Welcome back to the HR Connection, the podcast for HR professionals and business owners managing human resources in organizations with 1 to 500 employees. I'm Sabrina Baker, founder and CEO of Acacia HR Solutions, and today's episode is one that I've wanted to record for a long time. It's kind of been in my brain. It's something that we have worked through at Acacia for the last several years, and we've kind of hinted at it and talked a little bit about it on the podcast, but I really want to go deeper today. And I want to talk specifically about what it actually looks like to run a solo HR function when you have high volume. There's a lot coming at you. I know that I typically see HR departments of 1 in the 20 employees, 30, maybe 40 employees, but I have heard from you, some of our listeners, people who have connected with me on LinkedIn, that you're sitting in 100 employees, 150 employees by yourself. That's a lot. Typical HR ratios that I've heard are 1 to 125, and so if you are, you know, over 150 by yourself, that's a lot. I even think 1 to 100, 1 to 125 is a lot. So in these high-volume spaces where the requests keep coming, the work never seems to end, and you have no backup, what do you do? How do you manage that when it's never-ending and it feels so, so heavy? So I'm going to talk you through our actual operating system for how to structure your work. So we sit in similar positions. Our business partners, our generalists, have 6, 7 clients at a time. Within those 6, 7 clients, you're talking about hundreds of employees they're managing, and all of those clients think they're the only clients, so they're constantly coming at us with their requests. And because we want to feel like in-house HR, we don't limit them to certain time windows or, you know, we only work with them on these days. We want them to feel like we are responding to their request as they come in. But we've had to really learn how to operate within that and how to get it all done without making ourselves crazy and with clients feeling like they're getting what they need. Before I get too deep into today's episode, I want to point you to an episode we did on the HR Happy Hour Network. So we are a part of the HR Happy Hour Media Network. We have episodes. They are exclusive episodes, meaning that they are different than what is posted here on the HR Connection. Those get posted monthly. We're going to make sure that we link that for you in the show notes so you can also subscribe there. They have so many good podcasts on the HR Happy Hour Media Network. Ours is just one of them. But we did an episode there called Ready Mode. It talks about our framework that we call Ready Mode Guidelines. It's something that I adapted from a TED Talk from an ER doctor. And that framework, that Ready Mode Guidelines, it's really important for today's episode. So I would encourage you to go and get the full deep dive. I'm going to give you, like, a high level in this one, but I would encourage you to go back to that episode. You don't have to do it right now. You're not going to have to listen to that one first. It's okay to keep listening here and then grab that one later. But I do think they're really important companion pieces, and so we'll make sure that's linked so you can go back and listen to that one. But today we're going to get really, really operational. I want to talk about that triage system for prioritizing HR functions when you have limited capacity. I want to talk about which tasks you should be templating or automating, really kind of the structure of HR. And then really talk about and highlight which ones actually require your judgment every single time, because I think that number is lower than you think it is. And then how to structure the solo function so that your highest volume days don't absolutely break you. Let's get into it. Here's where I want to start, and we have talked about this quite a bit on the podcast. Most people would say that to be successful in small business HR, you need good time management, and that if you are stressed or overwhelmed, it's probably a time management issue. You've heard us specifically say this if you've been listening to this podcast, and I always push back on that because it's not time management. The reality is that the volume of work in a small business is always going to be large. There's always going to be more to do. There's never going to be a day, probably, where you say, "I'm all caught up. I've got nothing to do." There's always going to be something else because that's the nature of small business. And that's not just HR and small business. That is every person inside of a small business. Never gets to a place where there's like, "Oh, there's nothing else to do here," especially if that business is scaling. So what small business HR practitioners have is not a time management issue. They're never going to be able to fix even the best time management systems are not going to be able to fix the fact that there's just so much work. What they have is an issue in building capacity within themselves and then this classification problem of the work. And so here's what I mean by that. Everything coming in feels urgent all the time. If you have sat inside of a small business for even 5 minutes, you know that in a lot of them, people are running around as though the place is on fire and they are trying to get everything done. You have in HR, you have a manager who wants to terminate someone. You've got an employee asking