Sabrina

Welcome back to The HR Connection, the podcast built solely for those managing human resources inside of a small business, 1 to 500 employees. My name is Sabrina Baker, and today Marie and I are talking about the difference between DIY HR and intentional HR. Specifically, we're going to talk about why we say intentional and not strategic, share some mistakes that we see in DIY HR or how we know somebody is in that reactive DIY mode, and things you can do to move to a more intentional HR strategy. I think you're really going to enjoy this one. We give you examples from our real-life work. We are doing this work with clients every single day, and we hope that sharing our experience and our examples help. If you are already not subscribed, now would be a great time to do that as we continue this journey talking about HR and small business life. Let's get into it.

Marie

So today we're going to start with a client story. Within the last 45 days, we have onboarded a 150-person company, and when we came into this organization, there were gaps everywhere. And I'm talking like compliance exposure that people just didn't know about, no real documentation habits, and risks just like sitting in places that leadership had never even looked. And it wasn't because people were bad at running a business, but no one just knew that they needed to give HR the attention that it needed, and they didn't know where to look to begin with. Within 30 days of working with this client, we were able to get through a full audit and tackle their biggest critical items. So the code red stuck just completely gone. And it's important to understand that we did this in 30 days because that's exactly what it feels like to have a process in place. That's exactly what makes being intentional, makes possible for everybody, and that's exactly what we're going to talk to you about today. So the topic today is DIY HR versus intentional HR and where small employers go wrong. Now, I want to take a moment and just point out that I didn't say strategic HR, and we're doing that on purpose here. And that's really because when most people hear that phrase, that, "Okay, let's go into strategy," I feel like they picture this big corporate HR team with a massive budget and 40 pages of a people strategy deck. And if you're a small business owner or really the only HR person at your company, that's totally going to sound like someone else's problem, right? So we say intentional HR because this is something completely different. And really, it's not actions that we're taking, but it's a mindset that we have to adopt. It's going to be the way that we show up to work. It's deciding that HR, it's not just a to-do list that you get through, but it's a function that exists to protect and grow the business. And once you carry that mindset, all of the decisions you make, they're going to look different. The things you prioritize are going to look different. And you're going to start asking yourself, "Why are we doing this?" instead of, "What do I need to do next?"

 

Sabrina

Yeah. So Marie, obviously, this is something we talk about in the business quite a bit. It's even this year, something that we have made a focus with the rest of our team around thinking about strategy as a mindset. And I know that I definitely, early on in my career, looked at HR as tactical versus strategic. And I would look at tasks or projects as being in that strategic realm. And you have HR people all the time who say, "I want to be more strategic. I want to be more strategic." And what we find in a small business is that literally everything you do can be strategic and should be strategic because it is about how you think about the task and how you align that task with what the business is trying to do rather than the task itself. And so we have reframed this internally to this word intentional, and I think that that is a better way to shape it because it's not about, "Is it some strategic project?" When everything is, it's this idea of do it yourself, just wing it, just don't know what you're missing because you don't know, or intentionally go and build something that is rewarding for everyone inside the business.

Marie

Absolutely. You know, I think about a conversation well, I really just think about when I started working here with you. And I came in as a business partner, and I had never been in that position before. And we were talking about how to strategize with our clients, and I was so scared because it just felt so big. And I remember having this aha moment just a couple of years ago that was like, "Our clients, they may not think that they want strategy, but I don't think strategy is what we all make it out to be." I think it is just something that we go into everything we do with strategy, and it's thinking about that bigger picture, right, and how what we're doing now is going to affect what later. So let's take some time and really define the difference here. So what are we actually comparing? Because I want to be so real about this, and I don't want to be abstract for our listeners. So when we think about DIY HR, it's not wrong. I want to be so clear about that. And it's where most businesses start, and it makes sense, right? Everyone is wearing 10 hats. HR feels like something you'll just clean up later. And for a while, this works fine. It does until it doesn't, right? So an example of what DIY HR looks like is going to be handling things as they come up, grabbing a random template online when you think that you need it, but not really knowing what to do with it, not having set processes in place for something like hiring just because every role is a little different, or fixing compliance stuff after it's just gone completely sideways. On the flip side, intentional HR is the complete opposite. So it's not a different set of tasks here, but it is a different way of thinking about those tasks. So when you think about onboarding, you're not just onboarding someone. You're building an experience that sets them up to stay long-term. When you're thinking about a handbook, you're not just updating a handbook. You're protecting the business with those updates. So the work might look the same on the outside, but the thinking behind it is going to be completely different here.

