#17 JooBee's newsletter

TL;DR

🚀 Founders, expect more from your HR function

🧯 Sick of firefighting? Fix your HR Ops and Infrastructure

💥 Start-up career hacks with Sarah Touzani, CEO & Co-Founder (exclusive content)

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Founders, expect more from your HR function

As an HR leader, being labelled "Aunt Agony" is my worst nightmare! 😱 Ok, ok, there is definitely some truth to the notion that HR often handles policies and/or HR administrative tasks. But, if you understand the true power of the HR function in your business, you’ll come to expect more - MUCH more (and believe me, your HR leaders want you to expect more!).

4 business values your HR function should deliver

Broadly, your business has 4 needs - to run, drive, grow and scale through the lens of people and organisation - which you should expect your HR function to support. I captured these needs in what I call the HR Hierarchy of Needs.

1️⃣ RUN day-to-day HR

First and foremost, your business and people need their HR function to run day-to-day HR that just works - and this IS administratively heavy. Some examples, ensuring compliance with employment regulations, addressing employee queries, maintaining accurate records, and updating policies. Recruitment and training also involve administrative tasks like scheduling interviews and booking training sessions. 

2️⃣ DRIVE delivery of business strategy

Secondly, HR functions are needed to deliver on the business strategy through our people agenda. We do this by partnering closely with the business to ensure:

• No difficulties attracting and hiring talent

• New joiners are set up for success quickly

• The right people are in the right place at the right time

• Our people grow key capabilities and deliver great results

• We are not losing people to our competitors

3️⃣ GROW business to be faster, better and happier

Thirdly, the business needs HR to help them look into the future and build solutions that can enable them to continue to grow - faster, better and happier. For example, building career paths that are not just for today, but should accommodate the evolution of roles as the business scales. Or, implementing an ATS that is not just for now, but is able to handle an increase in complexity as the business grows.

4️⃣ SCALE business to grow exponentially

Many start-ups want to, but only a handful of start-ups truly invest in the need for an HR function that can enable the business as a whole to grow greater than the sum of its parts. This is what I like to call the “big bet” in HR that can 10x the impact on business growth through employee experience. For example, investment in people data and AI to understand our people better, make faster decisions or better personalise our employees' experiences.

So here’s the catch:

⛔ If the needs in one layer aren’t met, they’ll take precedence before looking at the next layer

The HR function’s priority starts at the first layer because it is the most urgent need. If all hell breaks loose in payroll this week, as an example, all efforts will be channelled to making sure employees are paid on time and any plans for designing those bespoke career paths will be parked until the HR function has the capacity to look at this again. If the right to work is not documented properly in the business, all effort will be channeled to ensure compliance and focus on redesigning a performance review experience will be parked. So, until you fulfil the needs of this layer, you can’t move on to solve the next layer of needs - or worse, you firefight perpetually. 

💥 As the business grows so too does the base of the pyramid (volume of administrative HR)

As your start-up grows and more people join, the wider the pyramid becomes - i.e. HR administrative work increases. More queries, more interviews to schedule, more operational tasks pile up. These Layer 1 business and employees needs take precedence - and HR doesn't have the time to focus on the next layer needs. It's no wonder businesses see HR’s value as purely administrative, instead of focusing on developing HR solutions that facilitate future growth.

Expect more from your HR function to grow and scale your start-up

As you hire your first HR leader, it's crucial to understand the value that the HR function can bring in unlocking the growth of your start-up. Because as your startup grows, so does administrative HR work, consuming resources. Therefore, select an HR leader who knows how to build the foundations to flip the HR Hierarchy of Needs pyramid so that your HR function spends the majority of their time and effort helping you pave the path to scale your start-up effectively.

Sick of firefighting? Fix your HR Ops and Infrastructure

A strong HR function will be able to help run, drive, grow and scale the business simultaneously; but a drowning HR function can only keep the lights on.

Hence, the all-too-frequent question about the right ratio of HR team to employees. Hot take: it doesn’t matter! It might feel natural to want to invest in headcount to ensure your HR team isn’t drowning or even treading water, but swimming strongly. The reality is that hiring more people instead of resolving the root causes of HR debt - means you will always be paying interest (in time and resources) for your debt 💸.

Whether I have 5:100 or 10:100 ratio of HR team to employees, my functional HR strategy is always to flip the pyramid on its head! By doing that, I ensure that I free up the majority of my team’s time and effort to focus on the top 3 layers of the HR Hierarchy of Needs pyramid instead of Layer 1 - operational tasks. 

