Meet The Disruptors: Rebecca Weaver of HRuprise on the Three Things You Need to Shake Up Your Industry
HRuprise founder Rebecca Weaver was featured as a guest in Authority Magazine’s Meet The Disruptors — an interview series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry.
Authority Magazine: Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Rebecca Weaver: I’ve always valued telling it like it is. In my 20 years as an HR leader, this helped me build really positive relationships with employees, despite the mistrust that many people have for traditional HR. I took employees’ concerns seriously, especially when they came to me for help with a harassment situation. I hated that they felt unsafe at work, and I took it as a personal responsibility to investigate every allegation fully, to hold harassers accountable, and to do it with as much transparency as possible so the whole company would know that these behaviors would not be tolerated in our workplace.
But it wasn’t until #MeToo went viral that I recognized the ways that I, as an HR leader, had unintentionally participated in a culture of harassment. It was baked into the job description. I can’t tell you how many times an employee came to me with a sensitive concern and I was prevented from telling them the full story. Why couldn’t I disclose to Jane that her harasser had several other harassment complaints already? Or advise Terrance not to quit just yet because his position was due to be eliminated next quarter and he’d get severance if he waited? Why couldn’t I tell Mia that she should ask for a raise because Marcus was being paid more for the same job?
Of course, I’d get fired for sharing this kind of information. Why? Because my job was to protect the company, not the employee.
Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it and I felt compelled to speak up. So I launched HRuprise on Instagram and began posting my own commentary about the problematic side of HR. The response was immediate, and I realized this was more than just a social media account — this was the beginning of a movement. And it eventually inspired me to invent a new, independent, employee-centric model for HR.
Click here to read the full interview on Medium.
