I would estimate that about 80% of my sales calls start with the potential client saying, "We kind of have a mess on our hands." Whether that mess be a letter from Wage and Hour or the DOL, or a lawyer, whether that mess be employee relations issues that are absolutely out of control, whether that mess be leaders spending way too much time on people-related issues, payroll errors, benefit administration nightmares, whatever that mess be, it is often the catalyst that sends them to finally seek HR support. Now, I know why this happens. I've talked about this before, that many employers, small employers, just don't prioritize HR. They don't think they need it. They think it's easy. They think as long as they're being legally compliant, they've got it all covered. And they don't really think about it until they have a mess on their hands. Now, certainly that mess is job security for us, but it would be really great if we could think about HR a little bit earlier and maybe not get to the point where it is unbearably messy and we have potentially hurt our morale, our engagement, we have potentially a big lawsuit on our hands, um, it would be really nice if we started thinking about that a little bit earlier until the proverbial shit hits the fan. So what I thought I would do in today's episode is tell you what those things are, give you the biggest HR gaps that we see that either send the clients our way or when we start with a new client and we go through our onboarding process, what are things that we find that are going to be fixed through our services. So what are those gaps that that we find that we prioritize? I'm going to break this down by compliance, infrastructure, and strategy. Strategy informs infrastructure, infrastructure builds on compliance. So I'm going to talk about each of these three areas and how the gaps that can exist in in all of these areas and most of it not through deliberate action, more through ignorance, lack of knowledge, lack of attention, how these gaps can create this huge mess that can sometimes be really, really difficult to unravel. It is my hope that if you are watching or listening to this and you are a leader inside of a small employer, maybe you are at the human resource person, maybe you are just a leader in another area, another department, maybe you're the founder or CEO, if you are listening to this and you say, "Oh, that gap sounds familiar," or "That really resonates with me," it might be time to get some HR support. If you already have HR support, it might be time to conduct an audit or get some fresh eyes to look at what's going on and see what can we do differently to fill these gaps. Before they get to be a much bigger problem. So let's start with compliance. In the beginning of a new client relationship, we come in and the first thing we do in the first 30 days is an HR audit. In that HR audit, we cover all of the legal compliance components that the employer has to follow, both federally and the states that they're located in.  It also has infrastructure pieces, workflow pieces, and then culture. So we do this massive audit that really covers all components of human resources, but where we're going to dial in first is on the compliance pieces. We want to make sure as soon as we can that we get our clients legally compliant. And so if we go in and find any compliance issues, anything that is not being followed as it should be or at all, we're going to start to fix that first. And the reason is I want the back of the house in order. I call all of that kind of compliance, administration stuff, the back of the house, I want that in order so that that my team can then focus on building infrastructure creating HR strategy. If they are constantly dealing with compliance issues, then that's all they're ever going to deal with. And we're never going to get to a place where we can think bigger and be really thoughtful about the work that we're doing. So we start with compliance. We do a comprehensive audit, but we start with our compliance findings and if there are things that are out of control, not being followed, we will address those first. So let me give you a few that we see quite often. Now, again, this is not necessarily through kind of this willful deliberate action of not following the law. Nine times out of ten, it is simply because they didn't know better. Unfortunately, though, in a court of law, I didn't know is not a legal defense. And so not knowing doesn't mean you don't have to follow these things and we want to make sure that we come in, help you understand the laws that you have to follow and then fix those things very quickly if we're not following them. So let me give you a few gaps that we often see when we come in and we do that that massive audit. The first one and probably the most prominent and can also be the most costly is misclassifying employees. This would be misclassifying contractors who should be employees in many states and federally. There is a contractor test to determine if somebody is a contractor or not. And in the state of California, where we operate and where many of our clients are, it is really difficult to be considered a contractor. Most contractors who are listed as contractors in a lot of places should really be classified as employees. So misclassifying employees from contractor to employee or misclassifying from an hourly employee to a salaried employee. In our small employer clients, we will often find that for just ease, they will classify employees as salaried and they think that as long as they pay the minimum salary threshold, they're okay. And that's just simply not the case. In the Fair Labor Standards Act and especially here in the state of California, there is a minimum salary and there's also a job task a job duties test that you have to administer. And so that is looking at the tasks this person performs and the salary. And so they can meet the salary; you can pay them the salary threshold to be considered salary exempt, but they don't meet the job duties. We often see that misclassification in salespeople. Your inside salespeople, a lot of time, are should be hourly or salaried non-exempt where they are eligible for overtime. And so we will see those misclassified, certainly other areas, but we often see it in sales and some of your more junior roles that make enough to meet the salary threshold, but they do not pass the job duties test. That misclassification can be very, very costly.  