not discuss other people's compensation. We also do not discuss our own. We do not discuss compensation.

The salary band for my role ranges from $90k to $145k. That is not a band. That is two different jobs.

Promotion cycle once a year, retroactively effective from a date in the past, paid out two months later, taxed as a bonus the first month.

She said let us schedule some time to chat. The chat was forty-five minutes long. There was a deck.

The HR business partner is partnered with three hundred employees, two product lines, four office locations, and a CEO who emails her at 11 p.m. Her job is human.

The compliance training is annual, mandatory, ninety minutes, with a quiz, and the quiz allows infinite retries on every question until you get the right answer. The quiz is theatre.

The HR ticketing system has a category called Other. Eighty percent of tickets are filed under Other. The category is, in effect, the system.

The new code of conduct is forty-seven pages. The previous one was eight. The new ones are the same rules, with more lawyers between you and the meaning.

She closed the meeting by saying my door is always open. Her door was already closed. Behind me.

I asked for a copy of my own file. They sent me a redacted version. The redactions were also redacted.