Why HR and IT Are Actually the Same Team

I’ll admit something upfront: I am not an IT person. I’ve eaten a sandwich over my laptop in front of my IT counterpart. I’ve asked for the same account to be updated four times in a row because I didn’t understand why the first three attempts didn’t work. I have, on more than one occasion, been the person IT was silently frustrated with.

So when I say that HR and IT are actually the same team, I’m not saying it from a place of having always known this. I’m saying it because I’ve been on the wrong side of the divide, and I’ve watched what happens when that divide goes unaddressed. The short version: it costs everyone. And it doesn’t have to.

The real reason IT doesn’t like you

HR leaders often tell me their IT counterpart doesn’t seem to like them very much. My instinct is always to gently point out that it probably isn’t personal. The more likely explanation is structural.

Think about how most companies are organized. HR sits near leadership or in a central office. IT gets tucked away near the servers (sometimes literally inside the server room, which is an OSHA problem for a different blog post). Both teams are heads-down, running hard on completely different priorities, speaking completely different languages, and occasionally colliding on projects neither team knew the other was involved in.

That’s not a relationship problem. That’s a design flaw. And until you name it as a design flaw, you can’t fix it.

You’re looking at the same people

Here’s the thing HR and IT have in common that neither team always sees clearly: you’re both responsible for every single employee from their first day to their last.

HR owns the record. IT owns the access. And neither of you can do your job correctly without the other’s information being accurate and timely.

Think about onboarding. HR is coordinating the offer letter, the paperwork, the benefits enrollment, the manager introduction. IT is configuring the laptop, setting up accounts, making sure the new hire can actually log in to the tools they need on day one. Both teams are working toward the same moment: a person sitting down, ready to work.

But if HR submits the wrong start date, or the department field is blank, or the manager isn’t assigned in the system, IT’s provisioning automation breaks. The new hire shows up and nothing works. And both teams get the blame.

The same is true in reverse. If IT doesn’t communicate what they need and when, HR can’t give them what they’re missing. The handoff fails in both directions.

That handoff is the employee lifecycle, and it’s the connective tissue between HR and IT. Every hire, every role change, every departure runs through it. When the two teams are in sync, it’s invisible. When they’re not, everyone feels it.

When the handoff breaks, everyone pays

I want to share a story that illustrates this better than any framework I could offer.

Macy Larios is an HR and IT manager at Romano Beverage. She came up through HR and ended up owning IT as well, which gave her a perspective most people in either function never get. At one point, she discovered roughly 50 iPads scattered through closets and cabinets around the office. They were still on the company’s cellular plan. She then found another 30 iPads that former employees had taken when they left. The company was still paying for all of it: both the devices and the cellular service. An extra $3,000 a month, for hardware tied to people who hadn’t worked there in months.

This is what happens when HR and IT are tracking offboarding as two separate workflows instead of one. HR closes out the paperwork. IT doesn’t find out until later, if at all. Devices go unretrieved. Access stays open. And the bill keeps coming.

The cost isn’t always a cellular plan. Sometimes it’s a former employee who still has access to a shared drive. Sometimes it’s a compliance gap that shows up in an audit. Sometimes it’s an onboarding failure because the provisioning trigger never fired correctly. The shape changes. The underlying cause is the same: two teams that should be moving together are moving separately.

See how Rippling automates the IT offboarding process to close that gap.

You share more risk than you realize

Here’s something I didn’t fully appreciate until I started spending more time at the IT-HR intersection: both teams carry compliance obligations the other doesn’t fully see.

HR thinks about employment law, mandatory training, termination documentation, and the specific risks that come with handling sensitive personnel data. IT thinks about device encryption, access revocation timing, phishing exposure, and what happens when someone’s credentials aren’t turned off on the day they leave.

Neither team always appreciates the weight the other is carrying. And that gap creates decisions that inadvertently create risk for both.

