Why does everyone hate HR? Reclaiming the people part of people ops

“Everyone hates HR" is a punchline. But for HR professionals, it's also personal. You chose this career because of people. The coaching, the development conversations, helping someone figure out what they actually want from their career. And yet the function you pour yourself into has become the one employees roll their eyes at: scapegoated for decisions made elsewhere, dismissed by leadership as a compliance checkpoint rather than a strategic voice. None of this was the plan.

‍

For many HR leaders, this is a daily reality. The function ends up poorly perceived, not because of what individuals do wrong, but because of what it has quietly become in the org. Employees rarely see HR at its best. They see HR when something is going wrong.

‍

Join three leading CPOs for a candid conversation about what it actually takes to turn this around.

‍

We’ll discuss:

• Why HR is misunderstood from every direction — employees see the function as a front for everything they distrust about corporate life. Managers and executives see it as a nuisance that gets in the way of what they want to do. You end up caught between both, misread by the people you’re actually trying to serve.
• How to carve out space for the work you actually signed up for — why People leaders so often find themselves too buried in administration to do the strategic, human work they came here for, and what it looks like to shift that balance in practice,
• Why the systems we work in shape how the org sees you — and how the most intentional People leaders are changing that by redesigning the foundation their function runs on, rather than just trying to manage perceptions