Especially here in California, the EDD just does not play around with misclassification. I want to give you an example from a client we had a few years ago who um had a contractor that worked for them for a couple of years as a contractor. During COVID, this individual went and applied for unemployment. This was an opportunity uh to apply for unemployment, of course, because everything was slowed down and they weren't working as much. And when they went to audit his unemployment record to see what kind of benefits he was due, they realized that he had not been paying into uh unemployment. Because he had been listed as a contractor and the company had not been paying into it and he had not been paying into it. And so that triggered an audit. Something as small as that that is completely outside of your control can trigger an audit. Typically, with the Department of Labor, Wage and Hour, there's something that triggers it. I have not seen random audits ever on any of our size clients. Um, I've only seen audits where an employee has called in a complaint or something like this happens. Somebody harmlessly went and applied for unemployment as they were eligible to do during the time and that triggered an entire audit. The audit took two years to complete. It was um, you know, just a heavy burden from an administrative standpoint for my team to make sure they had all the reporting together and and all of the paperwork that the auditors needed that they were able to explain what they did. When we came into the business, we did, uh, identify that this person should have been an employee. We had them switch the the person to an employee. So um, by the time the audit was triggered, they had already been an employee for several months, which helped quite a bit. But at the end of the day, after all of the auditing was done, after all of the um, taxes were figured out, the original fine was in the $70,000 range. They backed out taxes that he had paid. And so I think the company only ended up paying uh, around $20,000. But uh, in the original fine, just $15,000, $16,000 alone was penalties and interest. So that is one employee who was misclassified for maybe two years, a year or two years, and went to apply for unemployment, triggered an audit, and then the company ended up paying originally would have been around $50,000, $60,000. Ended up only being $20,000, but still, that's one employee. Can you imagine if they had had three, four, five contractors that should have been employees? So this is one of the things that we see quite often is having employees in the wrong category for FLSA, which is the Fair Labor Standards Act. That is contractor to employee or having them salaried when they should be hourly and vice versa. So that is one of the things on the audit that we look at very, very thoroughly. We look at job descriptions. We look at um, the job duties just to make sure that people are going to be classified correctly and if they're not, that we can go ahead and and figure out how to fix that. The second compliance area that we see uh, quite often is I-9. Um, we will have clients who don't have all of their I-9, so all of their employees do not have I-9s, or the I-9s are filled out incorrectly. There's missing information, or sometimes if the person is on a work visa, something that expires that you are supposed to renew and check. There is a portion of the I-9 that you fill out when you get receive their new updated visa and that you fill out that portion of the I-9. That is not being done. It's not being monitored. And so we will definitely see um, through an I-9 audit that they are not either stored right, filled out right, something is off with them. And we will then need to go back in and correct all of those. This is something that I have gone through in my past life in my corporate life. So I went through an I-9 audit. I have not had one since starting the business. Our clients to my knowledge have not had an I-9 audit. But in my corporate life, I went through a massive I-9 audit. This was a company with about 3,000 employees. This was one particular call center that had maybe 500, and they came in um, and I kid you not, it was like red pen, like teacher with the red pen. Sat down with I-9s and just started circling. And it was just, I was sweating bullets just sitting there watching them circle errors, knowing that every circle meant a fine. So in most small employers, you don't have you know thousands of employees that you're going to have to deal with for I-9s. But somebody coming in if that's still the way they do it, that had been a few years, but if that's still the way they do it, coming in with a red pen and circling and knowing that every one of those circles is a fine, um, it really can add up. So I-9 compliance, simple one. It's a very simple one to get right, but it's very easy to miss things and get wrong too if you're not paying attention or you don't have somebody consistently managing them or somebody who's knowledgeable about