about their PTO balance. You've got a request to update a job description. There's a benefits question. And all of that is hitting at the same time, right? Your Slack, your Teams, whatever it is you use for chat, that's dinging. Your email is going off. Somebody's standing in the door of your office. And it's all happening right now. And it all feels so urgent. And what makes that worse is that the people around you reinforce that belief. So your CEO genuinely thinks everything is urgent. Your managers think everything is urgent. Your employees have learned, and sometimes this is because we've trained them, that if they put enough pressure or if they ask enough times, then they'll get it. You'll drop what you're doing and they'll do what they need you to do. And so you spend your day reacting to everything. You, you know, pick up that thing that is loudest right now and then next loudest and then next loudest, but then something louder comes in and so you go back and you start your list over. And so you end the day absolutely exhausted with a list of things that you did, but you feel like you actually didn't do anything. There's this feeling of like running on a treadmill and never getting anywhere. That is not a capacity problem and it's not a time management problem. It is a triage problem. It is how we look at tasks and how we think about the work. And that's very fixable with a very disciplined structured system. Here's the shift that I really want you to make today, and that is not all HR work is created equal. Not all of it is urgent. And until you start treating it differently, you're going to stay stuck in this reaction mode no matter how many hours you put in or how good your time management system is. Okay, so let me do a really quick flyover of Ready Mode Guidelines. Just in case you haven't heard the HR Happy Hour episode yet, I'm not going to go into the full detail that that episode did, but I just want to give you a high level of the triage system because that is your starting point. Your starting point is to figure out what things are truly urgent and what things are not. So our Ready Mode Guidelines have four categories, and this is, as I said, based off of an ER doctor and the codes that they use inside of an emergency room. So it sorts everything on your plate, all of your tasks, into four categories. The first one is code red. That is absolute urgency. It is stop, do it right now. Absolutely important. So code reds are things like, "It is payday Friday and nobody got paid for some reason," right? That is a stop everything and figure that out. Code reds are, "There is bullying or harassment or a violence threat happening right now." Absolutely, that's priority. You stop what you're doing and you handle that. But code reds are those things that are truly urgent for everybody involved, and there are very few of them inside of HR. Code yellow, these are things that are important. They're on your list for the next couple of days. It's not something you have to drop everything and do right now. It's something you add into your weekly plan. They are very important. Maybe they're deadline-driven, and so they're absolutely on that to-do list, and you are going to figure out, calendar in when you're going to work on them. Code green, those are things that matter, but you've got a few weeks. These are, you know, maybe the deadline is pushed out, or maybe they're things that are important and you're going to get to them, but they're not as urgent maybe as a code yellow or a code red. So this could be, you know, it's April and you've got open enrollment, and you want to be thinking about new benefits. You want to be thinking about a different mix, but open enrollment doesn't actually start until September. It's April now, so you're going to fill in when you can work on open enrollment in time. It's not something you have to actually, you know, put on your to-do list in this next week. And then the last code is code black. These are things that just are no longer worth your energy. They're not something that you're going to continue to work on. And I think this one, you know, we talk about in that HR Happy Hour episode where HR practitioners can get stuck here because it's something that they maybe want to work on, but it's not being supported by their CEO or it's no longer important to the business, and they have to let it go. So code black are those kind of dead tasks that just no longer are worth your energy. So that's the framework. Four colors, red, yellow, green, black. If you want the full breakdown, please go and listen to that other episode. But it is really a protection mechanism for a solo function specifically. Thinking about how we prioritize tasks based on these codes is going to help you decide truly what is urgent and what can I get to in time. So what I want to spend our time on today, though, is that next layer down. So once you've triaged your work, how do you actually structure it so the right things get your judgment and the rest don't eat up your day, right? So as new requests come in, the idea is that you're going to triage it based on, is this a code red, yellow, green, black? And then once you know what it is, what then? That's where I want to spend the rest of this episode is once you know what it is, what do you do with it then? So here's where we start. Once you have sorted your work by urgency, and you can make that code red, yellow, green, black, whatever you want. It could just be numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4. It could be anything that you want to call it. It could be something cute. You know, this is a place where I think that sometimes being a little whimsical could actually help you stick with the structure. So name it whatever you want to. The Ready Mode codes work for us, but you name it whatever you want to. The goal, though, is that once you have sorted your work by that urgency and you know what each task is assigned, then you want to start and think about which of the work actually needs you. Now, we have definitely talked about this on the podcast before around what work actually requires HR and what work is getting dumped on HR. In fact, the previous episode to this one, I talked about how leadership often points things to HR that's not actually theirs to own. We call it a communication issue. We call it a retention issue when really it's a leadership issue or an accountability issue. So what work actually needs you? Because I think you're going to find that a lot of it may not. And it's not that that's a diminishment of the work. It's the whole point of this. If you are making decisions from scratch every single time someone asks, then you're wasting your judgment on things that don't require it. Or if you are stepping in to handle things that leaders or managers should and could, then you are wasting your energy on things that don't require it. So here's how I think about the tasks that are coming in. And as I have them, you know, kind of coded by their color, I think about two different buckets. The first bucket is something that is fully templatable. So these are the HR functions that follow a very defined process every single time. And inside of HR, we have quite a few of these that are very consistent every time. They don't really require a judgment call based on circumstances. For the most part, the process, the answer, all of that is going to be the same. So this is going to be stuff like onboarding and offboarding, time off requests, benefits admin, standard leaves of absence processing, workers' comp intakes, recruiting workflows. Could you in these have a little bit of nuance where you've got like a sticky leave situation or a different type of recruiting workflow you need to follow for one role? Sure. But for the most part, 95% of your leaves of absence, your recruiting positions, your benefits admin, it's the same every single time. At Acacia, we have what we call the Acacia Way process. And we have created an Acacia Way process for all of our routine reoccurring work. So this is Acacia Way process for leaves of absence, Acacia Way process for compensation studies, Acacia Way process for recruiting. We have an Acacia Way for all of those things that are very routine. That way, when an employee of mine needs to go and navigate one of those processes or an employee at a client asks, "Hey, I need to get a leave of absence, what's the process?" We don't have to think about it. We don't have to create it each time. We don't draft this custom answer every single time. We have a document that we walk through step by step and we go through that process each time. And where we can, we have automated the process. It also creates this ability for somebody else to step in. And I know if I'm talking to solo HR practitioners, then you're like, "Yeah, who's that? That person's not going to there's nobody to step in." But honestly, if you had to be out and your CEO had to manage a leave without you or had to, you know, manage a benefits admin thing without you, could they? And a lot of times the answer is no. But having this document, like our Acacia Way documents, where you have things written out, it helps you know that you're following the same process every time and you're not using your brain power on figuring out what the process should be. But it also, if somebody did have to step in, it also helps them know what that process is. So inside those processes, again, you want to automate where you can. In our recruiting workflow process, for example, we have templated emails. So we have emails that we would send when we want to interview somebody. We have emails for if some of our clients do like skills testing or they do panel interviews, some different kinds of things. We have all of that templated out so that when our team is recruiting, they don't sit there and recreate emails every single time. They just copy and paste the emails that we have, put them into the HRS system of the client, and send it. And it makes it so much faster and easier, and it helps us to know that we're being very consistent with what we're doing. So if you don't have something like this built, here's the test that I want you to do. Ask yourself, as you're doing a process, I want you to ask yourself, is this the same answer every time? When someone asks me for a time off request, am I giving them the same answer every time? And if you are, that's a workflow you can template. That is something that you can put into a system. It doesn't have to be in your head, and you don't need a fresh response every time someone asks. You can just send a very standard answer, a very standard email, a very standard process. Now, it's not about trying to be impersonal. It's not about, you know, trying to push things off and not be like the friendly HR face. It's about protecting your capacity for the work that actually requires you. I said in the last episode, you know, we get a lot of HR people who say, "I want to be more