Last week, workforce strategist Amanda Goodall reignited the cycle by calling to “remove 90 per cent of HR.” The post went viral. Thousands shared it. Comments split cleanly between employees saying “finally” and HR professionals rushing to defend the function.
What’s interesting is not the outrage. It’s the repetition.
This debate resurfaces every few years. Different person. Same argument. Identical response pattern.
“HR is useless bureaucracy.”
“HR prevents lawsuits.”
“HR protects companies, not workers.”
“That’s literally the job.”
Round and round.
The cycle repeats because the underlying tension never resolves. HR cannot serve two masters—legal protection for the company and advocacy for employees—without choosing. Structurally, HR always chooses the company. That’s who pays.
Why it resonates (again)
Goodall’s post landed during a particularly visible moment for HR’s enforcement role. Layoffs announced over video calls. Return-to-office mandates framed as culture building while senior leaders remained remote. As compliance pressures mounted, HR became the public face of decisions employees resented.
For many workers, perception shifted. HR moved from advocate to extension of corporate control.
The line “HR exists to protect the company, not you” resonated because of how the function is designed. HR reports to leadership. It minimises legal risk, enforces policy consistency, and absorbs fallout during restructuring.
One viral comment captured it neatly: “HR’s purpose is mostly to protect the business, not the individual.”
This isn’t a new insight. It’s a structural reality employees rediscover during every crisis, then forget until the next one.
“‘Remove HR’ goes viral because it names a frustration everyone recognises, but no organisation wants to resolve”
The measurement problem
Another fault line is measurement.
In organisations obsessed with metrics, HR’s impact is difficult to quantify. Critics argue people teams add process layers, slow decision-making, and expand headcount without the scrutiny applied to revenue-generating functions.
As budgets tighten, investments from growth years come under question. Engagement surveys. Wellness programmes. Expanded people operations. What value did these create? Can it be measured?
HR professionals counter that their success is largely invisible. Lawsuits avoided. Compliance failures prevented. Toxic managers addressed early. Success is the absence of disaster—hard to celebrate and harder to budget for.
They also point out they implement decisions made elsewhere, becoming the public face of actions they didn’t originate. Fair enough. But it doesn’t change the lived experience. HR is still the person in the room delivering the bad news.
“HR isn’t mistrusted because it’s inefficient. It’s mistrusted because it represents itself as an advocate while structurally serving power”
Why it never actually happens
If “remove HR” sentiment is so persistent, why hasn’t it happened?
Three reasons.
First, legal exposure is real. Remove HR and litigation risk rises sharply. Boards won’t accept that trade-off.
Second, someone still has to do the work. Payroll. Benefits. Compliance. Hiring logistics. Rename the function if you like. The tasks don’t disappear.
Third, companies benefit from the buffer. HR absorbs employee anger, allowing leadership to remain insulated from unpopular decisions. This is not a flaw. It’s a feature.
“The debate isn’t really about HR. It’s about power, trust, and whose interests organisations actually serve”
The AI distraction
Josh Bersin argues we’re entering an AI-driven reinvention of HR. Thirty to forty per cent of HR work, he says, can be automated, freeing teams for “strategic” roles.
This argument appears every time technology advances. HR systems. Outsourcing. Shared services. The promise is always the same: automation will finally make HR strategic.
The outcome is always similar. Technology shifts tasks, not incentives. The core tension remains because it isn’t about efficiency. It’s about power.
AI doesn’t make HR more trusted. It makes enforcement faster.
“Asking HR to advocate for employees while reporting to management is asking referees to pick a side”
The unresolved tension
Here’s the uncomfortable truth. HR’s dual mandate is impossible to fulfil simultaneously.
Protect the company while advocating for employees? These goals align sometimes. They diverge often. When they do, HR chooses the company. Not out of malice. Out of structure.
This isn’t a failure of individual HR professionals—many of whom entered the field genuinely wanting to help people navigate organisations and build better workplaces. It’s a failure of how we’ve designed the function itself. We’ve created a role that requires choosing between employee welfare and organisational risk, then acted surprised when HR consistently chooses the latter.
Asking HR to advocate for employees while reporting to management is like asking referees to favour one team. The incentives don’t align.
Employees understand this intellectually. Crisis moments make it visceral. Layoffs. Restructuring. Toxic leadership. The implied advocacy collapses, and resentment sets in.
That’s why “remove HR” goes viral. Not because HR is unnecessary. But because it presents itself as something it structurally cannot be.
“HR survives not because employees trust it, but because companies need a buffer between leadership and anger”
Why the cycle continues
Nothing changes the structure.
Companies need compliance. They need policy enforcement. They need a buffer. Employees will keep rediscovering this reality during moments of stress.
Someone will write another post. It will go viral. HR will defend itself. Employees will agree with the criticism. The cycle will repeat.
Until organisations separate compliance from advocacy, or drop the pretence entirely, the tension remains.
“Remove HR” goes viral because it names the contradiction. It never happens because companies still need the function—just not for the reasons they claim.
The debate isn’t really about HR. It’s about power, trust, and whose interests organisations serve. HR is simply where that contradiction becomes most visible.
That’s why it keeps happening.
And why it will happen again.