Marie Rolston 0:03 The HR Happy Hour Network is sponsored by Workhuman. The role of HR is changing fast, and the leaders who move beyond administration into true business leadership will have the edge. Workhuman Live is where that shift becomes real. Four transformative days in Orlando built around the challenges HR leaders are facing now, with 65 plus standout speakers, you'll get practical, research backed insights that you can use immediately, along with honest conversations with leaders under the same pressures and a human first experience designed to energize you, not exhaust. It's why 93% of past attendees left inspired, and why you need to be there this April 27 through 30th. Register now @workhumanlive.com and use code HRHappyHour before February 28 to save 20%. That's HRHappyHour all one word. Thanks for joining us. Sabrina Baker 0:57 Welcome to the HR Connection and our very first episode as part of the HR Happy Hour Network. My name is Sabrina Baker. I am the CEO and founder of Acacia HR Solutions. I am also the co host of the HR Connection. You are going to hear from Marie Rolston in just a few minutes, but we are so happy to be a part of HR Happy Hour network. I'm so thankful to Trish and to Steve for recognizing that small business HR does not have the voice it deserves in the greater HR marketplace. And we are so thrilled and thankful to be able to bring the HR connection to this network and to hopefully small business practitioners who have been wondering where the content is that is focused on them. We spend our days inside of small businesses managing human resources for clients and the one to 500 employee range. And what we know to be true, and what you're going to hear in this episode is that it is a different discipline. And so if that's you, we hope that you will go ahead and subscribe so that you get all of our future episodes, which we'll be releasing monthly, and that are focused completely on you managing HR in a small space. Let's jump in today's episode. Marie Rolston 2:17 It's 3pm on a Tuesday. You're drafting an offer letter. Someone messages you about PTO again, your CEO stops by and asks if you can help with that new manager who's struggling. And just in that moment, you remember, open enrollment starts on Monday, and you haven't even written a communication about it yet. If this sounds familiar, this episode is going to be for you. Sabrina Baker 2:39 And really, not even just this episode, but the entire podcast series. I'm Sabrina Baker, CEO and founder of Acacia HR Solutions, and I spend a lot of time thinking about why HR feels the way it does in small and mid sized businesses. Marie Rolston 2:54 And I'm Marie. I am an HR business partner here at Acacia. I work with small businesses as a part of their HR team, and I get to live this exact scenario every single day. Sabrina Baker 3:04 And Marie, here's what we know to be true, HR does feel harder in a small business, and I would say not even just does feel harder, but it is harder in a small business. And I think what's important for us to do today is talk to our audience about why that is structural and not personal. Marie Rolston 3:20 Yes, and let me be clear, this is not an optimization episode. We're not going to tell you to work smarter or manage your time better. It's really about just understanding what you're dealing with day to day when you manage HR in a small company. Sabrina Baker 3:36 Yep. So if you are an HR department of one, if you're HR adjacent and covering multiple roles. Maybe you're the marketing manager who got stuck with HR, or you're on a small and I do mean small HR team, we absolutely see you, and today, we want to talk about a few things that I think will hopefully make you feel seen and feel like this is a good place for you to be first. What does make a small business HR objectively harder? Why is it different? Second, where do people get stuck when they're trying to manage human resources in a small environment? And then third, how can you think differently about the role that you're in? Marie Rolston 4:14 We're also going to talk about why comparing yourself to enterprise HR is a complete trap, and what good small business HR looks like when you stop measuring yourself against the wrong standard. Sabrina Baker 4:25 Yeah, let that's a great place to start. Let's start with that reality. Okay, so here's the thing about HR. In small businesses, you are doing a fundamentally different job than enterprise HR. This is something that I realized very on into starting this business. I had not had small business experience. Started a business catering to small businesses, and I realized that small business HR is not a subset of enterprise HR. It is an entirely different discipline, and it is absolutely an underserved market in every way. You have vendors who do not build systems for small businesses. Conferences either don't have sessions geared towards small business HR, or if they do, it is a whole bunch of people telling you to just manage your time better and keep up with compliance, which is really not helpful, and mostly because no one understands Small Business HR life. It is a problem that I set out to fix with this business and the content. In enterprise HR Marie, you have depth, right? You have specialization. You have a recruiter, a comp analyst, an HR business partner, an employee relations person, maybe a chief people officer who sets strategy. You have this redundancy. You have this coverage. If someone's on vacation, the work still gets done, but in a small business... Marie Rolston 5:46 You don't. So in small business HR, you have breadth instead of