As darkness falls on the last workday before Halloween, a few familiar creatures are stirring in the HR department. 🎃
Watch till the end and tell us in the comments which one you’ve become: Policy Vampire, Burned-Out Zombie, Micromanaging Mummy, or the Ghost Who Never Answers Emails? 👻
#HackingHR #HRCommunity #Halloween #HR
Every conversation HR takes on that belongs to a manager is a conversation that manager never gets to practice.
💭 It usually starts with kindness. Someone is hurting, their manager is hard to reach or uncomfortable with the topic, and HR is the person with the open door and the patience. The problem moves to HR's desk, gets handled well, and the employee leaves feeling heard. The next time anyone on that team struggles, they know exactly where to go, and it isn't to their manager.
A year later, HR is the unofficial first responder for a team whose leader has had no reps at the hardest part of leading. The one doing all the responding has nobody to pass their own weight to.
🤝 A question that sounds almost too simple changes the dynamic: "What have you already tried?" Said gently, it tells the person their situation matters and that they have more room to move than they believed. It also puts the manager back into a story they were always supposed to be in.
Taking the problem is the fast option, and it feels warm in the moment. Handing it back means sitting with someone's disappointment right when they came looking for relief, and that costs HR something every single time.
👉 If you work in HR, what's the sentence you use to hand a problem back without the person feeling dropped? I would love to borrow it.
Share this with a colleague who has been the first responder for a long time.
#HRLeadership #HRCommunity #EmployeeExperience #ManagerDevelopment #PeopleFirst #WorkCulture #HRWellbeing #FutureOfWork
Emails are the warm-up. 👀
In our live bootcamps, you build a working AI system for your HR work, hands-on. You leave with the build, a diploma and SHRM/HRCI credits.
🎉 Next one starts Nov 3, and it’s free.
🔗 bootcamps.hackinghrlab.io/
#HackingHR #AIinHR #HRTech #HumanResources #HRProfessionals #PeopleAndCulture #AItools #FutureOfWork
Say your organization's values statement says, “We value work-life balance,” but managers are sending emails at 10 pm. Which do employees believe?
Edgar Schein (1928–2023), a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, spent decades studying these gaps. He is often called the “father of organizational culture.”
Schein described culture as the shared assumptions a group develops as it learns to solve problems together.
When a way of working succeeds often enough, people stop questioning it, and it becomes “how things are done here.” So instead of sorting companies into types, his model looks at culture in three levels, from what anyone can observe to what people take for granted:
1️⃣ What you see: the visible signs of culture, from meeting habits to who gets celebrated. Schein called these “artifacts,” an anthropology term for the things a group creates.
2️⃣ What we say: the values, goals, and policies leaders state. Schein called these “espoused values.”
3️⃣ What people believe: the assumptions people take for granted and rarely discuss. In Schein’s model, these are the “basic underlying assumptions.”
More than 40 years later, managers still use this model to understand their organizations, according to MIT Sloan.
🔸 When the three levels match, people feel that culture is consistent.
🔸 When they don't, employees learn to trust what they see over what they're told.
We turned Schein's model into a simple tool, with one example and one question for each level, so you can compare what people see, say, and believe.
👉 Which question would be hardest to answer honestly in your organization, and why?
#OrganizationalCulture #WorkplaceCulture #EdgarSchein #HRLeadership #Leadership
ALT Infographic by Hacking HR: Schein’s 3 Levels of Organizational Culture, based on Edgar Schein’s model of organizational culture. What You See (artifacts): visible signs of culture anyone can observe, such as office layout, dress code, meeting habits and who gets celebrated; easy to observe, hard to interpret. What We Say (espoused values): values, goals and rules leaders state, such as values statements, mission, policies and town hall messages; easy to find, but may not match behavior. What People Believe (basic underlying assumptions): beliefs people take for granted and rarely discuss, such as “Speaking up is risky”; hard to see, but shapes behavior most. In practice: managers send emails at 10 pm, leaders say “We value work-life balance,” and people believe answering at 10 pm shows commitment. Ask yourself: What would a new hire notice in week one? Which stated values would employees say we live? What do people believe gets rewarded, even if unspoken?
How much of what happens in the workplace actually reaches HR? @Emtrain has just released its 2027 Workplace Culture report, based on responses from 695,107 employees across more than 385 organizations and insights from 28,000+ anonymous employee comments.
➡️ What HR leaders will find inside the report:
🚨 Emerging risks, including conflict over social and political views, exclusion, and behaviors that can lead to harassment or discrimination issues.
💬 What employees are saying about leadership and accountability, from speaking up about bias to how managers respond to feedback and make decisions.