Sabrina

Yeah. If you think about the number of clients who come to us that have been in DIY mode, what we find is that there's no set structure for what they bring to us, meaning they don't all have an onboarding program or they don't all have a performance management. One of them will have onboarding. One of them won't. One of them will have performance management. One of them won't. One of them will have a completed, updated handbook. One of them won't. And it's because they've just been reacting to whatever happens in their business. So they realized they had a hiring problem, so they went and built a recruiting process, or they realized they needed this template, so they went and found it online. And so DIY stuff is very, very reactive and very just winging it. Like, "What is happening in this moment that I need to fix, and how do I band-aid it, and then how do I move on to the next thing and wait for the next thing to happen?" And it's definitely what happens when you have somebody who's not an HR professional or has any HR experience managing HR in a small business. And it's not I say this in a lot of the episodes, but it is true that it's not just HR in many businesses. A lot of your ancillary departments are like this. You could have somebody winging marketing. You could have somebody winging finance or winging whatever because they may not have the payroll to hire all the people they need. And so I think that's an important key to the fact that it's not wrong. It is the nature of the beast. It is the nature of being in especially in a less than 100. But then if you contrast that with our larger clients, most of them that have in-house HR who are actual HR professionals that have done this for their career, they come to us a little bit more intentional. They have things in place. They're trying to think about, "What do I need to build to actually match what the business is trying to do?" They know the core programs, the core processes that they need, and those are usually pretty much in place when they get to us. And so there's such a difference between that kind of mindset, and I think that it takes people who have the experience in the field to be able to come in and be really intentional about how you build your HR.

 

Marie

Yep, absolutely. And I want to repeat something that you mentioned. I heard you say the words reactive and proactive. And so I just want to make it clear for everybody, DIY HR is something that we're referring to as reactive, and intentional HR is proactive. And the switch from one to the other, it starts in your head before it ever shows up in a process. So next, let's talk about where it goes wrong. And so we have six common mistakes that we're going to go over, and these are not made-up examples by any means. We are walking into every single one of these situations with real clients every single day. Okay. So the first, number one is going to be HR gets treated like an admin job and not a business function. And so it's only getting attention when something breaks. And that's going to be a mindset problem before it ever becomes a process problem.

Sabrina

And the biggest mindset here is I don't even know if it's a mindset, but it's an experience situation. And I say this a lot, is that a lot of small business leaders have no idea what good HR looks like. They've never either had good HR or they haven't had HR at all. They just don't know what that looks like. And so they see HR as very compliant. They see it as very legally driven. And what is legally driven is administrative stuff. And at our core, absolutely, we were designed, right? The history of HR is that we were designed to be administrative, but we have grown and evolved. And definitely inside of a small business, we have to be more intentional. And so the DIY mindset, again, of HR is admin, and we're just going to fix what's broken or what keeps us out of jail, right? I hear that so much in the sales process. It's like, "I want you all to keep me out of jail." And I always say, "Well, we're going to do that and also build your business with you." And they just look at me because they don't even understand that we can possibly do that. So I think this one is definitely a mindset, but also just this they've never had it modeled for them. They've never had it modeled that HR can be more than admin.

Marie

Yeah. Yeah. HR, in my mind, it's definitely something that leaders, they don't realize that it should just be running in the background all the time just to it's like that well-oiled machine. When you have it and you service it regularly, it's just going to help your organization run smooth, right? Number two is no documentation habits until something goes wrong, and then everybody's just scrambling to put together a paper trail that doesn't exist.

Sabrina

So documentation's a funny one. I think that small businesses and I'll admit that this is me too, right? We don't want to be too corporate. And I think that documentation feels very corporate. It feels very big business. And we like our scrappy, agile ability. And so the idea of documentation feels so formal. It feels so bureaucratic. And so you have this scramble, like you said, when they realize probably through a lawyer because they're getting sued or because they need to fire somebody, and they've got an HR person or somebody saying, "You can't term that person. You have no documentation." And then they suddenly do it. But it's because I think before they're trying not to be so corporate and so bureaucratic, and then you have this scramble stuff, which is never good. It's never a good situation when you're trying to retrofit documentation to performance issues that have been going on for a year.