Avoid implementing old strategies to achieve a new vision

If we attempt to achieve a new vision while building the same HR team structure, hiring the same HR capabilities, implementing the same HR process or working in the same way we used to know, we will always get the same old outcomes - Einstein calls this insanity. The how-to is too long to cover in this newsletter. I’ve written 6 blogs on how to break this cycle - check out Season 2 of the ‘Scaling Start-ups’ blog.

In this newsletter, I’ll focus on 1 mistake you can avoid. Getting this right can exponentially scale your HR team’s value. 

The top 1 mistake to avoid: Hiring junior HR Ops roles to solve HR operational problems

In my HR function, I build 4 key pillars - 1️⃣Talent Partnering, 2️⃣People/HR Partnering, 3️⃣People Product Development and 4️⃣People/HR Ops and Infrastructure. Among these, the HR Ops and Infrastructure is the linchpin that can massively impact the flipping of your HR Hierarchy of Needs pyramid - and free up all the other HR pillars’ time to channel their effort to drive, grow and scale your start-up. 

Interestingly, the HR Ops and Infrastructure role is both the easiest and hardest to hire for. It's easy if you’re seeking HR folks who can create processes and hire more people to run those processes. But it becomes challenging when you need HR folks who can not only create and automate processes but also manage the increased volume of HR administrative tasks as the company’s headcount grows - all without expanding the headcount of the HR team! That's why filling my team's Head of HR Ops is so hard and the last role to fill — people with these capabilities are rare.

I vividly remember hiring Cynthia Chan as my Head of HR Ops and Infrastructure. Within her first 4 weeks onboard, not only did her team experience relief, but the other 3 pillars of the HR team (talent partnering, people partnering, product development), along with the Finance and Biz Ops teams, also breathed a sigh of relief.

Our processes were becoming increasingly complex as our headcount grew by 15% quarter over quarter. Within those initial 4 weeks, Cynthia streamlined, automated, or integrated HR processes in collaboration with all teams to reduce manual workload. One of my favourite rituals her team shares in our HR Slack channel is celebrating the 'killing of processes' with a ⚰️ coffin emoji every time they eliminate a process through streamlining or automation.

Don't misunderstand me. We didn’t create fewer processes. Instead, we created A LOT of HR processes to ensure the smooth operation of HR day-to-day activities, achieve consistent results, and create a positive employee experience. BUT, we don’t rely on manual execution. That's where the value of hiring a highly technical HR Ops leader lies.

Your real value lies in fire prevention, not fire-fighting

The mistake I made

One big mistake I made when navigating my career in a start-up was making myself too indispensable. Coming from a big bank in Paris to an early-stage start-up in London, I joined a tiny team building everything from scratch. As the first Ops hire, I dived into setting up processes and figuring out how things needed to work.

As we scaled to 80 employees post a successful Series A, with $50 million raised - I found myself at the centre of it all, particularly leading the operations team, which grew to 40-50 people. As the person with all the knowledge, I became the go-to person for answers.

Initially perceived as beneficial, this dynamic created a bottleneck. Whenever my team had questions, I swiftly responded on Slack - not realising I was hindering their learning and autonomy. This not only limited their development but also constrained my ability to focus on broader strategic objectives.

The one thing I wish I knew to avoid that mistake

It's the confidence to let things break occasionally. In hindsight, not every query needed my immediate response on Slack. Stepping back would have empowered others to step in, either to answer those questions or to encourage the person to seek out the answers themselves. This wouldn't resulted in disaster; it would have fostered a more self-sufficient team.

As a COO, it's tempting to slip into a firefighter role, always dousing the flames of the day-to-day issues. The real value lies in fire prevention - creating systems that reduce the likelihood of issues arising in the first place. Shifting from reactive to proactive would have allowed for more strategic planning and prevented the bottleneck caused by my constant availability.

One tip to hack your career in start-ups

My top tip for anyone looking to thrive in a start-up environment is to constantly reassess your role. In a fast-paced start-up, especially one that's scaling quickly, the scope of your job is in perpetual motion. What you were hired to do six months ago likely looks very different from what you're doing today, and it will continue to evolve.

So, every few months, take a step back and redefine your job description. Ask yourself how you can best contribute to the company in its current phase. This might mean letting go of tasks that were once your primary responsibility and embracing new challenges. Essentially, you need to 'fire yourself' from your old job and step into your new role with fresh eyes and renewed energy.

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