Human Failure, Indeed
Why, yes, it would be human failure, wouldn't it?
Let's begin with "Human Resources," shall we?
Human resources manages resources that happen to be human. Some several years ago, I worked in Personnel. We didn't have resources. We had people.
Nowadays, we have companies (which aren't human) staffed at the top by "owners" and "directors" and "shareholders" (which also aren't human), hiring resources, some of which are human.
Humans are finicky components. They're supposed to be plug-compatible replacements for one another. If you hire a human engineer, he can be used to replace any other human engineer of the same (or sufficiently similar) specification. Accounting humans can replace other accounting humans. Sales droids -- err, humans -- can be used to replace either sales or marketing humans.
Humans are received, fully programmed, from the Human Preparation Mills (see also "university"), and are supposed to be ready to use, subject only to a brief "initialization" or "orientation" period.
Unhappily, the technology of Human Programming being what it is, these resources are prone to various kinds of failure.
One of the more common failures is a "goals and desires" bug. This bug has supposedly been removed at various stages during the development process of Human Programming, but it continues to crop up unexpectedly (as bugs are wont to do).
In more primitive organizational technologies, e.g. those using people instead of "resource, human" for tasks requiring intelligence, things like goals, desires, feelings, and a quirk often referred to as "life," were expected and simply accounted for in the system design.
With the advent of the more advanced system of "resources" we were to have been relieved of the vagaries of such quirks, having only to deal with the functional interface.
Clearly, there's more work to be done.
I rather suspect that part of the problem here is that the people running the company are, themselves, somewhat human, and this condition has directly contributed to the errors in resource selection, resulting in the employment of a faulty human.
I'd start there. Removal of humans from management and executive positions is the only thing that will solve this chronic problem. Then we can set about seeing to the elimination of these "life-related" quirks from the human drone -- err, resource -- populations.
~~ AG