depth. So in this space, you are covering compliance, you're covering employee relations, recruiting, culture, strategy, benefits. You're doing it all with absolutely no backup. And when you're out, whether you're sick or you're on vacation, that work is just going to wait for you when you come back. Sabrina Baker 6:08 Yeah, and another difference is that there's absolutely no slack. There's no slack in your time. There's no slack in budget. There's no slack in systems and resources. You're not choosing between priorities when you're managing HR in a small environment, you're trying to do all of them at once, feeling like you have to do all of them at one time. Marie Rolston 6:26 Yeah, yeah, you really are. And, you know, I see this constantly. Just last month, I was working with a client, and we were trying to roll out this new onboarding process, right? But right in the middle of it, someone filed a complaint, so now I'm doing an investigation. Two days later, a manager quit, so now we're helping out with recruiting and that onboarding project, It's just kind of living in the back of my mind right now because there's really no one else to pick it up. Sabrina Baker 6:54 Yeah, so we see this all the time in small businesses. It's this role compression. You're constantly context switching between your tasks. You are starting with something like an onboarding project, which could be seen as a strategic project, but then you have to move to an investigation or recruiting, which is very tactical, and then the CEO needs you to coach him or guide him through something that's going on. So you're switching back to strategic. So you have this constant context switching between tactical and strategic. That does not happen in larger organizations. There is this emotional labor that we don't even talk about that gets added on top of when you are trying to do something like running payroll, but then suddenly you have to stop and guide a manager through something that they're going with and then back again. And sometimes you're doing all of that three, four or five times, even in the same hour. Marie Rolston 7:46 And here's the other thing that people really don't talk about, or maybe they don't even acknowledge, but HR, it's really happening inside the business and not alongside it. It is a part of your business. You're not watching things from the outside here, and things are moving fast all the time. You're having to make decisions that happen in real time. And all in all, you have to respond to things now and in the moment. And that's really difficult. Sabrina Baker 8:15 Enterprise HR has the luxury of process. Small Business HR has this immediacy that has consequence to it. And so that proximity creates this pressure, it also creates influence, which we will come back to, which is a very positive thing. But that pressure that doesn't exist in enterprise organizations is the or, I guess it does exist, but it exists differently in enterprise organizations, is the reason that small business HR is a completely different discipline. Marie Rolston 8:45 Something that I noticed coming into the small business space is, of course, it's different, but because of that difference, if you're not used to it, it really can feel like you're failing. Sabrina, do you think that is common all across the board, or just for people like coming in from larger organizations into small business HR? Sabrina Baker 9:06 I think it's definitely is a common feeling for anybody in small business HR. And I would say not even just HR, but other departments as well, when you're measuring yourself against enterprise HR standards, and that's all we have to measure ourselves against, because that's all that's written about, that's all that's talked about, then you can obviously feel like you are failing. And that comparison, it really does happen everywhere. It's LinkedIn, conferences, case studies, thought leadership, it's all written for companies with resources and infrastructure that you don't have. And so you set and you wonder, why can't I put that in place? But again, it's because you are in a completely different environment. Marie Rolston 9:47 You know, something that I hear from our clients all the time is they say I'm not strategic enough, or maybe they say I'm not even ready for strategy. But you know, when I ask what that means to them, it usually just translate to I don't have the space for it. Sabrina Baker 10:03 Right, because strategic has become shorthand for outputs, things like frameworks or programs or initiatives or dashboards, things that feel fancy. But in small business HR, strategy looks very different. It often just looks like a pattern of decisions not this polished deliverable. It's hard to have anything be polished inside of a small business, especially when you're building the infrastructure. And here's the thing about that, you're often the only HR voice in the room. So you are not only doing the work, you're also educating leadership on why the work matters. You're translating HR into business language. You're managing up, and you're doing it without an HR peer to Reality Check with which brings us to our reframe for this. The thing that makes small business hard isn't that you're not sophisticated enough, it's that you're closer to things like decision making, risk and impact than most enterprise HR people will ever be. And that proximity is really valuable. I think it's really cool. I think it's one of the things that makes working in a small business environment exciting. We always talk about how, you know, yes, our clients are busy and sometimes it feels chaotic, but it's also