What's everyone's most outrageous "I can't believe how out of touch leadership is" moment in HR?
I was the only HR person at a private healthcare clinic for about a year. When I started, they didn't have annual reviews, weren't paying overtime, weren't completing I9s, and offered less than a week of PTO.
The craziest experience there though was when I was trying to implement a review system so they weren't just giving raises and bonuses based on personal opinion. One of the categories was teamwork. I provided a definition with examples of good and bad teamwork. The owner asked me "what if they don't donate to things like baby/wedding showers?" They expected at least $50 from each person. I told them that isn't a good metric. They pushed back, I told them that they pay so little that their entire administrative staff needed government assistance, for some of them $50 was 3 to 4 hours of work, and that it was not an acceptable metric to use for teamwork. They overrode me and it became the only metric for teamwork. Pretty sure I made things worse for those employees. I was able to clean up the most egregious violations, like the overtime issue, but everything was a fight.