Express your gratitude to HR professionals that work so hard.
“Human Resource management is one of the toughest jobs because it required immense responsibility and dedication towards the company.” Typically, when you think HR, you think of the people who fired your favorite coworker or maybe you think the people that denied your pay raise request.
Human Resource Professional Day is dedicated to changing the perspective people have of HR and learn about why their job is valuable for businesses. Your company’s HR department is vital and essential to the company’s success and most of the time may not get enough credit for what they do.
This Human Resource Professional Day, we selected three of our HR Advisory members to showcase and remind them and other HR Professionals that the work you all do has not gone unnoticed.
Meet Nick Bilotta, Director of Studios & Talent Strategy at Candid
Q: How did you get into HR/employee benefits? What interested you the most about the field?
A: I walked the training to learning & development to leadership development and talent management path. I stepped into the employee relations world as well for the first time at my current company. What interests me is people and the opportunity to impact them directly where they spend the majority of their time awake–at work.
Q: What challenges do you feel HR faces in today’s working environment? What are you most excited about when it comes to creating change in the industry?
A: The challenges we face now are the same they have always been: translating our focus on people into dollars and cents for the business driving leaders of our companies. Today’s questions of WFH/hybrid and vaccine mandates are just the newest wrinkle in that fabric. What’s exciting for me is the opportunity for change present in any upheaval of the status quo. Breaking our old notions about productivity being linked to physical presence in-office means we can talk more honestly about the advantages of in-person connection and collaboration–and prioritize that accordingly.
Q: What do you appreciate most about the People/HR Space?
A: The camaraderie. Even if your company has a fairly large HR team, you can still feel like you are on an island a lot, fighting against a rising tide. I think meeting with People-people provides that much-needed feeling of connection and understanding. I think it also then reminds you why you do this work in the first place.
Meet Erica Woods, Head of People & Culture at Stacklet
Q: How did you get into HR/employee benefits? What interested you the most about the field?
A: I was in an administrative role for a growing start-up (back when the dinosaurs roamed). My manager asked me to learn and run HR for the organization. He said something like, “There’s this thing called Human Resources. I believe we’re currently in violation of all of its rules. Here’s the company credit card, please find and take a course so that you can manage HR for the company.” I agreed and the rest, as is said, is herstory. I’ve always been most interested in the partnership between HR and the business. I have been a trusted confidant of CEOs, managers, and employees throughout my career because I truly believe that a business is only as strong and successful as its humans. As a result, I made a niche for myself going into organizations with major functional issues or no HR function at all and helping them become well-oiled machines.
Q: What challenges do you feel HR faces in today’s working environment?
A: In a word, Covid. I see the biggest challenge in HR as being how to keep the boat (our organizations) steady while the sea monster with 100 legs and 7 heads (Covid) continues to try to rock it, shock it, and veer it off-course daily. In other words, we’re faced with learning how to build and maintain rules, protocols, and systems during a time when the information we’re receiving on how to do that is ever (and rapidly) shifting, AND we must continue to perform the core functions of our roles and integrate this new mid-Covid reality into each of those core functions. We also have to translate what we’ve learned into terms that relate to the entire organization, all while navigating through the shift in our roles as “armchair therapists,” which have grown exponentially because of the emotional issues we’re seeing as a result of Covid (isolation, illness/death, massive layoffs, etc.), and ensuring that we’re DE&I ambassadors (and not simply giving lip service to the truths of diversity, equity, and inclusion within our organizations).
Q: What are you most excited about when it comes to creating change in the industry?
A: I love remote and distributed work environments. I’m very fortunate to have already been working with a remote-first/distributed company (with team members in 40+ countries) pre-Covid. I believe that, with all of the devastation of Covid-times, one silver lining is that remote/distributed work environments have increased substantially, as have organizations that support remote/distributed workers. I’m excited to see how this continues to grow and shift so that remote/distributed work becomes even more wonderful.
Q: What is your work philosophy?
A: Bring kindness, compassion, intelligence, empathy, integrity, efficiency, ease, and no BS to everything I do ...and always be OK with saying, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.” It’s not merely my work philosophy, it’s my life philosophy.
Meet Allison Sproul, Senior Manager, People & Talent at connectRN
Q: How did you get into HR/employee benefits? What interested you the most about the field?
A: I originally got into HR by way of recruiting. I was teaching English in Beijing for EF at the time and my co-worker mentioned that the Teacher Recruitment & Training team was hiring. I applied, got the role, and have been in HR ever since! When I was growing up, I wanted to be a talk show host so I could get paid to talk to people. Recruitment seemed like another more realistic way to make a living by talking to people - can you tell I’m 100% extroverted?
Q: What challenges do you feel HR faces in today’s working environment? What are you most excited about when it comes to creating change in the industry?
A: I think the most interesting HR challenge for me is creating inclusion and belonging in a hybrid workforce. It was one thing when we were all remote but now it’s very top-of-mind that not all voices can be equally heard when a meeting is done partially in person and partially online. I think that if we can crack the code though, this can fundamentally change the way we work. That’s pretty exciting!
Q: What’s your work philosophy?
A: My mantra is to control the controllables. There are so many things out of our hands as HR professionals, such as visa processing regulations or various social justice movements, and that can be overwhelming if you let that dictate your workflow. Stepping back and asking yourself what you can do is so important.