really exciting because we are so close to the growth of the business, but it also feels like pressure. Sabrina Baker 11:26 Okay, so Marie, I think it's important for us to actually name what makes this hard like what let's call it out, so that people who are listening might be able to say, yep, that totally feels like what I experience every single day. Because it's not the things that show up on a job description. When I say small business HR is hard, it's not because the laws change or any of the actual like administrative HR changes from enterprise to small business, but it is this other component of things that you don't find on a job description. Marie Rolston 11:57 Yeah, you're definitely not ever going to find this on the job description. Because the hard part this is going to be the invisible work, and this is the work that no one sees, so nobody counts, right? Sabrina Baker 12:09 So in your experience as an HR business partner, somebody who's doing this work every single day, give us a few examples of what that looks like. Marie Rolston 12:17 Yeah, absolutely. So I think that the first thing that comes to mind is going to be something like having to translate messy leadership behavior into policy. So what I mean by this is like when a founder comes to you and says, Hey, we need to be more flexible. This is a favorite of mine, but when someone says something like that to you, you have to figure out what that means for remote work, for PTO, for performance, you take the ambiguity and you turn it into something that people can actually work with. Another example is when you have to be the stabilizer during growth or turnover or conflict, whenever things get chaotic, you you have to sit there and you have to hold the organization together. And that work really is hard. On top of that, it's also invisible. And if you do it, well, nothing's going to break and no one is ever going to notice. And when you think about that, unfortunately, preventative work, the kind of work that I was just talking about, it's never going to get the credit. No one is ever going to sit there and say to you, great job in keeping that conflict from escalating. And it's simply because they just don't see it happen. Sabrina Baker 13:28 Yeah, and you talked about ambiguity, which we know runs rampant inside of a small organization, and so with that, you have this constant judgment call that has to happen with incomplete information. And it's not even sometimes it's, of course, that they don't have the information, but a lot of times it's they don't even know, you know, small businesses are so reactive that they're just kind of living in the moment. And so you never have perfect data. You don't have case law from your legal team on standby. There's literally no one that you can talk to. You are making calls in the moment of whatever's happening based on context and pattern, and nine times out of 10, just kind of hoping that you're right. Marie Rolston 14:10 Yeah, you know, I was actually just helping a client with a restructure recently. They had no clear head count target. There was no final org chart. And really, the CEO, he just kept changing his mind like every day, it was something new. And so I'm over here just having to make decisions about who stays, who's go, who's going, how to communicate it, even though the plan is just keeping even though the plan just keeps shifting right, and that's exactly what hard looks like. Sabrina Baker 14:38 Yeah, I have no doubt that our listeners probably were just shaking their head saying, I also have a CEO who always changes their mind. I'm sure, as a CEO, I'm guilty as well, but when you are in that, that is exactly what we're talking about. That's what hard looks like in small business. HR, it's not complex systems. Half the time you don't even have a system. It's this constant judgment under uncertainty that you have to be willing to navigate. Marie Rolston 15:04 Yeah, but there is there is light and there is hope, right? It's because you do get good at it over time. As you're working through these vague interactions, you you develop the instincts, but because the work is invisible, you don't always know how much skill it's actually going to take. Sabrina Baker 15:23 So I think we've established that we believe that enterprise HR and small business HR is absolutely different, and that we should not be measuring the success of small business HR by enterprise standards. And now what I think we ought to talk about is, what does good actually look like we've been doing this for for 15 years. I've been doing this for almost 15 years. You've been doing it for almost four now, inside of a small business HR, with our small business HR clients. And so we obviously have some ideas. I will say before we go into this, there's no one size fits. All these are these are standards that we feel like can apply to most. But small businesses are very unique, and they're very nuanced, but we do have some ideas of what good HR looks like in a small business. Marie, what are your thoughts about that? Marie Rolston 16:09 Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to tell you plain and simple, it's prioritization coming into the to the small business space. If you have been successful elsewhere, you're going to want to come in and you're going to try to do everything as perfect as possible. You're going to want to give that a plus effort, but really it's going to be prioritizing, and then your C effort after that. That's what good looks like. Sabrina Baker 16:31 Yeah, small business HR, strategy. You know, you alluded to people saying, I want to be more strategic, or