Why I’m Writing This Series

To be honest, HR and company culture in a large corporation are a lot different from what you see in a small company, and frankly, much more complex. So there’s a good chance employees at big companies won’t relate much to the posts in this series.

But I’m writing it anyway because large corporations make up only a tiny slice of the private-sector world. Most people around us are working at smaller companies, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to write for them too.

As everyone knows, small companies often don’t have much structure. Many of them started small and stayed that way, so they keep the same culture they had back when they were basically just a tiny office.

When employees join that kind of place, they often don’t get proper training, and it’s hard to figure out what skills they’re even supposed to build as office workers. It can be so different from what they expected that a lot of new hires quit over exactly that.

I’m writing this series in the hope that people struggling in situations like this will feel a little less alone, and maybe get something useful out of it.

When you work in HR, you end up close to management’s thinking, while also having to talk constantly with the people doing the day-to-day work. You get some chance to see why managers keep making certain decisions, and why employees keep running into the same frustrations. You also often end up stuck in the middle when teams or departments clash, acting as the mediator, which gives you a pretty close look at each side’s interests and pain points.

HR also tends to have a lot of common ground from one company to another, no matter the industry. I’ve worked at several small companies and met a lot of different managers and employees, but the patterns were surprisingly similar. So I think there’s a lot in this that small-company workers will recognize.

By writing about what I’ve seen and felt from all these different angles, I hope readers can make some sense of situations they couldn’t quite understand at their own companies, or maybe never got explained to them at all.

I’ve also spent a fair amount of time counseling employees along the way. Some conversations were light, about everyday work life. Others were more serious, about adjusting to the company, or even about whether to quit. I want to bring those counseling experiences into this series too, so the stories feel even closer to real life. My hope is that readers can feel them a little more clearly, almost like they’re experiencing them for themselves.