what to do. The next piece of compliance that we see out of compliance quite often is only following the laws of the state that you're headquartered in rather than where your employees sit. So if you are a remote environment, if you have employees all over the country, you should know that there is a good chance that the state that they work in, those laws could apply. So if you are an Illinois-based company, yes, you have to comply with Illinois laws, but if you have 10 employees here in California, five employees even, you're going to have to comply with some California laws, even one employee, you're going to have to apply, you're going to have to comply with a few California laws. And so we will sometimes see policies and procedures that meet the requirements for the head state, the main state that the company operates in, but not all of the states that their employees work in. And so you want to make sure that you understand the state laws in all of those states anywhere you have employees and make sure that you are accommodating all of those different state laws. Sometimes that means leave laws that you have to offer, there's differences in overtime if you have hourly employees, um, sick leave, meal penalties here in the state of California. So you just really want to make sure that you are up to date on all the laws in all of the different states that you are operating in. I will tell you what we always recommend to our clients when they especially if they're newer and they are hiring fast and remote and just all over the place. We recommend to pick the most generous state and just go with that. It can be very burdensome to try to administer six different PTO plans and six different leave of absence plans. Now, we certainly have some who don't want to do that because California is very generous than many of your states. And so if they have employees in California, they don't really want to offer all of those benefits and leaves and things to all of their employees because it could get a little bit expensive. And I get that. Um, but really, it's just easier from an administrative standpoint. And I wonder about the pay trade-off from not offering the perks, but then sitting there and having to administer six different types of leaves or six different types of, um, vacation policies. Those things just, it just gets really burdensome, especially if employees are in many, many different states. If you're in two or three, maybe that's a lot easier, but you know we have clients who they have 25 employees and all 25 employees are pretty much in different states. You might have two in one and three in another, but they're really spread out to administer 25 different policies would be insane. Um, so that is our recommendation. One, make sure that you are, um, complying with all the states that you're in and then if you have, if you're across multiple states, pick the most generous of what you are in and offer that to everybody. Kind of along with that is making sure that you are compliant with your state, fully compliant with your state. We will see clients who didn't realize their state had a certain leave law or that you had to pay into a certain insurance for the state, New York, Washington, or two that come to mind that have paid family insurances that you pay into. Into the state. And you have to set that up upon starting your business. And so or having an employee in those states. And so sometimes we'll see clients who, um, they just didn't know about a certain law in their state. And so they're not being compliant with it. Or they are being compliant but maybe not fully or they haven't interpreted it correctly. Uh, meal, uh, penalties here in California is one that we'll see where clients interpret that into the fifth hour weird or they don't always pay the the penalty consistently or they don't get their waiver, something. They they know they're supposed to do it and they're doing part of it, but they're not doing the full thing. And again, somebody coming in and auditing is not going to care that you didn't know. That's not going to be a defense. And if you're not doing the full thing, depending on the auditing body, they can consider you not doing any of it. So those fines and those penalties can really add up. So making sure that you have a good understanding of all of the laws in your state and that you are following them. We find that, uh, state chambers of commerce are great. Uh, resources for this in California, Cal Chamber is fantastic at listing all of the different laws that are applicable in this state. You've got different laws that are applicable by city. Sometimes by county, by region. And so, um, the the state chambers of commerce do a really good job of keeping that updated so that you know what are the applicable laws to you based on the state either that your business is in or that your employees are in. And then the last one, and this kind of leads into the infrastructure piece, is a sorely just really, really, really outdated handbook. If you have a handbook that is more than a few years old or maybe it was just copied and pasted off the internet, uh, or maybe a lawyer wrote it when you first started the business and you can't understand a word because there's so much legal ease inside of it, that, uh, it probably needs to be updated. We will go in and do our audit and oftentimes find that policies and procedures that are in the handbook no longer are valid. They don't make sense anymore. Um, the PTO that the handbook says is different or the leave offering is different or, um, just little things like that that it hadn't been updated. And so it's no longer right. It's no longer correct. And handbooks are important. We'll probably end up