But hang on, what’s the point of making someone find a printer, and a scanner, and a pen, and those little “sign here” stickies anyway? Why, crime, of course!

The most common reason to hold on to employment records is because at some point, someone is going to need them. You may get a zombie tax letter with a five-figure fine from a state where no one’s worked for years. An employee may go through a nasty divorce and need payroll records from several years ago. Someone could file a complaint of systemic bias, and you’ll need complete records going back years to defend yourself. You may want to run a report on long-term trends and n

When someone is paid for a day they didn't work, it MUST be entered into payroll as some kind of Paid Time Off type. Otherwise, there's no way to pay it. Most of the uncommon leave types don't allow negative balances in payroll systems. So if your time off isn't allocated to another bucket, it can't get paid. The discrepancy could even block payroll and prevent everyone from getting paid.

Your handbook should help people make decisions. Not just disciplinary decisions. The handbook should draw bright lines where possible, and give guidance for situations that are unclear. Your handbook should give guidance on the unspoken habits your organization runs on.

Hiring the right people is only one ingredient to elite operations. Excellence is also about preventing the circumstances that leave room for mistakes. The procedures for putting down the CAUTION WET FLOOR signs that prevent the slip-and-falls of history.

Most of the Louvre’s collection is literally priceless. Meaning that their value as historical artifacts is unquantifiable. You can’t take out an insurance policy on something that’s invaluable. The cost would be prohibitive.

Going into your DMs with someone who’s left the company feels like walking into the perfectly-preserved bedroom of someone who passed away before their time. Eerie, reverent, forbidden.

You’re sending the recipient to purgatory. They'll spend the whole weekend in an avoidance loop, thinking about your email and dreading the mental calories it will take to reply. They’ll be headed out on a date with their spouse, turn on their phone to call an Uber, and there will be the notification for YOUR EMAIL, just waiting. Watching.

When you’re the one who makes sure that everything is done by the book, there’s no one left to manage your exit correctly. That often means that you’re more likely than anyone to be underpaid or have your exit mishandled.

When it comes to hiring and promotion, we tend to think admin skills are intuitive. So we devalue them. But admin skills are not universal.

If more people could see the data, maybe they’d want to renegotiate. But they might also have a better understanding of how their value is measured, and therefore find ways to bring more value to the company.

Nearly everything that happens in the company goes through payroll. And the person managing it needs to have the skills of an accountant, IT, lawyer, insurance agent, and operations manager, all rolled into one.

Unless you fired them for something super unethical or illegal (like sexual harassment, fraud, violence, or microwaving cabbage soup), there’s no need to report it. Let the state make the call.

Both of these tools are available to companies for less than a dollar per employee per month. They can transform someone’s exit from cold paperwork to meaningful support. If it rips your heart out to see what’s happening in the job market, Callings and Kept are two things you can offer right now that make a real difference.

Short term disability insurance (STD) isn’t sexy. It doesn't attract top talent, but it can keep a company from the kind of tough decisions that can end with lawyers. Many employers don’t even know that the situations that are draining their budget are insurable.

She couldn’t control the mayhem upstream, but somehow she was the one apologizing. “Have you ever heard of a ‘blameless post-mortem’?” I asked. It’s a concept that I learned from software companies. When a bug causes a major incident, the review isn’t about a bad line of code but the whole causal chain.

He was quite confident that people always know when their paycheck is wrong. I wish that were always true. Payroll is complex, and you don’t know what you don’t know. I see a ton of these kinds of silent errors with 401(k)s.

Companies don’t reward you for masking dysfunction. They rely on it. They reward the person patching it up with even more responsibilities. Not the kind that come with a promotion, but responsibilities that come with with more fire drills and more late nights.

Choosing payroll software is like tasting wine with the label on the inside: all polish up front and, too often, regret on the back end. By the time you know what’s inside, you’re already seeing double. Picking the best tool is about knowing in advance what “best” means for your working style. The settings you skip during setup are the ones that bite.

“Everything is broken and I hate it here.” Have you ever worked at one of those places where the work-arounds become the job? Onboarding someone new isn’t about learning your product or roadmap. It’s about learning where the landmines are, how to use The Beast and navigate the playbook.