strategic. I can't be more strategic. I don't know how to be." It's because you don't have the capacity to be strategic because you're drowning in all of this stuff. So every minute you spend re-explaining the same PTO policy, the same benefits information, is a minute you don't have for the side of the business that actually needs your judgment. Okay, so let's talk about judgment. Bucket two then of your tasks is the judgment every time bucket. That's things like employee relations, anything involving conflict, performance, conduct, terminations a lot of times. If you have complex leave situations or complex workers' comp. So performance management, especially, you know, if you're trying to navigate performance management alongside a manager who either wants to move too fast or not at all, these are all areas where the facts of the situation change the answer. You are not going to handle every single termination the same. Can you have the offboarding part of it templated? Yes. But the actual navigating of the termination is probably going to be different based on the circumstance. So your context, your ability to offer your judgment, places where you need to ask questions, understand the history, think before you move, you can't template your way through those. And you can't automate a difficult conversation. So these require you. They require your judgment, your experience, your read on the situation. So thinking about two different buckets of time, you've got or two different buckets of tasks. You have your fully templatable things, things that are on repeat. They're just going all the time, and they're common, consistent things that pop up or questions that get asked. You answer or handle them in the same way every single time. So you template that out. You automate it as much as you can, and you take that off of your brain. And then the other bucket of tasks is those that actually require your judgment. And that's where the bulk of your time should be spent. Because those are usually the things that actually do impact the business. So when you think about the judgment every time bucket, employee relations, conflict, performance, conduct, that's moving a business forward. That's the strategic stuff we're talking about. That's the interpersonal relationships inside of an organization. And that's where the bulk of your time really should be spent. In most processes, like I said, you're going to have part of the process that can be fully templatable and part of the process that might be a judgment call. So I had mentioned leaves. This is the easiest example I think that I can give. There is such nuance sometimes with leave, but the paperwork, the timeline, the communications, the required notices, all of that can be documented and followed consistently. But then if you have a situation where, you know, leave is intersecting with performance issues or accommodation or, you know, some other thing that just makes it a little bit stickier, then of course you step in and that requires your judgment. So with most of your processes, you're going to be able to look and say, "Okay, this part I can template. This part I can automate. This part, if it comes up, is going to need me to jump in and require my judgment." And that's totally fine. So let me give you an exercise that I think you can do with this to help you kind of wrap your brain around what I'm saying. You can go through the last two weeks of work. So go through the last two weeks of work, look at your calendar, look at your email, look at your chat channel. And for every reoccurring task or question, sort it into one of those two buckets. If it's templatable and you don't have a template for it yet, that's the first thing you do. If it's judgment work and you've been treating it like a quick task you can knock out between meetings, that's a sign that you need to protect more time for that, not less. So look at all of the tasks you've done in the past two weeks or take what you're working on right now as you're listening to this or what you're going to work on next. Is that something that is templatable? And if it is, do you have it templated? If not, do it. Do it while you're doing it. Template it while you're working on it so that the next time it's much easier for you to process. I'm going to guess that most of what crosses your desk in any given week is templatable. The judgment work is a smaller portion of your time overall, but it's the highest stakes portion. And it's exactly the kind of work that suffers when you're buried in these routine questions all day long. Okay, so we have our triage system, right? We have our ready mode guidelines, red, yellow, green, and black. And that gives you a category for your tasks. How urgent are they really? And then we have our two buckets. So within each of those, is this something that's templatable and routine, or is this something that requires my judgment? Now let's talk about structure. How do you actually structure the work then? Because you can have a triage system and you can have all kinds of templates built out, but if your environment is interrupting you constantly, none of that holds, right? Those all fall apart if you're allowing your environment to just crash and burn all over your structure and your systems every single day. The most common structural failure I see, especially in solo HR functions, is that the HR person has made themselves available to everyone at all times for everything. They've done it with really great