I want more strategy. But you know that I always say that strategy shows up in how you work. It's a mindset, not a task. And so inside of a small business, strategy is how you refine what's happening inside the business based on those business needs. So when we talk about HR leaders needing to understand the business, absolutely, in a small business space, you have to and then refining what is happening based on those needs. It's never about how many initiatives you launch or the type of initiatives you launch, but it is constantly refining. It's almost a constant refinement of what is happening inside the business as the business scales based on the needs and the goals they have for growth. Marie Rolston 17:18 And you know what Sabrina, consistency beats sophistication. I know we want to be sophisticated, but it's really about consistency. I would much rather see a manager have the same conversation with every single new hire than be presented with a beautiful onboarding program that only happens when there's time. Sabrina Baker 17:37 I think that's the key. So consistency beats sophistication and progress, beats polish. You don't need a perfect performance management system. You need managers who know how to give feedback. Marie Rolston 17:51 Yep, and we have a perfect example of this one. So we in the past, we had an HRBP who stopped trying to build these beautiful performance review processes, right? Employees and leaders, they were fighting it. They were completely not into it. So instead, she pulled back, and she coached three managers to have one difficult conversation each. These conversations were topics that the managers had been avoiding over time, and so when they actually sit down and have these conversations, we started to see some change. Over six months, the entire organization's turnover completely dropped. And because of that, the CEO went to that HRBP and started asking her opinion on hiring decisions. After that, she even got pulled into a restructure conversation early, instead of being told after the fact. Sabrina Baker 18:44 Those are the stories that I'm so proud of in this business when those things happen, because that really is what great HR in small environments looks like. It defies the logic of big HR, where frameworks and processes are absolutely King, and it says, What does the business actually need if I can't put the big system in place, if I can't put the big process in place, what is something really small that I can do to make a change? And so that's a perfect example of, okay, we'll throw out the performance process that everybody's fighting and nobody's going to do well anyway, and let's just learn how to give some feedback. Marie Rolston 19:21 And really, when I think about it, in a small environment, the best strategy is always going to be, what's the one thing creating the most drag right now and then fixing that? Sabrina Baker 19:33 And again, I think that's where small businesses has a huge advantage, because you are so close to the work that you see the patterns. You can absolutely see what's going on across the entire organization most of the time, because it's really, really small, right? We have clients from what eight employees, 10 employees, up to 150 plus. And so even in the larger organizations, 150 you're still pretty close to everything. And so you can see those plans. Patterns. You're so close that you know where the friction is occurring, and then you, as the HR practitioner, just have to give yourself permission to act on that, instead of waiting for a formal strategic planning process that's likely never going to happen, which you probably don't have that right exactly. So the bottom line here is that great HR, in a small environment, it's really a pattern of decisions. It's not a title, and it's not a seat at the table, which is a phrase that I absolutely hate. We've been saying it for decades, and I wish that we would just retire it in small businesses, you're making those decisions every day, and all of that is strategic. Marie Rolston 20:39 All right, so if you were listening to this, and you're thinking to yourself, Okay, Marie and Sabrina, this makes sense. But what the heck do I actually do? I want to talk about structure now. Sabrina Baker 20:49 Yeah, because here's here's what we know to be true that internally at Acacia and working with clients, structure is what creates capacity so small business HR practitioners, what we hear from them is often we don't have time. What I hear from our team is often we don't have time. We don't have time. And what we know is that structures creates that capacity, not more hours, not working harder, usually not even more people. It's structure. Marie Rolston 21:15 Yeah, and we can't stress it enough, guys, we are not here talking about building big systems. We are talking about capturing the decisions that you already made, so you don't have to remake them every single time, right? Sabrina Baker 21:29 And what I love about this, Marie is that it can be so minor, like our onboarding example earlier, you can have a very elaborate onboarding process, or you can simply ensure that the parts that are creating the most friction right now have a little bit of structure to them. Marie Rolston 21:45 Mm, hmm. Okay, so here's where I want you to start. I want you to look at your calendar from last week. I want you to find the one thing that took the most time and felt the most messy, and that's going to be your starting point. So when you're making your list, maybe it's offer letters. Maybe it's onboarding, like that onboarding project that I lost, or maybe it's the manager