They have a management chain just like everyone else, and if the person at the top (or the person above them) says "We're not going to discipline this guy" then the best HR can do is try to deescalate the situation.
If Edward had to do it, we do too.
Yes, in theory. But most HRs "protect the org" in the most short sighted way possible
Like any department, HR should be staffed with intelligent, values-driven leaders with the spine to take strong perspectives and the ability to form collaborative vs. transactional relationships with the business. Constantly saying "yes" and failing to push back or take principled stands is not collaborative. Yet that is what many young companies want out of their HR department. I've found this more true in young(er) tech companies, though my sample size is limited.
When you build your HR function as a transactional service center, you get short-sighted decision-making.
That's all just my professional opinion.
This, well, this is what the dark side can be. Of course, at the end of the day it depends on the org and the kind of people we let grow, if the people in our org are good, capable then it is fine, but from the words of that HR friend of my friend, that's the job of HR.
We do HR software, I've interacted with many HR people at many companies and I've never even heard of anything as outrageous as the behavior described in this case. In no way is it the way"most HRs" behave.
Though I still believe it must be because many (if not most) firms invest very little in their HR departments and hence they get what they pay for and employees make do with it until something blows up; e.g. scenarios like this. And I am sure there are stellar HR departments out there I have never interacted with.
But then again an industry, a field, or a practice is usually stereotyped based on the reputation of the majority and majority in this case, in my humble opinion, seems to be lying somewhere down south.
But that's my point. If Uber's HR properly cared about protecting the company's hide, they would have immediately disciplined the manager involved, and "sexually propositioning a first-day direct report" is so egregiously over the line that they would have fired the manager.
Uber's HR failed here not because they only cared about protecting the company's hide, but because they didn't.
So, they just don't care about employees
That's definitely not the case in my experience. I spent a few months at Fitbit before being harassed by a manager, Sam Trychin. All I wanted to do was do my work, be treated fairly, and not be harassed. HR was definitely not the place to go.
As soon as I made the complaint, Jade Curtis at HR had a meeting with me where she lied to my face (claimed all their managers are exactly the same when I had gone around asking other employees and explicitly confirmed my manager was not following company policy or even treating me fairly compared to his other team members), told me they would refuse to transfer me when I asked about solutions like that, and asserted that the solution was I had to talk more.
The next week they brought me in a fired me with never a written or even verbal warning, and never a negative performance review or a missed meeting, or even a late JIRA implementation. Indeed, everyone said good things about my performance. I had also followed her advice to "talk more". Again they refused to entertain any option of continuing at the company when I offered to try anything that would solve things.
The only thing Fitbit HR cared about was A) to get as much ammunition for a lawsuit as possible, and B) fire me as fast as possible after I was harassed. They didn't try at all to solve things at the company.
In terms of what happened, everything was fairly normal for a couple months. Then one day my wife drove me in to the office because my back was hurting and standing an hour on the BART made things even worse. We followed every rule for her to be in the building. We arrived at 8am after a 2 hour drive, waiting until the front desk was open at 8:30am and got her a badge, then proceeded to my desk which is safely outside all the signs indicating no guests are allowed due to unreleased projects being worked on.
The developer to my right was super friendly and talkative and awesome to my wife - completely normal. My manager came in later (he was rarely around and always left early at 4pm, one of those pre-IPO people who don't put any effort in now that they have their options) and blew up after 10 minutes - super strange. His face turned all red and he was breathing heavy and he took me aside to a private room. He said my wife is too distracting for him to get any work done and she has to move.
We immediately left the area and went to the couches across from the front desk to figure out what to do. Then I took her off campus. She never visited again any day after that (who would bring their wife back when their manager is acting creepy toward her?), but my manager continually blew up about her and made up new rules about her. For example, the week after, he took me aside to a private room again and said she couldn't visit ever again. Meanwhile when other team member's family visited, he was super nice and even booked a conference room for a full day for another team member's kids to visit.
At the same time he started treating me very unfairly. For example, he said any exercise on my part counted as a "long lunch" and wasn't allowed. Meanwhile it was "Steptember" and all employees were encouraged to exercise and had internal teams competing with who could do the most exercise.
Similarly I was in an automatic activity tracking beta test, and all short exercises had failed to trigger the new logic, so I took a 1 hour bike ride on the Embarcadero instead of lunch to try to get a positive result for my beta test data - he blew up about this as well.
The manager claimed the PM had been trying to contact me all day and wasn't able to because I took that bike ride. This was not true. The PM Hipchatted me on the way back from the bike ride, I stopped at a cafe on the way back, and did the code review the PM wanted from me immediately, within 10 minutes.
So the manager was lying about my interaction with the PM to justify his not letting me exercise and his blowing up any time I was away from my desk - which I had to be pretty often because I was writing the Bluetooth pairing code and there's a step that aborts if there are too many devices nearby, like at our desks. The test group lead actually worked from home at least one day a week for precisely this reason and I was only working down the hall at some tables, which should not have been a problem.
Meanwhile everyone else at the company I talked to encouraged exercise, and one manager I talked to even recommended an afternoon nap for getting your energy back to code some more! So my manager was definitely not following company policy or treating me fairly. All HR cared about was firing me, though. I found out later the manager was divorced and that's probably why he went nuts over my wife.
It actually sounds really similar to Susan Fowler's experience at Uber. She had a manager acting creepy and weird because of his own marital issues. Then HR invented fake "undocumented performance issues" that were never communicated before and didn't hold up to scrutiny when other employees were asked about it, so that HR could deny transfer and any other solutions, and the manager could keep looking good at the company.