intentions. You want to be responsive. You want people to feel supportive. But what you've actually done is train the organization to believe that you have no boundaries, no workflow, and no competing priorities. And then you wonder why you can't ever get anything done. I will tell you that we had this issue early on in the business where I wanted to be really responsive and my team wanted to be really responsive. So we would try to answer everything as it came in. But as you can imagine, with multiple clients, multiple Slack channels and chats, and everything was all we could never get to the work because we were always answering this question or that question. And so we had to learn, one, it's part of the catalyst for putting these ready mode guidelines and the structure in place is because I had to learn myself and teach all of my employees that if we treat everything as urgent, they will continue to believe it. And if we continue to allow ourselves to be immediately responsive, and I mean like we would get an email and respond within five minutes, then we're never actually going to get any work done because that flow is never going to stop. So let me tell you what actually works for us. And this is something that I use personally and then that we have trained all of our team on. And it has helped us to really there are a couple of things, but the first one has really helped me in particular figure out how I'm going to get all of the code yellows done, but also open up time for a code red should I need it. And that is in time blocking. And it's in how you block your time, how you calendar your time. So I used to be somebody that could just throw a list down on a piece of paper beside me and, you know, get to things as I got to them. And that seemed to work. But as I got busier, and definitely if I were sitting inside an HR department of one needing to do all the things, that list would only sit there and just continue to grow. I would mark one thing off of it and then three more things would come up. And so I had to really use I really had to learn how to use time blocking and use my calendar. And so when most people do time blocking, one of the things that I find is that they will just cut out a chunk of time and they will say, "Okay, this is HR work time, right? I'm not going to allow any meetings. I'm going to shut my door. I'm going to put myself on unavailable in chat and I'm just going to put HR work on the calendar." And that's great, but then you have to use your brain to sit down at that time and think, "What HR work should I really be doing?" So what I want you to think about is time blocking your calendar based on tasks. So if you have your ready mode, so you know what tasks are yellow, which is probably your priority for the week, then you sit down and you actually carve out time on your calendar. In your calendar invite, you say what tasks or tasks you're going to be working on. So a couple of ways that you could do this is you could have like an admin block. So maybe there's just some admin type catch-up work that you need to do, and maybe that's like an hour of time. I always talk about admin time as I call it like a power hour. It's all of those little bitty tasks that no one ever wants to do, but they need to get done. And there's, you know, just a bunch of them that pile up and they each take maybe five minutes. And so I will block those out. I'll have one power hour of admin tasks where I'm just going to knock all of those out at one time, get it over with, get it done, get it off my calendar. But you could time block based on maybe you have two leave requests and you're going to need an hour to process those leave requests or to talk to the employees. Block that out. You've got some recruiting that you need to do. Block that out. Block a chunk of time out, but be very specific in what you're blocking the time for. So again, I think a lot of people will block time on their calendar and they'll say, "This is my work time. This is my focus time." But what are you doing during that time? I think if you go into that time and you don't have a plan, then it makes it really, really hard to get the things you need to get done. So you want to think ahead of time. What am I going to do during that block? And you want to do that for an entire week. Give yourself blocks of time every single day. I know that we have a lot of environments where it's a lot of meetings, it's a lot of just back-to-back stuff, and then it's like, "How do you get the work done?" And that is a struggle I completely understand. And it is a skill to learn how to hold a boundary to say, "I don't know that I need to be in this meeting. I actually need to prioritize getting to these other tasks and having those conversations." So blocking that time on your calendar. During those blocks, you are not available for impromptu interruptions. So if that means closing Slack down or Teams chat or whatever it is, if it means letting your email sit, if it means closing your door, it means that you cannot stop what you're doing. During that time block, you have to do what you've planned to do. And you cannot stop what you're doing to handle something else. Okay? Typically, your time blocks are not going to be four, five, six hours. So it's not like people are going five, six hours without hearing from you. Your time blocks are probably an hour, 90 minutes, maybe two hours if you're lucky. At a time, they can go that long. Nine times out of ten, there's not a code red