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 Hi ya party people, You made it to Friday! Some of you thrived this week, and others were in survival mode, but here we are. 💪 My current life hack is always actively having something small to look forward to, whether it’s much-needed couch rotting, or the new episode of Love Island tomorrow. Aaaand now it’s Q&A time! First up: someone is out here keeping every operational plate spinning, but wants to quantify their work with data. Then, we have a nonprofit HR manager about to run performance reviews with zero raises to offer, which is prob a sentence that should come with a trigger warning. Nothing we haven’t experienced before, so let’s unpack! P.S. Ready to submit a question? Send it in here, and you might be featured next Friday! 👀 Sponsored by Adobe Onboarding shouldn't be emailing new hires a shared folder and hoping they can piece everything together on their own. 🎲 ASK AWAY 🤓 metrics & budgets ✍🏾 Curious to hear, what are the key HR metrics you regularly report to leadership, and how often do you share them? I feel confident that I’m effectively managing the day-to-day operations and keeping a lot of moving pieces aligned, but I’m looking for better ways to quantify and showcase that impact to leadership through meaningful data and reporting. Would love any insight into what has worked well for you. Context: I work with a leadership team that largely takes the approach of “just get it done.” There’s very little interest in formal performance management, performance reviews, or deep operational involvement unless something is going wrong. That’s part of why I’m trying to become more intentional about reporting meaningful HR metrics and business impact upward — not necessarily because they’re asking for it, but because I want to better demonstrate the value, scope, and operational complexity of the function in a way that resonates with executive leadership. 📣 Anonymous Safe Space User: Honestly, if your leadership team is focused on just getting things done, I'd focus less on traditional HR metrics and more on business metrics with a people lens. That could be things like voluntary turnover, time-to-fill, regrettable attrition, offer acceptance rates, internal promotions, engagement trends, manager effectiveness, and the cost of open roles tend to resonate more than activity metrics. I'd also recommend reporting more on what changed because of HR, since executives generally care more about outcomes than effort. The sweet spot is finding 5-7 metrics that connect directly to revenue, productivity, retention, or risk and reporting them consistently enough that leaders start seeing trends for themselves. 📣 Sondra Norris, Founder @ Strategic Culture Partners: In my experience, what matters to the executive team is anything that impacts or threatens the achievement of their business strategy (in their language) - that you're keeping an eye on those things and raising the flag to solve them. You know you're talking about the less-than-important things to them when they pick up their phones, stop attending your meetings, glaze over ... It's not that the things are not important, they're not important to them. Start by having a conversation with them: 1. What do you think of our execution velocity right now? 2. Are you getting the information you need, at the right level, to focus where you need to be focusing? If not, what's your perception of the information you're getting? 3. Are the appropriate levels of ownership and initiative happening, in your opinion? Or are you getting called in to make decisions you think others should have made? Ask these questions with your own knowledge of the company's existing "culture gap" (what's said is important vs. what's actually important) and "trust debt" (stuff the people remember and use to measure everything else by). If more than one exec is concerned with any/all of those issues - you've got work to do, issues to surface. Those three things (Execution Velocity, Information Flow, and Ownership & Initiative) all affect whether or not the business strategy will be achieved, and all can be traced to the following conditions: 1. Predictability. Can the employees reasonably, and positively, predict what will happen based on the past track record? If not - they're uncertain. Uncertainty causes hesitation and resistance - execution slows. 2. Leadership Credibility. Do the employees have proof that they can count on and believe in the executive team's individual and collective leadership? If not, trust is low. Low trust causes hesitation and resistance - execution slows. 3. Relational Security. Do the employees have proof that their honesty is survivable under this exec team's leadership? If not, safety is low. Low safety causes hesitation and resistance - execution slows. These are your starting points, not about what you're presenting or talking about, but what you know as an HR practitioner - and any data you routinely present should connect to these and their effect on whether or not the strategy is likely to be achieved. Interesting data points I've presented in the past: 1. Tenure numbers. If more than 20% of your company is "new" (≤ 6 months) - you've got issues. #1 - who's training them? #2 - as they figure out the lay of the land, they're going to put more trust in what they hear "on the street" from their peers. 2. Time-as-successful-people-managers. People managers are responsible for translating strategic concepts into action plans. (And a lot more.) If lots of your people managers have no track record, you should have low confidence that the strategy will happen. 3. Friction points. If payroll and benefits are hard to navigate and/or unpredictable - that's friction. If operating conditions are unpredictable, unsystematized, reliant on one or two people - that's friction. Where are the friction points? HRBP's should be hearing about these from their client groups - HR should have a collective stance and opinion on these: how much friction is being caused, how big of a threat the friction is, and how to fix it. Safe Space members can join this discussion here. Not a member yet? Apply to join here.  ✍🏾 How can we continue engagement and accountability when it's not in our budget to give increases this year? Context: We’re a 50-employee nonprofit and are not offering salary increases this year due to budget limitations. This has been communicated to employees. I'm looking for guidance on how to approach annual performance reviews and goal setting in this context—specifically, how to maintain engagement and motivation when raises are not an outcome. 