doing a whole episode on handbooks, but they are important for small employers. They they can help you in a defense situation if you need to show a policy, if you need to show that employees were aware of something, then certainly you need a handbook to to lay that out for you. Um, but also it just helps employees know where to go or what to do if they have a question about benefits that are offered or they have a question about how their time accrues. They don't always have to go ask somebody. There's a document that they can refer to that tells them that. So if you are somebody, if your company has got a really, really outdated handbook, it's important that you get that updated. We recommend that you that you review your handbook every year. So for our clients, we have them on an auto cycle where every single year we are reviewing it. So what that means is when they sign on with us as a client, we do a thorough read every line, ask our questions. Is this still relevant? Make our changes. Add policies that we know are not in there that should be, um, and then once we have done that super thorough review the first time with them, then, uh, we get them on an auto, um, auto review every single year and we just check the things that maybe we knew we know a new law was passed or one was updated or the company changed its PTO accruals and so we'll go in and just update not necessarily do a full read-through but just update the things that we know have changed since the last time. And we do that every single year because we want we don't want to have to update the handbook every time something changes. We'll make sure that we notify employees, communicate that, but at least once a year we want to go through that review and make sure that in that moment the handbook is the most up-to-date it possibly can be. So if you have a really, really updated or outdated handbook, I would really encourage you to think about getting that, um, updated with a really thorough read-through and review very, very soon. Okay, let's move on to HR infrastructure. So HR infrastructure is kind of the building blocks of your, uh, HR processes, your workflows, how employee programs are administered. That's how we think of HR infrastructure. So you have compliance, which is the law. This is how you have to, this is what you have to offer your employees. This is how you have to treat them in certain ways. Um, and then infrastructure builds on that because then it creates the processes and the workflows that allow you to do that. So a couple of things that we see that are often a little bit broken in HR infrastructure. The first one is that there are no processes. There are no policies per se. There are no workflows. For something like leaves of absence or payroll errors or payroll changes. And so what happens when you have no workflow, no process is that things are handled very inconsistently, which could be out of compliance. Um, or they are often just riddled with mistakes and errors, which can be very, very frustrating both for leadership and employees. We oftentimes will see that clients have left something like a leave of absence up to their leaders, so individual leaders of departments are the ones who manage the leaves of absence for their department. And those leaders a lot of times don't know the paperwork they're supposed to, um, get. They don't really understand timeframes or in the state of California, you have pregnancy disability leave. California Family Rights Act, and then the federal FMLA, Family Medical Leave Act, which all kind of intersect somehow. They can, some of them run consecutively, some of them run concurrently. And so if you don't know how that works and you don't know how much time an individual might be able to take for all three of those because one individual could be eligible for all three, then you can really be out of compliance and mess that up. And then you'll have that inconsistency. So one leader is giving somebody 12 weeks, another leader is only giving them four weeks, and that can create its own mess of problems. So when you have no infrastructure, when you have no process, no workflows for everyday things like how do employees sign up for their benefits? What do they do when they're missing a benefit card? Where do they go with benefit questions? Um, when do the deductions come out of their paychecks? And how does that work? Where, how do they ask for a leave of absence? And what documentation are they going to need? And what's the communication look like? And how does their benefit stay? When you don't have processes for all of those basic day-to-day events that can occur in an employee's life, then you are potentially setting yourself up for compliance trouble, legal trouble, but also just this morale and engagement issue amongst employees, leaders, really everybody because nobody knows what's going on in these things. So that those basic workflows for what I would say are your big four or five areas, benefits, payroll, leave of absence, um, onboarding, offboarding, if when you don't have good structure and workflows for that, then everything is messy. Everything feels messy. There's no consistency and it can really impact your overall employee morale. The next piece of HR infrastructure that we often see um that that clients are struggling with, so something that they actually come to us because they are experiencing this, is that there is no process for grievances. Employees have really nowhere to go to share feedback, to air grievances if they have um, you know, minor grievances with maybe their supervisor or another employee, but even much larger ones like harassment or workplace violence, which again can lead to a lot of legal issues. There's no