Marie

Number three, hiring with no process. So no job profiles, no structured interviews, no onboarding plan. We are just running on vibes and a gut feeling for whoever seems like a good fit. And the thinking here is that we're going to know the right person when we see them, but that's not a real plan at all.

 

Sabrina

Yeah. I just recorded a YouTube episode, Marie, about what breaks when you get to 15 employees. And one of the things that I said in it was that of the processes, of the HR tasks, the HR disciplines that you could ignore early on, hiring is not one of them up to 15 and beyond. I mean, I would argue it's much longer, but definitely up to 15, you cannot ignore having a good hiring process because one bad hire can just decimate your business at that, right? One personality that just is toxic or a low performer. I mean, it happens. We've certainly had it happen, but it really takes a toll on the business when you're super small. And even up to our larger clients, there's still that ripple effect that you have inside of a small business. And so while I would hope that nobody's ignoring any HR process, I know they are. Hiring is not one that you can take a risk on. You have to know what you need, especially when you're in a situation where people have to wear multiple hats or you're going to ask them to you're going to ask them to create and build and execute all in the same day, right, where maybe they're coming from a place where they're used to only executing or only operating at a high level. You have to know what you need, and you have to have a really good process.

Marie

As someone who used to recruit on vibes, the moment that I started to really understand and become so intentional with what we were looking for and being able to clearly define and communicate what I was seeing in candidates, you enter into a completely new ballgame with the kind of candidates that you bring to organizations, and it really does make a difference. Number four, and this one comes up every single day, I swear, is performance that is managed informally. So we're talking about hard conversations that are slipped into a one-on-one in the last five minutes. If you are in office, you might be passing in the hallway, and you make a side comment. Or maybe these are hard conversations that don't happen at all because people are just so uncomfortable with confrontation, right? But when manage is I'm sorry. When performance is managed informally, that's when the termination can become necessary, and there's nothing written down to reference, right? And so that mindset gap here, it's just thinking that good relationships replace clear expectations, and that is never the case.

Sabrina

This one's one that I think about. We see such a swing in small businesses. We will have the small business, just like you said, where close relationships because maybe the founder has people that have been with them for a long time. Maybe it's family. We know, God forbid, if any of you are in a family-owned business, we feel for you. Maybe it's family. Maybe it's whatever. There's this close-knit group, and so they all feel like performance is just based on that. People are going to do good because we're friends here. We're buddies here. We're all close, and we're vibing. And then we have other clients who are like, "One tiny mistake, and we're firing you. And there's no chance. No, no, no. This person just has to go, right? Or I just don't like them, so they have to go." So this one is one that swings all over the place, but no matter which one they are, it's very informal, and it's very reactive, either reactive or not active at all, meaning that they slip things under the rug. They don't address what they need to. And it's definitely one that, as they grow in headcount, creates more and more and more problems. And this is one that, as you get to maybe 50 employees where you've got a pretty good middle management layer, if you don't have a good process by then, you're in trouble because your managers are then all handling this differently, and they're all doing their own thing. And some of them have more comfort with holding people accountable, and some don't. And so then it's just all over the place. And we know that is a nightmare to fix. It is really, really difficult to fix when you have built a business up to 50, 75, 100-plus employees with no formal performance management process in place.

Marie

Yeah, absolutely. But it's also a missed opportunity, right? And I think we've talked about this briefly in another episode, but when people are avoiding those hard conversations to protect a good relationship, you're actually damaging that relationship, and you're damaging your opportunity to do something really important for the business, and that's being clear, right? Okay. Let's keep going. Number five is going to be that compliance is a total afterthought. So this looks like handbooks that nobody's touched in years, I-9s that are done incorrectly or not at all, leave laws that nobody even knew applied to them. This one is almost always a mindset issue, right? Compliance, it's going to feel like a big company problem until it becomes your problem.