The clearest example is offboarding. The window between an employee’s last day and the moment their access is fully removed is one of the most significant security vulnerabilities a company can have. It’s not hypothetical. It’s where real incidents happen. And it’s almost entirely driven by how quickly HR and IT communicate when someone leaves.

If IT doesn’t know until Friday afternoon that someone’s last day was Wednesday, that’s two days of open access to every app that person ever touched. If HR makes a decision about a device without looping IT in, that device may never come back, and IT may never be able to wipe it.

These aren’t IT problems or HR problems. They’re shared problems that happen in the gap between two teams that aren’t talking.

The metrics you should be tracking together

Both HR and IT have something else in common that I find oddly comforting: when we’re doing our jobs well, nobody says anything. Nobody comes to work saying “I love how fast my laptop was set up” or “the onboarding experience was so smooth.” They just get to work. But the moment something breaks—slow provisioning, a security incident, an access issue during a termination—both teams hear about it immediately and at volume.

That shared experience of being invisible when things go right and very visible when things go wrong is one of the most underutilized foundations for partnership I’ve seen. It’s also why I think HR and IT should be tracking certain metrics together rather than in parallel.

Day-one readiness is an IT metric. It measures how many new hires are fully set up and operational on their first day. But IT can’t hit that number without accurate HR data: the right start date, the right role, the right manager, submitted with enough lead time. If HR is measuring time-to-productivity as a separate number, you’re scoring the same play twice from opposite sides of the field.

Rippling’s IT onboarding checklist shows exactly where the two teams need to hand off to each other.

Offboarding completeness is another one. IT tracks whether access was revoked across all systems by the employee’s last day. HR tracks whether exit paperwork was completed and equipment was returned. Those are the same process viewed through two different lenses. They should be one shared checklist, not two.

When you align on shared metrics, you create shared accountability. That changes how both teams show up to the work.

What “same team” actually looks like

I want to be concrete here, because “better collaboration” is the kind of advice that sounds good and changes nothing.

One standing sync between HR and IT changes more than almost anything else. It doesn’t have to be long. It doesn’t have to be formal. Carter Francis, who has spent years in IT leadership, described a monthly HR-IT meeting at one company that involved a bottle of wine and an hour of getting aligned on what was coming. That team worked well together. The format was the point: a regular moment to share what was on the horizon, surface dependencies, and catch problems before they became incidents.

If there’s existing friction between your HR and IT teams, the first move is simpler than you might think. Go talk to your IT person. Not about a ticket. Not about a project. Just go say hi. Acknowledge that the relationship could be better, and that you want to understand their world more. Most IT people, in my experience, are genuinely glad when someone from another function wants to actually understand what they do and why.

A lightweight intake process for new tools also goes a long way. If HR is evaluating software, putting IT in the loop before signing the contract rather than after removes one of the most common sources of friction between these teams. It doesn’t require a lengthy approval process. It requires a conversation.

This is especially true for AI tools, where shadow IT risks are growing faster than most companies’ policies can keep up with.

The bridge and the people who protect it

Macy said something near the end of our webinar that I keep coming back to.

“HR’s job is to build the bridge. IT’s job is to protect it. Stop working against each other and build an incredible infrastructure together.”

That framing is right. HR brings people into the organization, supports them through their time there, and manages their departure. IT makes sure those people can actually do their work, securely and reliably, at every stage. Both functions are essential to the same outcome: an organization where people can do their best work.

Rippling connects HR and IT in a single platform so the data driving that outcome stays accurate and in sync automatically.

The companies that figure this out stop paying for the ones that haven’t. Not just in money, though the $3,000-a-month iPad bill is real. In time, in risk, in the accumulated cost of two teams running a shared process at cross-purposes.

You’re already on the same team. You might as well start acting like it.

Emily Herron works at Rippling, where she helps HR leaders build more effective partnerships with their IT counterparts. Learn how Rippling connects HR and IT in a single platform.