good process or workflow for them or no outlet for them to be able to share those concerns. Uh, moreover, we'll talk about this in strategy, but no feedback loops, no communication, not strong communication, when you don't have a good process and a good workflow for employees to just be able to say, "Hey, this is bothering me," or "This is not working for me," or "Hey, I'm being harassed." Um, then employees will look elsewhere for that. They will go outside to legal counsel. They will um, you know, create potentially a very toxic environment. It can create a toxic environment when those things are kind of just being allowed to happen because there's nobody to speak up and say, or nobody to speak up to and say, "Hey, this is wrong. Can we do something about this?" So not having any kind of process for feedback loops, for grievances, uh, minor or major, can be a really big problem and and when clients come to us with that issue, what's happened is employee relations has gotten so out of control that leaders feel like they are spending all of their time managing that sort of thing, managing toxic behavior, managing employees who aren't getting along or who have these issues um, or managing harassment that doesn't ever seem to go away. There's no good workflow, no structure for that. So then everybody's kind of in it. And then nobody is being productive or efficient or doing much work because they're spending most of their time managing things like that. And then the last um, error or gap, I guess, that we see with HR infrastructure is that there is no point of contact for HR. And I've kind of alluded to this with the other stuff, but when you don't have one person designated as your HR person, then again, things are handled inconsistently because different leaders are going to do things differently or they're not being handled at all. And so employees just don't know who to go to. They have no idea. We've had clients come into us and when we say, "Okay, who's managing your leaves of absence? It's this person. Who's managing your payroll? It's this person. Who's managing your benefits? This person." Well, no wonder employees have no idea where to go. Now, I am not saying you have to have an HR person. If you are small, small, if you are one to 50, you do not probably need a full-time HR individual. It can be another person. We have clients who come to us and their finance person, their marketing person was handling HR pretty well. Um, not perfect, not great, but enough to get by until they became too big for that person to do two jobs. So can you have a leader doing hybrid roles? Yes. You can. Um, but I would strongly suggest that that person have a consultant, somebody they can call who knows HR, that they can run questions by. There are tons of hotline services out there. The former we're available. Um, but some kind of service that they can call to get the advice that they need when they need it. Um, and that they have a desire to do it. A lot of times human resources is just thrown on an individual. I always make the joke that, you know, Jill in marketing did that really cool employee event one time and now suddenly they think she can do HR. Um, the person needs to want to take that on because they're going to have to do a lot of research. They're going to have to do a lot of learning on top of their other job. So making sure that if you are designating somebody for HR, which you should designate somebody for HR, that that person wants to do it, wants to learn, wants to try to make sure that the company is compliant, has the infrastructure, all of these things. And that they also have the right resources that they need to manage HR effectively. Once you get past the 50 mark, I always advocate earlier, but I think definitely cross the 50 mark is when you need dedicated HR support. Again, depending on what your business is, I'm not saying it has to be a full-time HR person in-house. We offer fractional support and we have clients in the hundred range, hundreds of employees range. So it definitely doesn't always have to be somebody dedicated in-house, but it does have to be somebody who's focused on HR, even at a fractional level, part-time level, a certain amount of hours a week. And the reason is, and I don't know why this is, but in my 14 years, I can tell you that 60 employees is the number of employees where employee relations issues go bananas. I don't know how many times I can say employees in one sentence, but there you go. It's so true that 60 employees is the number. I don't know why. I don't know what it is, but we will so many times have our own clients or new clients come to us and they'll have just hit that 60 mark. They're around that 60 mark or something. And now all of a sudden, there are so many personalities you're choosing, so many communication issues, and so many just soft skill issues. That if you're trying to just be legally compliant, um, and not deal with those, they're just going to grow and get bigger as you scale. And you have to get those fixed then. So having somebody who is dedicated to HR, under 50 employees, under 60 employees, it could be made somebody else in the business. I would say it should be HR adjacent sometimes. We definitely see a lot of finance people. We will see, um, like chief of staff, business managers, those types of people who have kind of been handling HR, maybe, maybe VP of operations, type people. So I think it should be adjacent, but it doesn't necessarily have to be an HR professional. But they should have HR professional resources available to them. And then above that, I think you got to have some dedicated staff. So like somebody who knows human resources, somebody who's experienced in human resources to be