 

Sabrina

I think we have a lot of small businesses who think they're too small to need to be compliant with things. They get basic things like minimum wage or overtime. They know those because that's in the news all the time. We talk about that so much. But then to the leave laws, they think, "Oh, we're surely too small to have to offer leaves." Or I've literally had leaders and so I just want to say this because if this resonates with any of our listeners and who their CEO is, but I've literally had CEOs say to me, "Well, what's the risk if we don't do it?" Because I can absorb 20,000. If the risk is going to be a $30,000 fine, that's okay with me. I was appalled that that would even be the mindset of, "Well, let me just take the risk," right? It's like the person who doesn't pay their taxes, I guess, and hopes they don't ever get caught. Well, you're going to. It's going to catch up with you.

Marie

This last mistake, it's going to be a real sneaky one here. So this is leaning too hard on the "we're like a family" here instead of just setting clear expectations. And I know both of us have very strong opinions about using the word family when it comes to businesses, but I get that it can feel good, and it can feel like you're bringing everybody together. And that culture is really great, but when conflict shows up, feelings are never going to be documentation, and feelings are never going to make your expectations any more clear, right? Clear and structured, they are not opposites. You can have both, and intentional HR mindset holds both of those together at the same time.

Sabrina

Yeah. Employees don't want to be your family. They just don't want to be in your family. That's not why they came to be inside your organization.

Marie

Those were all great examples, Sabrina. So we've just went over the six most common mistakes that we see. Now let's do some myth-busting here. And so you've already hinted to this a little bit just a few minutes ago by mentioning how leaders will say, "We're too small for that." So let's picture this. You're running a 15-person company, and someone—me, Sabrina—we're telling you to be more intentional about HR, and it really sounds like overkill. Again, that just feels like a big company problem. But really, that's exactly the mindset that gets the small employers into trouble. And we talked about this earlier in this episode too, but it's because the size of your company doesn't necessarily change the size of your risk. So small employers, they don't actually carry less risk. They carry more per employee, and that's so important to understand. When you're in that smaller organization, there is less built-in knowledge to absorb a mistake and fewer resources to even recover from one. We were talking about that bad hire, right? And so when you look at it when you look at it from a larger perspective, a bad hire at a 500-person company, it's going to feel like a blip to them. But one bad hire at a 15-person company, that's going to change the entire culture of that business, right? It's one mishandled termination. It's one compliance gap, one discrimination claim, right? But at a small company, these aren't just HR problems that are going to feel like nothing the next day. They're real business problems. And that's because they're going to hit that bottom line, right? They're going to tank morale. And really, they can take up months and months of leadership's time if they're not careful about it.

Sabrina

This is my whole soapbox, right? This is my entire soapbox right here is the earlier you start to build HR, the better off your business will be overall, that your business will grow faster. And I will die on this hill that your business will grow faster and better if you focus intentionally on HR earlier.

Marie

So, Sabrina, what does this actually look like? What does intentional HR really look like? Because we definitely don't want to leave y'all with just a list of what's broken here. So we're going to go over five examples of what doing this well actually looks like because the difference, it's not always visible from the outside. As we've been saying, it's really about how everyone is thinking about every single HR decision that's made. So number one is we're not just hiring when we're desperate. There is a workforce plan in place, and it's tied to where the business is going. And that's the mindset of people decisions are business decisions.

Sabrina

Yeah. If you think about us, right, last year, we had an offsite in October, and I rolled out an org chart that could be six months away, eight months away, even from now. But I know in the future what our org chart is going to look like. And the faster that organizations can get into some workforce planning mode where they're thinking about their future org chart, thinking about the future roles they're going to need, building a process for that hiring, building a process for those skills, then the more intentional they're going to be able to grow the business overall.

Marie

Number two is having your hiring and onboarding process look the same way every single time. And it's not because we're rigid or because we don't want to wow people that are coming in, but it's because that we are understanding that consistency is actually how you protect the business and the people coming into it.

Sabrina

We are a perfect example of the difference between a consistent hiring and onboarding process and not, right? So early on, probably when you came on board - what is that now, four years? - we probably didn't have the best and most consistent hiring and onboarding process. We were super small at that time. I mean, we're still small, but I hired everybody, and I hired them my way. And then we onboarded. Of course, my onboarding way was back then. Here you go. Good luck. But think about how intentional we've been over the last even two years in streamlining that process and in looking at what do we really need with our skills framework, and what do they come in with? What are we going to train them on at 30, 60, 90 days? And if you think about our latest generalist hire and how fast she's gotten up to speed and how she's ramping and we're consulting, so it takes a while to get really feeling good about what you're doing. But if I look at how fast she got to certain milestones over previous ones, it's night and day. And it's because of that consistent hiring and onboarding and that process that we have. And I know that every hire we have going forward will be the same.

