Pros
Operational Buidness Leaders, Line and Project Management are knowledgeable, highly capable and committed to their customer, their employees and adhering to company policies and HR processes. The HR Directors are high caliber caring professionals invested in doing good work and improving broken and lacking processes.
Cons
There is little to no support to achieve the work as HR is structured and staffed. Daily there are reactive actions that generate the newest immediate priority to be done now. A lot of time is put into designing and developing HR process tools, and much time is spent in meetings to review, rework, design and then implement processes and tools. However the foundation is not secure. There is no quality control for thousands of personnel transactions processed by email and paper. Many hands touch one transaction and when a batch or a single transaction fails, the correction is to find the person to blame and chastise that person. The actions are NOT solutions focused. HR processes live with the leaves on the branches of the trees and the forest is ignored. No holistic understanding of how to effectively deliver HR as a shared serice. The HR policies and plans were pushed into consolidation in an 18 month or less process - true integration planning and inclusion at the top most entity level (NRC) was avoided. HR staff are highly experienced at the Director levels with low quality support at the mid and junior staff level. Director must carry cells phones nonstop to respond to the CHRO and failure to do so results in a verbal berating. Immediate answers at the time of a call from the CHRO are demanded regardless of where or what you may be doing. It is a stop everything and jump now management mentality. Work is not strategically planned and deadlines are overlapped with no ability to reasonably rework when one project overcomes another. Kudos on one action or project can be quickly followed by a verbal thrashing for a real or perceived failure. The focus is on the perception at the moment and long term value/credibility is very difficult to establish unless you are resilient enough to push through the frequent and volatile verbal chastisement dished out freely as the CHRO sees fit for the issue or the moment. Benefits continue to be cut and costs for healthcare shifted heavily to the employees. General employee pay reviews are random and individual, the annual pay review cycle is selective. pay constraints are consistent with the govt contracting industry and reduced costs but this is not the case at all levels.