able to manage that. Having that point of contact, having one person administering all of your policies, all of your workflows, all of your procedures is going to make sure that if nothing else, you are consistent and then also if they are doing what they need to be doing, keeping up with laws, you're going to be legally compliant as well. Okay, let's talk about HR strategy and the gaps that we see in the HR strategy when new clients come on board with us. And this one's really simple because there usually is no strategy. It is not something that, um, anybody has prioritized. If a lot of times when they come to us, we are their first real HR. And so they're doing well just to be paying employees correctly. And we get that. I totally understand that. Um, and so we see that there really is no strategy. There's no definition of values or if they are sure they were copied and pasted from the internet. Or their values that the CEO, founder, believes in and want to kind of live by, but they're not being lived in the business. Um, we will see that there's no alignment between HR initiatives and business goals. I absolutely believe the HR initiatives can and should drive the business goals. So if the company whatever their goals are, if it's scaling, if it's a certain amount of revenue dollars, if it's higher levels of customer service, whatever it is, there should be an HR initiative aligned to each of those goals. Uh, that never exists. Um, with clients that come to us. And there there is just no real strategy. Again, a lot of times HR is seen as overhead. It's seen as kind of this necessary evil that nobody wants to have. And I don't necessarily blame anyone. I think it's just because we haven't really defined what good HR looks like in small employers. Although if you want to, you can go and listen to the episode I did on that. But, um, we haven't really defined what it looks like. We haven't really shown a lot of founders, leaders that we can be strategic, that we can help them drive the business through HR initiatives, through having really buttoned up the back office, the compliance, the legal stuff, having really good workflows and processes for those day-to-day employee experience situations. And then when we have those things all settled, then we know we have the time to be really thoughtful about the business. To say, "Oh, this is what's happening. This is where you want to go. Here's the levers I think we can pull from a people perspective." To get you there. And oh, by the way, these levers are going to improve morale. They're going to improve engagement. They are going to make employees actually want to show up every day because small employers can be so fun and so exciting. And so purpose-driven. That when you align where the business is going with the HR initiatives that you are rolling out, everyone is better for it. And so we, um, I have seen the most stressful environments just really the the work that they're doing, the way that they have to do it is really stressful. This happens so much, of course, in startups where they are driving the profitability, trying with everything in their power to get to the black. Um, and you've got a small team that has to be very scrappy. And it's so stressful. They're working hours and hours and hours. But they're so happy. And it's because there is this culture, there is this environment, there is this values-driven behaviors that is showing up every single day that makes them keep coming back even though the work is really, really stressful. And when you have somebody who is helping you align your people initiatives to that which you're trying to drive, that's what you're going to create. You're going to create this environment where employees are thriving even though the work that they're doing is is mind-boggling stressful. Um, so the the biggest gap we see, and oftentimes in the sales process, I'll talk about HR strategy, I'll talk about culture, and I'll talk about engagement, and a lot of times they'll say, "I'll be honest, I got nothing, but that's what I need. I know that I need it. I know that I need somebody to come in here and talk to me about the things that I can do or how to move my business forward from a people perspective." We definitely start to see this. I'll tell you, I have a team of eight, and I see this now. I see where I need to think about, um, the culture and the environment that I'm building for my staff to be able to thrive. We're a hundred percent remote and already at eight employees, I'm starting to see the cracks in that. I don't think we'll ever be in office people. We're spread out, so it wouldn't work for us anyway. Um, but I definitely see the cracks in remote work and how that affects the relationships that we have and how it affects our culture and our engagement. And so I'm already starting to think about as small as we are, how do I focus on that as we continue to grow and scale? Because I want to figure it out at eight employees and not wait till 80 when something has been created, something has grown organically that is so unbelievably broken and not what I intended. That I have to try to turn that around, which will be almost impossible. So you want to think about as much as it's counterintuitive to most people, as much as it seems difficult, you want to start thinking about the type of culture you want to build, the type of HR strategy you're going to need to provide employees the type of engagement and experience that you want them to have that also drives business growth. When you do that, and you do it early, early, early, then it's much easier to build it. People always ask, can you build culture? Does it grow organically? I think the answer is both. Um, but then you can