Coffee With Mike- Providing Value to HR

In HR, we get a lot of different questions from employees and they have a lot of different situations. You’re allowed to express the information, but you're not allowed to provide advice. So, when you think about what situation the employee is trying to put you in, they’re really asking you for advice. You know it, they know it, and yet they feel this wall go up like, “oh, wait a minute.” 

They're not really gonna give me any advice. They're just gonna tell me words, they're just gonna give me sentences, they're just gonna give me a description. I'm left with, “Well, what do I do?”  This is really frustrating, I think, for a lot of HR people because they just cannot cross that Rubicon. It's like forbidden. It's the forbidden zone to get into being an advisor. 

What we're trying to do is provide that opportunity for you to be able to segue from what you know to be the information, to what they need to do with that information and have that advice. That's why we're here. We're trying to help your employee make good decisions for them, within the context of who they are, of what they think, what their priorities and plans are for the future, what their priorities are for the present, and how all that comes together to make one good decision, or maybe several good decisions. 

This is especially true for employees who just are brand new in the system and they just don't know exactly what these acronyms mean, or they don't know what these benefits are, so our job is to get past all that. You can identify acronyms, you can identify benefits. What we're trying to do is help you lead them to the right place of making good decisions so that when they finally get into the work mode, when they finally get into going back home and explaining it to their family, that they can really know what they did, and know why they did it, and know why it's best for them. I think that's a really important thing for us to be able to provide for you.