Big title, right?  Here's the thought behind it today.

HR gets paid to have an open door, and to encourage people to raise their hand if they see issues that don't look right.

Sometimes, the issues raised are things that are plain to see.  Tom's a total jerk.  Jane has anger management issues.  Everyone knows it and sees it.

However, most of the time things are much more murky, and when murkiness combined with Title 7 issues collide, allegations made can label someone as something terrible - a racist, bigot, ageist, etc.

Bottom line - in today's politically correct world, it's easy to aggressively label someone as any of those things, and the world generally believes it's true until it's proven that it's not.  24 hour news cycle culture.

Thus is the slippery slope of HR.  We have to encourage people to raise their hands, but some people will go from 0-100 mph without a need for facts.

The clear answer is in the history of the individual.  What's their track record like related to being a racist? A bigot?  An ageist?  The problem is that most onlookers aren't aware of the track record and HR has no means to provide the full record.  Too often the community that is your company votes off of one reported incident, most of the time without complete info on that incident.  You can clear someone of the label in your investigation, but the scarlet letter remains, impacting promotions, 360 scores, future relationships, etc.

Which means the burden for HR has never been higher.  You have to keep the door open, but if you're a deep HR pro, you also have to protect good people from being labeled by people seeking to destroy them for whatever reason - because they don't like them, or maybe just because they're difficult people who don't care.

There's a lot of bad people in the workplace, which is a microcosm of society.  HR needs to make sure bad allegations made by imperfect people are as aggressively challenged as bad actions by people who fit the racist/bigot/ageist label.

The job has never been tougher.