You don't need a big team, a big budget, or a big HR title to do HR well. You simply need to understand how small employer HR works. This season on the HR Connection, we unpack the messy realities the mindset shifts and the small but mighty moves that make a big difference. Let's break it all down so you don't miss a beat. Welcome back to the HR Connection. My name is Sabrina Baker. I am the CEO and founder of Acacia HR Solutions, and I have been your host through season one of the podcast. We made it. This is episode 15. We decided to do this podcast in seasons so that we could take a break in the middle, evaluate what was working well, and continually bring you better and more relevant content to help you be better at managing HR in a small employer. For us, a small employer is anything less than 500 employees. We don't care about revenue. We don't care about location or industry. It is any organization that has less than 500 employees. When I started the business 14 years ago, coming from big business environments down to small orgs, I realized there was a huge gap in knowledge. There is not a lot of content. There's not a lot of blogs, podcasts, um, conference sessions, geared towards those managing HR in a small employer. And the way that you manage HR in a small org is different. It absolutely is. So the first 15 episodes here have been breaking down certain aspects of small employer HR, trying to give a little bit of insight into why it's different, things that we suggest you do at a very high level, and as we continue through the seasons, we are going to get deeper and deeper into making sure that you have the resources you need to effectively manage HR inside of a small organization. Let's break down the takeaways from this season. The first takeaway: if you caught the first couple of episodes, the pilot in episode one, maybe two, then you heard me talk about the difference between big business HR and small employer HR. The way that you manage human resources inside a large organization where you are probably working with a large HR team, a healthy budget and lots of resources is very, very different than the way that you manage human resources in a small employer, less than 500 employees, where you may be the sole HR practitioner. You may be a hybrid HR practitioner. Not even really skilled in HR or experienced in HR. You do marketing or you do finance, and that is your profession. But HR was just given to you because somebody had to do it. The way that you do that in a small employer is very different. If you remember in those episodes, I compared working in a small employer to living in a small town. Everybody knows everybody. The same person takes your luggage who checks you in, who flies the plane. Everybody is related and certainly everybody is in everybody's business. And so what that means is managing human resources in a small employer requires connection. It requires personalization. It requires this close attention to the individuals inside the organization. Where you can get away with being more general in large organizations because there's no way that you can really adapt to every person in a 5,000, 10,000 employer in a small org. It is more required that you are looking at the individual people inside your organizations and making decisions around them. So managing HR in a small employer requires that you flip-flop a little bit between this administrative tactical managing benefits, managing leads of absence, managing payroll to this very strategic and personalized HR strategy that looks at the individuals inside the organization and figures out how do we motivate and inspire and move them forward for the benefit of both them and the business. The second takeaway from this season is that HR can and should help drive the business. Episodes three and four talked about HR being an admin and how when you do that inside of a small employer, when you see your human resources individual as just an administrative tactical, just keep me compliant, keep me out of jail, person, then you are not utilizing human resources to its fullest ability. Remember, we have HR, the person, and we have HR, the processes, the strategy, the infrastructure. And those processes, those infrastructure, that strategy should align with business goals and that leader that HR person, whoever is managing it, should understand and be allowed to create workflows, processes, policies, programs, that do help to motivate and inspire those employees to help drive the business goals. It should be integrated. HR strategy should be integrated into the overall business goals. When you are a small org, and let's talk super small in my organization, we have eight employees. I can't have anybody being strictly admin. I need all eight people helping me look at the business goals and figuring out how do we achieve the things that we have set before us. And so using your human resources as an admin or as a tactical piece only, um, is really limiting how you're going to be able to grow and scale when you are looking at the people that you have inside your business. So you want to make sure that you are giving human resources the attention, that it needs, and the permission to act as a strategic partner inside the organization in order to be able to really, really help drive towards those business goals. The third takeaway that I have for you from this season is that the practical bits add up. The small pieces add up. Starting around episode eight-ish, we talked about HR tech, that we then went into scaling HR as you grow. And then if you watched the previous three episodes, the ones directly before this one, then you met my business partners, Marie, Christine, and Penelope, who talked about payroll and benefits and employee relations. In all of those episodes, we gave you one thing that you could do today to start moving towards that goal. In an HR department of one situation, in a small employer, regardless of maybe you have a small team, time is of the essence. You don't have a lot of it. It is a hot, hot commodity. And all of these concepts that we talk about can certainly feel overwhelming, and they can certainly feel