Why We Still Hate HR—And 100 Executives on How to Fix It

Fast Company has returned to one of business journalism's most durable provocations: the widespread dislike of human resources departments—and it has brought 100 business leaders along to propose fixes.

The outlet's latest piece, titled "Why we still hate HR—and 100 business leaders on how to fix it," revives a debate that has run in corporate circles for two decades. The core complaint, as Fast Company frames it, has not gone away: employees and executives alike still regard HR with suspicion, seeing it as an administrative bottleneck rather than a strategic function.

What distinguishes this iteration is the scale of the sourcing. Rather than a single-author polemic, Fast Company canvassed 100 business leaders for their prescriptions. The result is a practitioner-led diagnosis of what ails the function—covering, according to the publication, the gap between HR's stated mission and its day-to-day behavior inside companies.

The piece lands at a moment when the HR function carries more responsibility than it has in decades. Executives are asking talent teams to manage hybrid-work policy, retention pressure, and workforce planning under tighter budgets. That added weight, the article suggests, has not yet translated into added respect.

Fast Company's argument echoes a long-running critique in management writing: that HR departments claim a seat at the strategy table while spending most of their time on compliance, paperwork, and process. The 100 leaders surveyed offer countermeasures, turning the piece from complaint into a repair manual for the function.

For business audiences, the stakes are straightforward. Companies that treat HR as a cost center risk losing the talent war to rivals that staff and empower the function differently. Fast Company's roster of 100 executives is betting the fix starts with leadership—not the HR office itself.