questions about the PTO. But whatever it is, you're probably doing it from scratch every single time. And here's an example for you, something that I've worked for work through. So for one client, I was getting constant questions about PTO just all the time. People were asking me things about carryover, exception, sick time, edge cases, the PTO policy existed, but every situation felt so different, and every answer kind of felt like it just required me to start over and over and over. But when I sat down and tried to think about a solution, we didn't end up rewriting the policy, and we definitely didn't implement any kind of software. But instead, we just built a one page decision guide for folks, and this this one pager. It had three common scenarios, and so it had things like what HR decides versus what the manager decides, and then when an exception actually needs escalation. And overall, when I think about it, you know that one pager It took less than an hour to make, and because of that, manager questions dropped by half within a month. And it had the same policy, but just with less friction. Sabrina Baker 23:25 That simple thing creates a little bit of capacity. I always talk about how in small businesses, the growth of a small business happens through its people. Certainly, sales is important and marketing is important, but definitely in a small business, as you are scaling, you need people infrastructure to grow the business well, and I'll get back, I'll get a lot of pushback from HR leaders. If I talk about this at conferences or webinars or whatever, I get a lot of pushback from HR leaders saying, Yeah, that would be great if I had time to put that structure in place. And unfortunately, there is not a way to add actual time, right? There is not a way to add actual time to your day, but if you create even just a little bit of structure, then that's going to add capacity to do other things in that time, you're not going to be repeating yourself or creating, like you said, doing everything from scratch that you don't have to. So that's really what structure does in small business HR. It doesn't make the work disappear. It makes it repeatable, so that you're not spending all of this mental energy on things that you've already figured out. Marie Rolston 24:26 Yep, exactly. And one thing that's important to understand, and I know it's so hard, but you have to give yourself permission to build small. You do not need to fix everything. Instead, like I said before, you pick one area that's creating the most drag, and add enough structure to it just to make it 10% easier. And once you've done that, you can move on to the next thing, right? Sabrina Baker 24:49 Because in small business, HR, small pockets of structure compound one checklist leads to faster decisions. Faster decisions create time, and time creates. Space to think, what an amazing thing to have, right? It's just a little bit of space to think a little bit, and that's when the Small Business HR practitioner starts to feel less reactive, because you're not looking for perfection in this. We can't possibly look for perfection. We have to look for repeatability. And that's how you start to get ahead of the chaos instead of just managing it. Okay, so here's what we want you to take away from this. If managing HR in your small environment feels hard, it's because it is and different than all other HR we wanted to spend this first episode on the HR Happy Hour Network, which we're so happy to be a part of really setting up that you are in a different position. You are in a different space than traditional or enterprise HR, and that we recognize that and you are exactly who we are building content for. Marie Rolston 25:55 And if you are constantly scratching your head wondering to yourself, why is this so different? It's because small business HR is its own thing. It needs a completely different skill set, a completely different mindset and a completely different definition of success. The moment you stop comparing yourself to enterprise HR or even your last HR job, you're going to be able to see the work that you're actually doing. Sabrina Baker 26:22 Yeah, you are closer to the business, you're closer to the decisions, you're closer to the impact, and that creates pressure, but it also creates great influence. Marie Rolston 26:33 And pressure makes diamonds, right? So with that, just know we're going to keep talking about that influence in future episodes, we're going to cover how to think about strategy when you're also doing tactical work. We're going to talk about how to handle head count pressure, how to manage up when leadership behavior is creating problems. And we're going to talk about how to know when systems are breaking as you grow. Sabrina Baker 26:56 If you found us through the HR Happy Hour Media Network, again, we're so happy to be here, but if you want more, we will be releasing monthly episodes on this network through the HR Happy Hour, and then we have this same podcast runs weekly on our own network. So you can find weekly episodes on Spotify Apple podcasts, where anywhere you listen to your podcast, the HR Connection is there. And we have weekly episodes. We continually go deeper on the real challenges of small business HR and only small business HR in every single episode. Marie Rolston 27:29 If this really resonated with you, send it to someone else in your network doing small business HR alone, because they're going to need to hear it too. Marie Rolston 27:40 I hope this was helpful. Thank you so much for listening. Marie Rolston 27:42 We'll see you next time. Transcribed by https://otter.ai