like there's a lot to do. And a lot of times when I talk to HR practitioners inside of a small org, I will hear them say, "Sabrina, all of that that you're telling me is great. I don't have the time. I don't have the time for all of that." And so I will say, "Well, what do you have the time for? Can we do one thing? Can we do one piece of this?" Because that adds up. And if we can do one thing and then the next month, the next quarter, do another thing, then we're finally going to start to move the needle on these things. If we don't, then nothing changes, right? Because nothing changes if nothing changes. So doing one thing, those little practical bits of things that you can do to start to add up around your HR tech situation, your processes, if it feels like a lot of manual labor, uh, how you're organizing your payroll, your benefits, um, thinking about scaling. If there's a lot of hiring coming up, I would really encourage you to go and watch that scaling HR episode so that you can make sure that your infrastructure is growing with you. Because if it doesn't, it creates quite a mess that is really, really hard to undo. So those little practical pieces that getting better, just in that 1%, doing one thing slowly over time, in a year's time, you're going to see a world of difference inside your human resources. And then finally, the fourth takeaway from this season is that I know it feels lonely, but you are not alone. And it's the whole point of this podcast. It is to help those managing HR in a small employer to not feel alone. If you did not watch episode seven or listen to episode seven, you're going to want to go back and do that because that is all about not feeling alone inside of a small employer. And what you can do to start building your network and connecting with people who are in similar situations as you are. We named the HR connection that HR connection because when you are inside of a small employer, it's hard to make connections. One of the things that I find very frustrating about HR communities and frustrating just because of my work is that if I go on to a forum, a Facebook group, a community site, and I ask a question oftentimes, the people who are answering well-meaning, nothing against them, they're trying to help, but they are often not in a similar situation. They are coming from a very large organization or they have a big budget or they have a big team. And that doesn't help me because sometimes the solutions are costly or require more resources and time than I possibly could have. And so this HR connection is going to be solely focused on those managing HR under 500. So if you haven't listened to HR to episode seven, I hope you'll go back and do that. I also hope that if you are not subscribed here or following us on LinkedIn or subscribed to our mailing list, that you will do one or all of those things. So now what? If you have listened to all of the HR connection, first of all, thank you so much. I hope you found it helpful. You're already a little bit ahead of the game. If you haven't, I certainly hope that you will go back and find the episodes that might resonate most with you and give those a watch or a listen depending on where you are. I would love to hear from you. I'd love to hear feedback and ideas for season two and beyond. If you have them, but I wanted to give you something that you could do. And I kind of already talked about this with those little tidbits, but as you go back and you listen to the episodes and you think about the things that you can do inside your organization, I really want you, I want to encourage you to take action. I know for me, I do this and tell me if you are guilty of this too, but I will listen to a podcast, um, or watch something on YouTube and I'll think, man, that's fantastic. That's really good advice. And then I'll get doing something else and I'll forget about it and I don't actually take action. And so I really want to encourage you, if you have been listening or you're going to go back and maybe listen or watch some episodes that you will pick out one thing that you actually start to do. Maybe it is look at some of your manual processes and think, how can I make the leverage technology a little bit better? How can I audit something that maybe hasn't been audited in a while? It can be so small. How can I maybe get that manager, the training, they actually need that's going to benefit everybody inside the organization? It can be a really small thing, but what is one thing that you've heard in these episodes that resonated with you and you thought, my business needs that. We need to do that inside my organization. If you haven't taken action, I would really encourage you to think about doing so now. This was just the beginning. We've got so much more coming. We have learned so much through this first season, and I'm so excited to say that in next season and beyond, we are going to have small HR voices, not just my voice all the time. I know you want to hear from others, and we are going to have people on this podcast who are doing the work that you're doing, people who are inside of small organizations, managing HR, and they are doing really cool things. If that's you, we would love to host you. And so there is a form on our website. You can fill out to be a part of this podcast. What I hope that anybody who's watching or listening gets out of this is that small HR is not small impact. You are making such a difference in the organization that you are in. And you can continue to do that both for your own satisfaction and for the organization. So we have so much more coming, so much more advice, so much more thought leadership around how do we do this well? And as always, how do we do this with limited time, limited budget, limited resources, and maybe not the support of the leaders in the way that we need it? There is so much content coming. Next season comes out in September. Again, if you are not following us or not subscribed, please do so now so that you are notified. It'll be just a few weeks and that season will be launching. And I certainly hope to see you then. Thanks so much for being a part of the HR Connection.