alt Hacker NewsThe phrasing "HR isn't there to protect you, it's there to protect the company" applies more here.
My experience is also that HR is very reasonable and cooperative with harassment claims. But the thing is that when you have a legit harassment claim, the law is there to protect you. You could make things very expensive for the company in court, and so protecting the company does mean protecting you and treating you respectfully and cooperatively.
If HR investigates and finds you don't have a legit case and that in fact you may have been the instigator, then protecting the company probably means getting rid of you. Your judgment and account of the facts is questionable in that case, and you're a liability from the other side.
I don't know exactly what happened in this case, but in the harassment case I've had to handle as a manager, the (male) employee said that the (female) victim had initiated everything and had this weird fascination with him, while the paper trail that everybody could see clearly showed that he was both the instigator and the one behaving improperly. Projection is strong in cases like these. So it's entirely possible we're not getting the full story from this anonymous blog post.
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> and that in fact you may have been the instigator, then protecting the company probably means getting rid of you.
That protects other employees. If you are instigator and then go to complain to HR trying to make them punish the victim, firing you protects everyone around you. And it protects the culture from becoming toxic.
HR can play negative role, but this scenario is not one of those.
> The phrasing "HR isn't there to protect you, it's there to protect the company" applies more here.
I agree (although had interpreted the statement originally differently). Unfortunately, the part about "XYZ isn't there to protect you" applies to so much in life. Even police don't have a responsibility to you protect you (but just the public as a whole). The lesson from stuff like this is often to make sure your best interest are aligned with the most powerful and active stakeholder in the "room".