Summary.
In light of sexual harassment allegations against Uber, questions have been raised about how the company’s culture and decisions made by leaders played into what has become a very public crisis. One of these questions involves the role of HR, and more specifically, the singular way Uber viewed the function — primarily as a recruitment tool — at the expense of everything else.This focus on a single element of the HR value proposition can actually perpetuate a crisis: If risky managerial behaviors are tolerated while HR focuses on recruitment, those behaviors can be seen as accepted and, over time, snowball.Susan Fowler, a former site reliability engineer at Uber, recently wrote about her “very, very strange year at Uber,” characterized by a pervasive culture of alleged sexual harassment. The dispatch included disturbing and potentially illegal managerial activities, such as Fowler’s boss telling her she could be fired for reporting the behaviors. Just as striking is her description of Uber’s HR organization, which reportedly advised Fowler that because the manager in question was a high performer, HR did not feel comfortable punishing him.