📣 Stephanie Slysz, Director of People & Culture @ Galvanize USA: This is actually a great opportunity to decouple performance reviews from compensation. If they've been historically linked, now's the time to separate them. I like to think about two types of growth worth distinguishing: skill growth (breadth, depth, leadership opportunities that deepen someone's expertise in their current role) and compensation growth (which should track with promotions and expanded scope, not just annual reviews). When those get tangled together, reviews tend to focus on justifying a raise rather than developing the person — and on past performance rather than future growth. That's not great for anyone. Compensation is a real and legitimate motivator, I'm not pretending otherwise. But it's not the only one, and reviews that only serve that purpose miss something important. The intrinsic case for professional growth is worth leaning into. People (should) want to get better at their work and managers can actively support that without asking employees to take on new unpaid responsibilities (that distinction matters). For this cycle, consider reframing the core review question: not "how is this employee performing" but "what can I, as a manager, do to support this person's growth?" That's where goal setting becomes a real tool rather than a formality — goals oriented around skill development and what the manager will actively do to support them. No raises this year doesn't have to mean no growth — and that shift from evaluation to investment is how you get clearer on what growth actually looks like. 📣 David Blanchard, Vice President, Employee Benefits @ Lockton: Not to throw salt on the wound, but to ensure you're not surprised by a further hit to your culture, don't forget that you're likely to get (unless you're lucky) an increase in cost to your health plan deductions. Essentially making the lack of a raise, a real step backwards in take-home pay. I agree with everything that @Stephanie Slysz and @Sondra Norris have outlined, and just would suggest that the messaging about this being a tough year be proactively extended to the likely hit on the benefit deduction front. Depending on your benefit package, there may be ways of mitigating some of that impact through voluntary benefit expansion, etc., but wouldn't want you to have to repeat the "This year stinks" message again later in the year. Best to remind folks that you're aware of the entire challenge, and reinforce the value of being an engaged member of your organization early and often. 📣 Kerry Jamieson, Sr. Director of HR @ Connections for Kids: We are also a non-profit and went through this last year. Our increases are in part tied to our annual evals so we were concerned about how employees would react. We also had a significant change in our benefit offerings and increase in cost at the same time. To get ahead of it we had a meeting with all the supervisors to make sure they had the information they needed, answered their questions and talked about the importance of how this is all presented to the rest of the agency. When the notice was sent out to all the employees our leadership was prepared with a consistent message and the ability to answer questions. Supervisors then talked with employees during individual evaluations and supervisions and directed anyone that had additional questions or concerns to talk to HR. In the end the majority of our employees were understanding, and we had very little fallout from the experience. We did our best to be transparent, supportive and offered additional resources where we could and for a lot of our employees that made a big difference. Safe Space members can join this discussion here. Not a member yet? Apply to join here. Sponsored by Hogan Assessments Your org just promoted its next round of leaders and guess what??? That's not a hot take either, that's Hogan Assessments' data! After surveying nearly 10,000 workers globally and comparing results against 21,000+ executive personality profiles, their new report found zero overlap between the competencies of leaders getting promoted and the leaders employees want to follow. Thankfully, it also shows you how you can close that gap! Download the report, it's free and it's full of gems. 💎 🚨 ON YOUR RADAR 🎧 Nothing prepares you for your first startup. Christine Song learned that the hard way, and we're discussing all the wisdom and lessons she learned from the chaos. Check it out on Spotify or Apple Podcasts! 🗓️ 2026 is already half over…and I have lots of questions! Join us on June 24th for HR Therapy, where we're pulling data from Checkr's 2026 CHRO Insights Report and getting uncomfortably honest about HR’s biggest challenges this year. ❤️ From ‘I Hate it Here’ to ‘I Love it Here’: Your Culture Transformation Roadmap. HR can influence culture change in any organization, and this course teaches you how. Join the Safe Space community to access it! 🔎 H2 is almost here, and it probably looks different than your original plans. Lattice's 2026 State of People Strategy Report has the receipts to get you back on track. Plus, they're surveying HR leaders for the 2027 report right now. Read the report and take the survey — add your insights, and help your fellow HR peeps.* *This one is brought to you by one of my amazing brand partners 📝 RESOURCE OF THE WEEK Each week I feature a resource I love from the Safe Space library that I believe would be relatable to this week's newsletter topic. This week, we’re revisiting an AI-Ready Workforce Framework. Check it out HERE ⬇️  {/if}{if contains(profile.lists,"Safe Space Members")} 🫂 COMMUNITY CORNER Community Happenings🔼 Hey Raleigh/Triangle NC Area - Safe Space member Mariah Hachmeister is looking to host an in-person meetup and she wants your suggestions. Head to her post and let her know your fav spots and dates that work for you! 🏔️ Oh Hi Denver Front Range Area folks - Safe Space Community Manager Kat is gathering July dates + ideas for an in-person meetup before she moves to NC. She’s thinking ice cream and vibes at Central Market. If you’re in, let her know here and she’ll get the event up soon! {/if}{if contains(profile.lists,"Safe Space Members")}{/if} FRIDAY FUN 🎧 let's mix it up for some fun? SOOOO i'm not gonna lie... we did this. And it's actually A LOT of fun. It could be because I make posters for every DJ announcement and then turn it into a big deal. But hey, who knew letting employees stream music they love could inject so much energy into an already fun meeting??? Don't knock it till you try it!! It's summer and summer SHOULD BE FUN, meetings are usually not fun!!! But now they can be... That's all for this week! I hope you enjoyed! If you have any thoughts, please let me know. I'm allll ears. Reminder: Today is FRIDAY. 🙏 | |||||||||||
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