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| Hi y’all! I’m back home from traveling to keynote a state conference in Kentucky and hitting up a company event in Austin. Your girl is here, there, everywhere! Next month I’m hitting up: Louisville, KY (again), Boston (Safe Space meet up is happening!) and LA for Safe Space Summit. Waitttt have you requested your spot to Safe Space Summit yet? If you’re a senior People leader at a company > 250, we want you there!!!!! We cover your travel & hotel (PRICE: $0) so it’s essentially a free trip to get inspo, address some of your toughest challenges and meet the coolest people in HR! So far I've announced 2/4 speakers and some guests but, come through? Some of the smartest minds are gonna be in that room! If you can’t be IRL, catch me virtually: 🎧 The pod is heattting up this szn and the incredible Val Jensen joins me to talk about biased tools, performative people-first promises, and why letting AI make decisions about employees is a legal and ethical dumpster fire waiting to happen. 📺 HR Therapy is next week! And I’m talking about all things multi-state compliance like laws we need to know and pay transparency rules. But I couldn’t do this on my own, nooo. I needed to get an expert ON THE LINE! So a real life lawyer is joining me. No more theory, real answers on WTF we need to be focused on. Okay now onto today, we’re talking about my beef with September (the month, not the Earth, Wind & Fire song). BUILDER MODE Second January: 📣 Tomorrow is September 1st. I know, it snuck up on me too! If you've been doing this job for a hot minute, you already know what this means… The summer haze lifts, everybody coming back from PTO feeling restful and with FRESH ideas, and suddenly your calendar has some new meetings. AKA: hell???? We got: Q4 planning, open enrollment, end of year performance reviews. Just a few things on the average HR mind in September. Not to mention the rando project born from whatever your CEO heard on a podcast on a plane in August. Let’s just call September the second January? Idk if anyone calls it that but September DEFFF gives the same resolution energy of January. I frequently call the end of the year the worst time of year for HR. Am I wrong?? And listen… I'm not going to pretend I'm above this! Every September of my career I have opened a blank doc, written Q4 PRIORITIES at the top, listed far too many things, and felt genuinely great about my second January… For about four days until things get a tad intense and then I reconsider all my professional life choices. Not to mention, a lot of our work is inherited. 🧮 So, a quick math equation: Second January + inherited roadmaps = not fun for HR? The inherited roadmap: 🔥 Not to add more fuel to this Second January fire but it feels like A LOT of our HR work is somewhat inherited. Tech teams have a word for this!! It’s called tech debt. Tech teams put items in a backlog, then argue (lol) about them in planning to get them into an actual sprint time to pay down the debt. Some things stay in the backlog for longer than some Engineers are willing to admit! We kinda have the exact same thing? HR debt. Not original I know. Wondering how much HR debt you could have? Here’s how to get started on that work. Go down your priority list and determine where each priority actually came from. Is it:
I’ve spent this Build Mode quarter pulling apart things like onboarding, surveys, 1:1s, exit interviews, values decks, AI, and in almost every case, the reason the process was broken wasn't that nobody cared. I’d argue HR people probably care the most!!! I think it’s actually because a lot of our processes are inherited… And here's the diff between HR debt and tech debt. Tech debt actually gets created on purpose. A call is made to move fast and deal with the cost later knowing there's a clear tradeoff. Most HR debt, all of it, maybe, gets created NOT on purpose. Nobody traded anything. It just... accumulated. So, how do you climb out of the hole of tech debt plus wrangle your execs with their Second January energy? Filtering thru it all: When everyone is coming in HOT this fall AND you’re looking at a very long list of inherited HR, it can be hard to filter through what actually needs your attention. Builder mode can come quickly crashing down when you agree to too much. That’s the LAST THING I want to happen when I’m out here asking you to improve, rebuild or tear down things at work. So, if you can’t decide on HOW you pick where to focus your attention, here are 3 filters to consider: 1. You'd fix it even if nobody noticed. Some of our most important fixes have nothing to do with visibility. Sometimes it's a thing nobody else would ever clock and you just know it has to be done. If there's no glory in it and you still want to do something about it, that could tell you how important it actually is. 2. You can already prove it's broken. If it doesn't require a whole freaking discovery project and you already know it's an issue, that's something that deserves your attention. Think: exit interview themes, a cluster of survey comments, or several managers who all said the same thing unprompted. If you need more data than that, consider moving it to Q1. 3. It's about to stop being just your problem. This one's about spread. And not the fun kind with hummus and cheese. I’m talking about things that spread outside of HR. The broken intake process becomes an open req that sits open for five months, which becomes a desperado hire in November, which becomes a manager nobody would have approved on a normal day, which becomes a team that turns over by spring. That’s just an example btw sorry if I triggered you!!! But that’s what I’m talking about when I say spread. Things that stop becoming an HR problem and go deeep in the org. So if you can draw a straight line from the thing in front of you to somebody else's problem, potentially that's your one to focus on. Fix it while you can. 📣 Anything that doesn't make it through all three filters isn't unimportant, it's just not yours to carry RIGHT NOW. And one favor? I've spent this quarter telling you what to rebuild, and I never once asked what you'd choose. So: What's the thing you know is broken that you can't get anyone to let you fix? Hit reply and tell me! And I pinky promise to cover it in a future edition Sponsored by WorkBright These days, I-9 compliance is already a nightmare.  (HUMAN) RESOURCES
*This one is brought to you by one of my amazing brand partners WORK-LIFE BALANCE
SONG OF THE WEEK 🎧 September, Earth, Wind & Fire I can beef all I want with this month but I will accept no words about this song. If you need me i’ll be bumping to this! THAT'S ALL FOR THIS MONDAYYYYY. Reminder: we're in PEAK HR szn now, take care of yourself! | ||||||||
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