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.

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.

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.

What started as a step back became a growth hack. When it came time to brand my service, I knew exactly what I was good at, where there was a gap, and what people would pay for. 

Riddle me this: What responsibility is sometimes handled by senior finance and other times by entry-level HR? What function manages a budget of millions but often gets assigned to the person with the lowest hourly rate? 

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.

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.

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.