This is by far the most disorganised HR team that I've ever joined, which lacks leadership. This is Disorganised, Lack of Leadership People Teambased on some members' direct experience and interactions, and this extends beyond Shopee People team to members in other business teams.
1. Lack of leadership capability - Our People Team Lead is inconsistent, and frequently reverses directions. Only does last-minute scrambling based off the decisions of top management. This creates confusion and reduce the HR function to a reactive, low-value executor.
2. Lack of regard for morale /wellbeing - Despite leading HR, shows little to no concern for the morale or wellbeing of team. Concerns raised during townhalls are often dismissed or ignored. Employee survey scores may not show, because these scores are not anonymous, and the findings are cherrypicked for management to see.
3. Poor Business Acumen - Our lead frequently claims to understand business context, yet demonstrates little actual business sense, and simply asking members to check with other teams to be sure. Without any HR background, needs HR concepts to be explained repeatedly, but yet dismisses market practices and make decisions arbitrarily, just for convenience to explain to the management. This oversimplifies complex organisational problems into impractical guidelines and processes. Meetings with lead lack structure, outcomes or coherence, wasting everyone's time.
4. Biased leadership - Employees of a specific nationality are consistently favoured, promoted, marked as key talents and awarded good performance ratings year after year - irrespective of merit and feedback from team. This is not subtle. It is observed, repeated and deeply corrosive to trust and fairness.
5. High attrition - For HR, attrition rates similar to business teams should be alarming. Many consistent and strong performers, especially -1s, have either changed reporting lines, transferred out or left the organisation. Meanwhile, many remaining are mediocre performers, disengaged and tang ping, because performance accountability is weak or biasedly applied.
To fresh grads thinking of joining Shopee People team, learn quickly, and be prepared to leave.
To MBBs thinking of doing strategic HR work, this doesn't exist here. What you may get is just a pay hike in exchange for transactional, menial work under such unclear and inconsistent leadership. Decide if that trade-off is worth it, unless you are thinking of retiring here, which may not be a bad option then.