that's going to happen during that time. And so by blocking this out and not being available, then it allows you to retrain them that not everything is urgent and that not everything is going to get your attention immediately. Another piece that I think is important for HR departments of one to think about as you are trying to think about your time blocks is kind of co-batching tasks or co-locating tasks. I think that context switching can be really hard. You know, we all know that multitasking is a myth, even though we all think we can do it and we think we can do it really well. But study after study has shown that when we focus on one task start to finish, we do a better job of that than if we start this task and then jump to this one. And so in your time blocking, this is why I say it's important to block similar tasks inside your block. So if you are, you know, doing recruiting, then maybe it's all recruiting admin in one hour. And maybe in the next two-hour block, you have you're doing phone screens back to back, just knocking them all out. Rather than having one on Monday and one on Tuesday and three on Thursday, if you can get schedules to align to where you've got like four phone screens just back to back, I think that's better because then your mind is in that mode. Your mind is in that mode of doing whatever that task is and you're not trying to jump from one task to the other. So as much as you can, you want to kind of co-locate or co-batch similar tasks so your brain stays in one mode instead of constantly resetting to what am I doing now. Then here's the piece that I think is unique. It's something that we absolutely had to implement at Acacia and it's gone very well for us since doing so. And so I really want to encourage you to think about this. I think it's going to sound a little weird when I first announce it, but I really want you to think about it. All of this only works if you set expectations formally with your leaders, with your employees, with your CEO. And when I say set expectations formally, I mean you are sharing about how you're going to work. You are sharing about how you will be, you know, holding, looking at tasks based on your category system, red, yellow, green, black. You are going to be looking at tasks based on what can you group together and get done. And the thing that we decided to do at Acacia that changed the game for us was create service level agreements with our clients. So SLAs, your, if you have a customer service team, if you have a product team, they likely have service level agreements. And I really think it's something that every department inside an organization should have. And so the way that we use service level agreements is that they are defined timeframes for how quickly we respond to things, how quickly we get to full resolution, how do they escalate things, how do we decide what is a code red, what is a code yellow, what is a code green, black. So when we have a new client come on, I get on a Zoom with them and go over this. I tell them about our triaging system. And I say, "I know to you everything sounds urgent and like it has to be done right now, but the reality is it doesn't. And here's how we decide." And then I give them our SLAs and I tell them, "You can expect an email response from us within four hours." Are we usually faster? Yes. Can we always be faster? No. So four hours is the timeframe. And what that does is it sets those expectations that they're not going to be calling me to complain when they haven't gotten an email response in two hours. They know that our SLA is four hours. Now, I know it sounds formal and it sounds, I think, way more formal than it actually is. Because what it means in practice is that routine questions get that response in four hours. They don't need a response right away. They actually have a timeframe and they know it's okay to sit on this and I'm going to get a response in a time that feels really good to me. Requests for, you know, documents or standard information or final resolution of things happens within 24 hours or 48 hours depending. So there's this really clear timeframe where they know, "Okay, I should not expect anything before this timeframe." And if I get something earlier, great. But if not, that's okay too. And it has changed the game for how clients look at our responsiveness. Now, there are absolutely escalation procedures inside of our SLAs, meaning that if they have something that they need, it really is a code red and they need an answer for within four hours, there's mechanisms for them to get that in front of us. They can text, they can chat. We're much faster in chat than we are in email. So it's not to say that everything is going to get a four-hour response time or everything is going to get a 24-hour resolution time. It is just to say that most things, it's okay for them to wait for four hours or 24 hours. But if they need some kind of, you know, sooner resolution truly needed, then okay, here's how you escalate that. Here's how you get a hold of us when you need something much faster than our four hours. I really think that you as an HR department of one or even a small HR team should sit down and create your SLAs. We actually, I've done this with several groups. I've done it with accounting departments. I've done it with sales departments, marketing departments, HR departments. And it's such a game changer when you sit down and say, "Okay, what is reasonable?" And look, four hours is our time. I'm not saying