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.

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.

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. 

Let me give you a “hypothetical” example that has definitely never happened in real life. It’ll make your blood run cold.

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.

Parental leave combines the most complicated parts of HR into one policy: protected classes, disability, paid time off and sick time, obscure payroll esoterica, employees who are "active" but not "working" (and sometimes don't come back when you expect), insurance (policy details, deductions, and a qualifying event), onboarding and offboarding (maybe more than once per person), a bajillionty federal, state, and local laws, many of which conflict

People often confuse their job being 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗱 (by FMLA, etc.) with getting 𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗱. It's a common mistake. I'm sorry. I really am. I know you're going through a lot. I hate delivering this message when it's already too late. 

This wasn’t payroll. It was a cold case. Policies contradicted payroll data. Contracts were locked behind sharing permissions from people who’d left the company. Folder names were gibberish. People paid hourly were getting flat rates with no timecards to confirm overtime. A million Scribe docs with no annotations. Hours of 20-minute videos with no transcripts.

Founders love to say, “But we’re a startup.” Like sloppiness is a badge of honor. It's less cute when it comes up in diligence. Here are three dumb mistakes that could have tanked a deal, and the simple fixes that saved them.

As an HR department of one, she’d created an environment where people loved to work. I was called in because they were having trouble with a few vendors. And as usual, the problem wasn’t the vendors, but how the company was using the tools.

Termination isn't just a button in your HRIS. It's a tightly regulated event. It's the kind of process where everyone is watching. That’s why HR and managers feel so much pressure to keep it confidential. But too much confidentiality means the people responsible for execution don’t have enough time to get it right. 

If you're thinking, "But wait, that sounds like my company..."  That's the point.  These situations come up in all kinds of companies. They're as common as meetings that could have been emails. 

I don't know who needs to hear this, but Qualifying Life Events (QLEs) aren't written in stone.

You don’t need HR. You need infrastructure. And a little foresight before the next fire drill. You can't scale on vibes and Airtable alone. 

Meanwhile, mistrust over the final paycheck was just one in a list of disagreements leading to a quickly deteriorating relationship

Don't put up with a broken back office just because you don't want to deal with HR. A fast-growing startup needs someone with the operational range AND depth to think on their feet.

A man claiming to represent the New York Workers' Comp Board had shown up at my client's home in upstate New York, demanding proof of coverage. It would have been laughable, except that it was real.