build it and be more intentional about it and course correct the minute you see it start to get off a little bit. Rather than let something organically grow that you never intended and now you have to figure out how do I completely turn this ship around. So in strategy, we see a huge gap in that it's never considered. It's never seen as important. And the minute that we can get all the compliance stuff buttoned up, build the work, the structures and the infrastructure that we need, the workflows and the processes to make sure that day-to-day experience is happening, then we can start to work on strategy and align the HR initiatives with the business goals. And now we see the business change. I'll I'll tell you, it's not overnight. It takes us a good year, year and a half sometimes with clients to get through all of that, to get to a place where we can even start thinking about strategy and thinking about, um, you know, how do we really align those initiatives. We're doing it all along. We're always kind of dropping to see where we can and building things where we can. But for us to get to a place where we can really sit and do nothing but think about how do we help this business meet its goals? How do we help employees meet their goals and their career or what they want to do here at this organization? Um, it takes a little bit of time. So if you are listening to this and you feel overwhelmed because all of this is a lot, these are a lot of gaps and you very well may feel like, "Oh, my business has a lot of these." Um, just know that it is not an overnight fix. It is something that takes a long time even for very, very seasoned HR professionals. It takes a very structured process for us. Uh, something that we have honed over 14 years of being in business to be able to take a business from a place where they come and say, "I have a mess on my hands." To a place where they say, "Okay, now I can see how my people strategy is driving my business." So let me give you three things you can do. You can start to do to actually tackle all of these. Um, as I said, we start with a comprehensive HR audit and all of these things, the strategy piece, the infrastructure piece, the compliance piece, it's all in there. Um, and one of the things that you can absolutely do today, take an hour this week, is to start doing an HR audit. I'm going to link ours in the notes for this episode. Um, so you can download that. But you don't have to do it. As many pages, you just don't have to do it all at one time in one sitting. Do what you can. It's broken out into sections, recruiting, onboarding, um, benefits, payroll, whatever it may be. So don't feel like you have to knock it out all at one time. Maybe you just take a section, maybe you just take a few things in a section and you sit down and you start to audit it. I do believe that anybody can use this. I don't think you have to be an HR professional to to know how to use the audit. If there's a term you don't understand, a quick, a quick search on the internet will will help you figure that out, I'm sure. So the first thing that we would really suggest if you're feeling like these gaps might exist in your business is to conduct an HR audit. The second thing that I would suggest around infrastructure is to start to look at, and part of this will happen in the audit, but also you can do it separately, is start to look at some of that day-to-day employee experience stuff, benefits administration, leave of absence, payroll. Where do we have workflows? Where do we not? Where can we create templates? Really quickly, ChatGPT is great for this. Where can I go and create a template? Um, for employees to follow when they need to request a leave, when they have a question about their benefits, when they need to, um, make a change to their payroll. What is a quick communication I can send them? So where you can start to put that structure and that process and workflow in place the less burden you're going to have on you or whoever's managing HR to, uh, do that when it comes up. So number one, comprehensive HR audit. All of this stuff is on there. All of the things we've talked about today and much more is on there. I'm going to definitely link that for you. The second thing that I think you could do is start to look at your day-to-day workflows and say, do we have workflows? And if we don't, some quick hits I can have with some quick wins that I could maybe create a form for this or I could create a standard communication for this. What's some, what's some quick process updates I can put in, uh, fairly quickly that might take a little bit of the administrative burden off? And also inform employees of what's available to them or what they need. And then the third one, around strategy, is to look at the values you have posted and ask yourself if those are lived. We are going to talk about culture in an upcoming episode. A whole episode on it. And this will be a big part of it. But, um, it's important. I think for all employers to look at their values, look at the corporate values, and to say, we're actually living this. Is this still relevant? Because sometimes the core values change what what was a value in the beginning of the business and what is the value 10, 15, 20 years later, may not be anymore. And so are the values still relevant? And if they are, are we living it? And if we're not, what are we going to do about that? What are we going to do about the fact that we're not, that we say this is the value but we don't really see it in behaviors? If you're interested in more of that, stay tuned. A couple of episodes down the road. That whole culture discussion, how to drive it, how to let it grow organically in the way that you want, is coming up.