HR Professional Day | Meet Our Internal HR Team

Meet Our Internal HR Team

Tell us about your role and what a typical day looks like for you.

I oversee a few areas: internal HR, Benefits administration, health and life insurance sales, and FrankAdvice. My typical day has 4-5 meetings, some scheduled and some are impromptu. Like all of us, it includes a great deal of email! It also includes drop-by in-person discussions, phone calls, Teams communications, and calls/texts on my cell phone. It can range from reviewing state, federal, and local regulations to ensure our compliance, to listening/working with a manager or an employee having a personal crisis or job issue, to calling an ambulance for a sick employee, pressing a manager about the issues they are concerned with regarding one of their employees and creating a solution for correction, investigations, balancing employee desires, client expectations, and business requirements, COVID issues, evaluations and wage reviews, ADA, FMLA, interviewing applicants, onboarding new employees, and employee separations.

What’s one thing about HR that most people would be surprised to find out?

I think employees would be surprised to find out how much effort HR and the manager spends to thoroughly diagnose the employee relations issue and then develop the communication to help the employee see the issue and recognize what is needed for correction. The goal is to solve the problem and maintain the relationship; ending the employment is reserved for when there’s no alternative remaining.

What’s your favorite part of your job?

Laughing! The job is challenging, just like everyone else’s job is! The key to getting through the day is being intentional to stay calm when it gets rough and find laughter as much as possible.  

Tell us about your role and what a typical day looks like for you.

My main role is making sure I am available for employees. I focus on employee relations, corrective actions, recruitment and many other areas. There is never a typical day in HR because it is always filled with constant changes and events that very unexpectedly happen.

What is the most challenging part of your job?

I am a planner so the most challenging part for me is that no matter what I plan to accomplish each day it usually never works out that way. I usually accomplish many things I never even thought would come up.

What’s one thing about HR that many be surprised to find out?

I think that people don’t realize the amount of stress an HR professional handles every day. In HR we really are here to support and help each employee to the best of our ability.

Besides my coffee every morning, there is never a typical or standard day in HR since there’s always something new happening. There are new system implementations, new laws and/or policies to learn and practice, new or existing positions to be recruited for, and different employee relations to handle on a daily basis.

What is the most challenging part of your job?

The most challenging but exciting part of my job is knowing the unknown. A wise man once said, “life’s like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get,” and that’s the best way to describe the life of an HR individual. HR is filled with a variety of exhilarating work, however you never know what can or will happen the following day and depending what the issue/case is, we have to go the extra mile to learn, handle, and solve the issue with the right precautions, measurements and comprehension.

What’s your favorite part of your job?

Working directly with our employees and assisting them to the fullest of my knowledge. Having the opportunity to work side-by-side, assist, and teach all our new and existing employees are the reasons why an hour commute doesn’t bother me but instead keeps a smile on my face. And, of course, all the laughs, jokes, and silliness we need to have in order to stay sane.