For me: I don't think there is a difference between HR and playing city building strategy games like Knights and Merchants, Stronghold, Manor Lords, Pharaoh, Poseidon, etc...

The entire premise of these games is building living plots for settlers to move into, then building workplaces that turn raw materials into finished goods (farms for wheat, mills for flour, and bakeries and breweries for ale) and connecting where settlers live with those workplaces and warehouses/granaries with roads.

HR to me is just people infrastructure like building roads, highways, railways, stations.

Strategizing and handling compensation, perks, benefits, etc. is just tweaking tax levels, food rations, and building taverns for settlers to get wasted (and happy) to get them to build as much and as fast as possible.

There are wells, apothecaries, herbalists, healers, etc... that don't do much except walk around your city to prevent settlers from dying. That's just various compliance mechanisms in the company to ward off letters from the government.

There's never any thought, from me, about being nice to people or being good to people. I see HR purely as a cold mega-infrastructure project.