This was one of the things which impressed me during our 11 year stint with EDS (you know, the company Ross Perot started, then sold to GM, later spun-off and which was recently acquired by HP). For as large a company as EDS was (several billion in sales and many thousands of employees) they had no formal HR department. Granted, there were a few clerks assigned full time to HR activities back at HQ as well as a manager, but all of the big decisions were made by a committee of line managers and corporate executives who met a 2 or 3 times a year. The day-to-day stuff was left to lower level managers and their admins who were given a lot of latitude to run their organizations. As long a set of overall guidelines was followed, managers pretty much did their own HR thing. Granted, official paperwork and documentation was handled by that small cadre of 'clerks' back in Plano, but the actual application of the 'rules' were up to your manager. For example, there was NO formal scheme for keeping track of vacation or sick days. Managers were informed as to how many days off each employee was entitled to but it was up to the manager as to how to manage that or to even give additional days at his or her desecration (and the only paperwork generated stayed in the admins desk). This led to the inside joke that the only reason that you CAN'T take any vacation was that "either you didn't have any coming, or you worked for an A###ole" (although I never heard anyone complain that their manager actually denied them vacation days).
And we first noticed this when our company was acquired by EDS back in 1991 (we were a division of McDonnell Douglas at the time). Every employee was given a personal face-to-face interview by an EDS employee where you could ask questions, get details of how EDS did things and where you signed your normal new-employee paperwork (tax withholding forms, patent agreement, employment contract, etc.). The interesting thing was that NONE of the EDS people doing the interviewing were HR people. In fact, the person supervising the interview process for our location wasn't even an HR person (more on that later). These were normal EDS people, volunteers from across the business units, some mid-level managers, some technical professionals, even a few administrative assitants. All of them were doing this on a temporary basis and when the task was over, they went back to their normal jobs, whatever that was. At no time during my 'mustering in' did I meet an actual HR person.
And then a few years later, we acquired another albeit smaller company and I was asked if I would like to be on the interview team, which I agreed to. I was just one of the interviewers and I was assigned to transition people at the new companies main software development site in Alabama. Then a couple of years later I was asked to be a 'team leader' for an acquisition where again I was assigned to one the new companies development sites in Oregon.
And the last time I was involved in an employee transition, I was the overall team leader for the new companies entire West Coast operation: development, support and sales, having to take my 'team' to offices in Northern California, Oregon and Washington. And while during our 'training' for each of these activities we were interfacing with what I guess you would call HR professionals, when it came to actually doing the interviews and answering the questions most all of this was done by the teams of regular employees with only the really unusual cases having to be 'kicked-up' to HR in Plano (usually someone with visa problems or like this one guy in Seattle once who demanded that I get our corporate attorney on the phone before he'd sign any of the paperwork and then was shocked that I actually knew who our corporate attorney was, then doubly-shocked when the attorney knew ME).
Anyway, it was such a relief those 11 years with EDS after my previous 10+ years with McDonnell Douglas (until you've worked for a large aerospace company you do NOT know what it's like to have an all powerful, omnipresent HR organization intervening into every aspect of your professional life, and even your personal life at times as I was relocated 3 times while working for MDC).
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
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