that's a universal time. Your time might be two hours. Your time might be six hours. I don't know what the right time is. But you sit down and you say, "What is reasonable for me to be able to answer emails? What is reasonable for me to be able to answer chat messages? What is reasonable when I have something that I maybe need to look into?" So somebody comes and gives me a benefits issue and I've got to call the broker or I've got to call the carrier. Well, that's maybe a 24-hour or 48-hour resolution. So you set your SLAs based on what makes sense for you. But I'm telling you that when you do that, when you can set those SLAs and then you share them with your leaders, with your employees, and you say, "Here's the response time that you can expect from us." And then you actually hold to it. So you don't drop what you're doing and answer things, but you hold to your SLAs, then that consistency is what changes that outside behavior. So if you say you'll respond within 24 hours when whatever it is, and then you respond in 10 minutes just because someone pushed, you've taught them that pushing works. So you have to hold the line you set and then people will adjust and they'll adjust faster than you think. And I'm telling you, when we started doing this, you know, I think for our existing clients, we were very nervous about how they were going to take to it because they were very used to getting really quick responses. But it's been fine. Once we delivered the SLAs and we told them why we needed to do this and they see that we really do hold to them, and again, we have very reasonable turnarounds, they've been fine. And I don't get feedback on, "Oh, you're not responding within this or you're not doing this." That's not happening. So you could establish what your SLAs are. That's also going to help you triage your tasks because then you cannot have email on all day. You don't need to. You can check it in the morning, you can check it midday, and you know that if you do that, you're going to be within your four-hour window of responding. Again, whatever your timeframe is, that determines how many times you need to check your email. Or you're going to have your time blocked on, you know, maybe recruiting because you have an SLA around how fast you will get phone screens done or how fast you will get a job posted. And that's going to help you plan out your time blocking. So it just can be an absolute game changer. It is something that I don't see a lot of departments doing, but I can tell you in the small businesses, a lot of times when we see issues, we will suggest this. And when they put it in place, it absolutely changes how they work. So one more piece on this, and I think this is really important, is that we do have those code reds. And so you kind of have to design for chaos instead of fighting it. Like we are living in a small business life, and small businesses are not linear organizations. Leaders are figuring things out in real time. I tell my team all the time, there's no playbook. When you decide to become an entrepreneur, nobody gives you a guidebook, nobody gives you lessons. You just do it, right? You go and you get a license, a business license, and then you just start doing the thing. And you go online and like with everything else, you're trying to learn how to do marketing and sales and finance, and you can read six different articles and they're all different and you don't know which one to do. So we are literally figuring it out in real time, and that's never more true than inside of a small organization. You have very inconsistent communication. There's new priorities that show up without warning. That's not going to change. We're not going to fix that small business life. And I would say, I don't know that we want to. I think that's what makes it cool. I think that's what makes it fun and exciting sometimes. But you have to learn how to kind of design for that chaos rather than fighting against it. And this structure, having a ready mode guideline, having templates where you can, having automation where you can, and then having some time blocking and some SLAs that make sense for you, that's how you design for the chaos. Now, a piece of designing for chaos is allowing space for a code red. We know they are going to happen. Again, I don't think they happen nearly as often as we think they might in the beginning, but as we have gone and we have triaged our tasks, I very rarely see code red tasks come up for our employees. But we do have to design for them. There are times when something happens and we do have to stop. So you can't have your day so packed that you're not able to take on a code red should it come. You need to have a system that allows for some flexibility that you're not running so close to deadlines that you can't possibly push something off when a code red comes in. So you absolutely have to kind of design for chaos, design for times when things are going to happen that you didn't plan for, and you build in that buffer. You know that crazy days are going to happen. And so rather than being surprised by it, you absolutely plan for it. A system that you create that only works when things go smoothly is not actually a system. It's just a hope. When the structure is in place, when you've got it in place, like things like categorized time blocks, batched work, defined SLAs, and a list you actively manage instead of one that manages you, that's the difference between solo HR practitioners who burn out in two years and the ones who stay effective for the long haul. The work is never going to go away and it's never going to get smaller. The system around it has to get stronger. So on this podcast, one of the things that I'm really adamant about is giving you things you can walk away with. I want people who are in this space who don't have a lot of resources, they don't have a lot of outlets, there's not a lot of people talking specifically to them in a small environment. I want to be a voice that gives you something you can actually do. