Human resources: can an HR director remain human?

Do the practices of large French groups really resemble the inhuman world that Corporate describes? Released in theaters on April 5, the film caused an outcry among human resources directors (HRDs), who discovered it during a private screening and a meeting with the director and the screenwriter.
The story takes place in a company whose HR Director reveals to his teams the new objectives during a seminar in Chamonix. Employees will have to leave. But at no time is there any question of a redundancy plan, staff support or severance pay. Managers who take part in this team-building trip – with a dog sled raid – must understand for themselves that they will have to push employees to consider that they no longer have a place in the company, and to resign. Except that one of them ended up throwing himself out of a window at his workplace.

“ As human resources managers, our members were shocked by the very negative, cold and cynical vision of the film about the company,” says Bénédicte Ravache, secretary general of the National Association of Human Resources Directors (ANDRH).

And even more so on the HR function as it is presented. “Caricatural? The director, Nicolas Silhol, is far from being a stranger to the business world. The son of a management professor at Polytechnique and HEC specializing in human resources management, he says he has discussed these issues with him a lot. And for his film, he was directly inspired by the episode of suicides at France Telecom, in 2008-2009, before the former public operator took the name of Orange.
At the time, 16,000 job cuts had been implemented, in one way or another. About thirty employees had cracked, and ended their lives. The lawsuit against the company and its CEO at the time, Didier Lombard, has still not been successful. The contestation, by two other managers of the company (including the HR director), of their indictment for complicity in moral harassment slowed down the procedure. There remains the expression used, in the letter left by one of these employees who took their own life, engraved in the memory: ” management by terror “. An expression that has also resonated at La Poste, Renault and even at Pôle Emploi.

Read the rest of the Challenge article: https://www.challenges.fr/emploi/management/ressources-humaines-un-drh-peut-il-rester-humain_467014?utm_content=buffer767ed&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer