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.

That’s what it feels like when I get pulled in to clean things up when someone’s been sloppy. The damage has already been done. Nothing I can do about that. But someone’s got to manage the fallout.

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.

People Ops doesn’t have to be in-house. It doesn’t have to be full time. It doesn’t even have to “feel” like HR. But it does have to be done right.

Putting words to those operating principles won’t just help someone ramp faster. It gives your whole team a shared language to spot and fix misalignments.

Ops drag isn’t obvious at first, but it compounds quickly. Fortunately, small systems create big leverage. And a few smart fixes now can save you from spending your days scrambling as you grow.