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, "This is me. I really need to do this. I want to put this in place," let me give you kind of a one, two, three step here that you can do. The first one is to think about your triage system. So take the four categories, red, yellow, green, black, and apply them to your current list. What are the things that are currently on your list right now, this week, that you feel like are tasks that have to be done? And then categorize them. What is actually red? And what have you been treating like red that's probably not, right? And then are there any code blacks? Are there any things that you need to let go of entirely? So that's the first thing. Take that to-do list and let's categorize them. Again, you can change the colors. You could just make it a numbered list, but let's categorize them by truly what they are so that we understand what we have coming in. Then step two would be to audit your reoccurring work. So this is looking at things like the last two weeks, looking at the things that are coming up. Anything that's fully templatable, automated, or can be automated, you want to build that process. Stop recreating it from scratch. Stop writing emails from scratch. Stop pulling up forms or creating forms. Make sure that you have that templatable and that it's automated where it can be. And then everything that requires your judgment, protect that time. So do not let templatable work crowd out the thinking work, right? This is how we open up capacity. This is how we open up time to actually be strategic. Because when somebody asks for PTO or somebody asks for help with their benefits, we've got that documented. It takes five seconds for us to get them what they need and we move on. And that is protecting the work and the time that requires your judgment. And then once you have that figured out, you take that system to your leadership team. So not complaining about your workload, but as a framework for how you operate. You say, "Here's how I'm triaging tasks. Here's what gets immediate attention and here's what gets added to my to-do list. Here's what goes on a priority list versus here's what goes on the hay in the next two weeks list." And if you're really committed to this, I do think that you could create some service level agreements and share with them what that looks like. And I'll tell you that we did this a couple of years ago. I did it with an accounting department that was getting they were accounts receivable for a very I'm sorry. They were accounts payable for a very large organization. Large in our terms, meaning like 450 employees. And so they were constantly getting requests to pay this check, right? You know, pay this vendor, do this. And we created service level agreements for them. I went in and I did a workshop where we created service level agreements. And as soon as they communicated that to the people who they needed to share it with, I immediately had three other groups from that same organization say, "We need these two. Can you come in and help us?" And so sometimes it just takes one person inside of an organization to kind of get the ball rolling and then everybody else will get on board. I guarantee you that if you as HR say, "Hey, here are the service level agreements I would like to go by. I would like to be able to respond to email in three hours and I'd like to be able to respond to chat in one hour and I'd like for that to be okay," then you're probably going to have your marketing leader or your finance leader or somebody else be like, "Okay, yeah, I need to do that too. I'm drowning as well." So you are not alone in this. And I think that if you are brave enough to set some service level agreements and then share those, then I think those conversations absolutely can reset the environment you're working in. You may have to make adjustments. So you may go in and say, "Hey, I want to have a four-hour return time in email." And your CEO may be like, "No, two hours is enough." That's fair. That's fine. You can totally compromise on what the time needs to be because you want them to feel really good about it. But the goal is to give you space. The goal is to give you space to where you don't feel like you have to answer immediately. You are so much more effective as a solo HR practitioner when you are operating with intention. And you absolutely cannot operate with intention if you are letting everyone else decide what matters and when. So if you want to go deeper on the ready mode philosophy behind all of this, as I mentioned, there's a mindset shift in there. I talk about going from crazy mode to ready mode. And then, of course, I go deeper into the four colors. Go find that episode on HR Happy Hour. We'll make sure it's linked below. If this episode was useful to you, please share it with someone else who's running HR alone. I'm sure that they need it too. Subscribe if you haven't. And I will see you next time on the HR Connection.