Most states have regulations that fall into a few easy categories: Do you protect 12 weeks of leave, even if the company isn’t covered by FMLA? Do you have a state-paid program?

Every decision looks different in the abstract vs. when you have a real person sitting in front of you. If fairness requires that someone makes a decision that feels shitty, give your decision-makers the context that they need to follow the policy (and still sleep at night).

If you’ve been trapped in your workplace unable to leave, eating Doritos from the vending machine for dinner and sleeping under your desk, should you be paid for that time?

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!

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.

Worst of all, striking fear into every HR leader and PeopleOps specialist is the Parental Leave Policy 😱. Parental leave isn’t just about giving people 12 weeks off. 

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. 

What all of these point solutions are missing: Human Resources and People Operations are complex jobs that require a nuanced understanding of a variety of different subjects. The AI opportunities aren’t in replacing the humans in Human Resources. They’re enhancing human judgement. 

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.

Is it okay for an hourly employee to work 30 hrs/week (instead of 40) for 3 weeks due to illness without taking intermittent FMLA? Their manager is cool with it and the employee doesn't want to take PTO.

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. 

Let's get one thing straight: It's perfectly fine for your company to reimburse people for having a life. But if there's no business purpose or tax-preferred program for it (like an HRA, commuter benefit, or 401k), it has to be taxed as income. 

If you think that looking up worker’s comp codes is boring, you’re missing out. If you give me a list of thousands of obscure jobs, I’m going to lose at least 20 minutes going through it. 

A PEO is an insurance broker, a guardrail, and a payroll provider. But it’s not a brain. Some people need a PEO. Some need a person. Most don’t know which they are.

Certifications like SHRM and HRCI that over-rely on recall without nuance only magnify this false sense of authority. Like passing the exam makes you Solomon or something. 

I spoke to someone last week who was confused about how to administer her company’s sick leave policy. This HR person (or should I say “truancy officer”?) was essentially blocking people from using their time and then deleting it before they could. That’s not how that works.

Did you know: Payroll doesn’t update tax settings automatically when someone moves. If you live somewhere where it’s common to commute across state lines, having different settings for where someone lives and works seems natural.

Somewhere between two weeks and thirty years, it has to become something else. 

Most teams treat FLSA salary exemptions as a payroll hack. But you need to do more than pay someone a flat rate for them to be exempt from overtime.

And yet, if 50 of your employees can’t meet at Applebees after work, someone taking leave might not have legal job protection. Even if the work is covered. Even if the team has capacity. Even if the impact is minimal.