 

Marie

Number three is that managers aren't just handed a new employee and wish good luck. We are sitting with managers, and we are training them. We are making sure that they feel supported because the company understands that managers are HR's greatest asset.

Sabrina

Absolutely. Greatest asset, greatest ally. The relationship that especially an HR department of one has with their managers will make or break their role. They will either be miserable, or they will love their life depending on the relationship that they have with the managers inside their organization. And we know, I said earlier, of the HR disciplines that you can ignore or shouldn't ignore any of them, but we do have ignored. Training and development of leaders is number one, right? It is such a huge thing that people just kind of tap those individual contributors on the shoulder and say, "You're now a leader," and those people have no idea what they're doing. And there's nothing in the organization that's modeling good behavior, that's modeling good leadership. And then we throw them in this leadership role, and we expect them just to know what to do. And there can be such small ways that you can do this that don't have to necessarily be this huge course or this huge bringing somebody like us in and doing all this training. You don't have to do that. You can do this very small and intentionally, even just sharing blogs, sharing podcasts, sharing things that would maybe make them think differently about their role.

Marie

Okay. Number four. We're not waiting for an audit or a complaint to look at compliance. So instead, we are checking in proactively, regularly, weekly, monthly, whatever the cadence needs to be. And that's because the mindset is, "I would rather find it first than find out because something has happened."

Sabrina

Definitely. We talked in the last episode - I think it was the last one - about kind of our onboarding process that we go through. We gave a framework, right, for managing through when things feel broken. And compliance, I preach to you all all the time that compliance is the foundation of what we do. We have to get that right.

Marie

This last example of what intentional HR looks like, I know it's going to be difficult. I know it sounds difficult, but it's having HR in the room when business decisions actually get made. And it's not because someone is fighting for a seat at the table, your favorite, but it is because leadership already understands that the people decisions live inside every single business decision.

Sabrina

This one is hard because I'm sure that our HR listeners are saying, "Yeah, that'd be great. That'd be great. I'd love to be involved in those decisions. I would love to be in the room, but I'm not invited in." And so this is probably a whole series, let's just be honest, of episodes that we need to do about how do you influence from the middle. Certainly something that we've had to learn as we come in, even though clients hire us, they hire us in their minds for sometimes a very intentional reason, meaning one area or something, and then they don't realize that HR does permeate because you have human beings in your organization. HR permeates everything that you're doing. They don't realize that, and we have to kind of fight for our space. And so there are ways that you can do it. There are ways that you can influence from the middle and that you can gain the ear that you're trying to gain, but it, A, takes time, takes a lot of time. It takes you getting all this other stuff right, right? It takes you being intentional about all the other HR build that you're doing. And then it takes learning how to communicate in a way that they can't deny what you're saying.

Marie

I know. I wish we had a statistic to share here, but it is true. As heavy as it feels, it is worth continuing to be resilient and pushing forward because the opportunity will present itself. It always does.

Sabrina

Well, I think if you paraded every business partner, every generalist on our team on this podcast and said, "Give me an example of a time that you were not being heard or you were not invited in, and you worked your way through it," they could all give you one. And they might say, "It took me two years. It took me six months. It took me three years." We've got clients who've been with us a long time, but now that's my favorite client, or now it's so I get to really affect their business because they're including me and stuff.

Marie

Yes, exactly, Sabrina. And so I just want to take a second, and I want to talk directly to the person who is the entire HR department. You are just one person. You are the entire function, and you're expected to handle everything. We know that y'all are trying to do this at once. And this is processing, onboarding paperwork, and trying to get a seat at the table. You are managing a termination and building a performance process. You're doing compliance work and trying to be more intentional. All of it, it's happening every single day. And that tension is real, right? We see it. We know it's happening. And one of the things about carrying that intentional mindset, especially when you're that HR department of one, is that it doesn't make your list of things to do even shorter. But it does change how you move through it. And so that is something that we really want to land with all of you because when you are able to just change the way that you're thinking, you're not just reacting to whatever lands on your desk or in your inbox anymore. And instead, you're starting to make choices about what matters most and why. And that's just a different kind of tired at the end of the day, right? That is something that you can go home and actually feel good about and start to look forward to going into the office or logging onto your computer the next day. On last week's episode, we talked about a framework called the Stabilize, Streamline, and Build. And the reason why I love this is that it really does meet you where you are or where your mindset actually is. And we talk about that you can't build when you're in crisis mode, right, because that's just going to force you back into that DIY thinking. But having that intentional mindset or even the willingness to start having that intentional mindset is what's going to carry you through all three of the stages of that framework. It's what's going to keep you from slipping back into that reactive mode every time something new hits. And ultimately, it's great because you know where you are, and you know what's coming next, and that's the whole thing. What's important to note is if you didn't hear that episode, go back and check it out. We're going to have a one-pager for you at the end of this episode that you can take a look at and walk you through how to go through that framework.

 

Sabrina

I think about the emotional stress in an HR department of one. When you're trying to when you are in crisis mode all the time, and you are drowning, and you're firefighting, and you're just barely keeping your head above water, how emotionally stressful that is.

Marie

And if you are in that HR department of onesie, and you are ready to build that intentional mindset with a real process behind it, we have a cohort that we are going to be launching in the beginning of April. And we would love to meet you and see you and work with you and help you through all of this. We'll be sharing some more details in the next couple of weeks about this, but April 17th is going to be our first day for the cohort, and we are so excited to share it with all of you.

Sabrina

And then I think the other thing that's important for us to plug a little bit is if you're sitting here and you're saying, "I wish my CEO were listening," or, "I wish my CEO would think this way," we also have a YouTube channel. I have a YouTube channel where I speak CEO to CEO. And it is my way of trying to help you as the HR practitioner get your CEO to hear what they need to from another CEO. So I am a CEO who's building a small business, and I'm doing it with these exact things we're talking about. So I'm building my business from an HR-first mindset, which is completely different than anybody else builds a business. And it's very frustrating for me when I try to benchmark or go to masterminds or whatever, and everybody's building their business very differently, but I see how it is helping grow the business and how it is helping move the business to much bigger places than I ever thought it could be. And so there is a YouTube channel. We'll make sure that the link is in the show notes if you ever wanted to. You could be a little passive-aggressive if you wanted to and pass on an episode to your CEO and be like, "I think it might be good for you to listen to this." But it talks about HR stuff, but from the mindset of a CEO. And I think that's a different place than kind of coming from the HR practitioner. And so we'll make sure that link is in the show notes as well.

Marie

Yeah, absolutely. And I'll just say this. I'm working with you, and so I naturally am listening and watching these episodes. But from an HR standpoint, it has helped me a lot to hear what you are having to say to other leaders from that CEO lens and then translating that, thinking about that, taking time to reflect about how that can trickle down into the HR space. And I bring that into the clients that I work with too. And so again, that's just saying we get it. You're HR folks, but there's a lot of meat and substance in the content that we're pushing out to everyone. Okay. So let's wrap this up. I have one question that I want all of you to take into this week, and I want you to sit with it as a mindset check and not just something to do. But I want you to ask yourself, "Is what I'm doing today protecting the business or just keeping up with it?" And then once you've sat with that, pick one area that you're still in DIY mode, just one. It can be very small. And think about what does one intentional step look like there, not just the task, but the actual thinking behind it. Sabrina, this was a really fun episode to talk with you about today. Thanks for your time.

Sabrina

Yeah, absolutely. If you are not already subscribed to the HR Connection, please do that so you get future episodes weekly here. And then we are on the HR Happy Hour Media Network. I think we've announced that yet. Have we announced that yet in an episode? But we are on the HR Happy Hour Media Network, part of their platform, which we're so excited to bring small business voices to that. And we release exclusive episodes there monthly. So you can subscribe to both the HR Connection here, wherever you're listening to your podcast, and then the HR Happy Hour will also be linked in the show notes.

Marie

Absolutely. Thanks again, everyone. We'll see you next time.

Sabrina

See you next time.