🔸 Five priorities for HR in 2027, with practical recommendations for resolving conflict, making fair decisions, managing change, and strengthening ethical conduct.
Explore the full report for more employee perspectives, research findings, and recommended actions.
👉 Download the report: bit.ly/4sgbYqT
#WorkplaceCulture #OrganizationalCulture #WorkplaceTrends2027 #HRLeadership #Leadership #EmployeeRelations #HumanResources
ALT Infographic titled “Workplace Culture Risk Iceberg,” featuring an iceberg above and below the ocean surface. Six findings from Emtrain’s 2027 Workplace Culture Report are highlighted with red connectors: 35.5% report workplace conflict over differing social or political views; 12.9% report inappropriate gossip; and 9.9% have observed stereotypical comments. Below the waterline, 21.6% say calling out bias could risk workplace relationships; 10.9% report that people in authority get away with disrespectful behavior; and 56.6% give favorable responses about opportunities being based on skills rather than bias. The footer displays Emtrain and Hacking HR logos alongside an invitation to download the report.
Companies that act on change first earned a 150% higher return on invested capital.
The difference: seven human skills that AI and technology can't do well.
Meet them in this week's newsletter 👇
news.hackinghr.io/p/workforc…
Which of your projects is slipping right now? 👀
Nov 3–4: Enrique Rubio builds an AI project management system live, with a risk radar, dashboards, and status updates that write themselves.
Free, with a certificate and HR credits.
👉 Register now: bit.ly/4BlRSj7
#HumanResources #HR #ProjectManagement #AIBootcamp #AIinHR
To move through change and sustain high performance, organizations need people with specific human skills and one stable foundation.
Check out our latest post in partnership with @pearson:
👉 bit.ly/4zU35WL
#WorkforceAgility #OrganizationalAgility #DurableSkills #ChangeManagement
Your organization probably has an employee experience team. It almost certainly also has a manager everyone knows about.
💡 Not a rumor. A known quantity. The one whose team turns over every eighteen months, whose skip-level feedback gets described in HR meetings as “complex,” whose direct reports have learned to perform fine in engagement surveys because saying the true thing never changed anything. Leadership knows. HR knows. The experience program runs anyway, in a parallel universe where that person’s behavior isn’t the data.
Exit interviews name managers constantly. That data gets summarized, sanitized, and presented in a format where the pattern is visible but the person isn’t. Because the person is a business relationship, a top performer by the numbers, someone’s hire. So employee experience becomes a design problem and the manager becomes someone else’s conversation for later.
Later rarely comes.
👉 Has your org ever actually acted on manager behavior flagged in experience data? What did that look like?
#HRLeadership #ManagerDevelopment #EmployeeExperience #PeopleFirst #FutureOfWork #HRCommunity #WorkCulture #Leadership
🚩 An employee who used to challenge decisions now agrees with everything. Someone who was eager to grow hasn't mentioned a promotion in months. The person who always had ideas barely speaks in meetings anymore.
It's easy to overlook these changes when deadlines are being met, and performance looks fine on paper.
But people can keep doing their jobs long after they've stopped believing things will get better.
And by the time someone tells you they're unhappy, they may have spent months trying to make themselves heard.
👀 Pay attention to who's gone quiet, who's stopped volunteering, and who's no longer asking for anything.
💬 Have you ever reached a point at work where you stopped speaking up because you felt nothing would change? What happened?
🔁 Share this with a leader who needs to recognize the signs earlier.
#Leadership #EmployeeEngagement #WorkplaceCulture #PeopleManagement #HackingHR
🎉 Only 4 days until iSpring AI Days 2026!
The question at the center of the event is: How do we use these capabilities without compromising quality, losing human judgment, or creating more content simply because we can?
📷 The agenda is amazing!
It brings together practitioners exploring AI adoption, course creation, human judgment, learning quality, and more! If you can't attend live, register anyway.
@iSpringPro will send registered participants the full session recordings after the event.
🌐 Free and online
👉 Register for free: bit.ly/4hUAuKS
#LearningAndDevelopment #AIOrchestration #FutureOfLD #AIinHR #ELearning #CourseCreator #ELearningDevelopment
The sweetest words on a Friday: “Meeting canceled.” 😊😃😁
Happy Friday!
#hrmemes #hrlife #fridaymemes #humanresources #hr #HRHumor #hrhumour #HackingHR #officehumor #officememes
Turn a rough project brief into a full plan with AI.
In this FREE 2-day live bootcamp (Nov 3–4, 2026, 6–8 AM PT), Enrique Rubio, founder of Hacking HR, will build a complete AI project management system: AI planning, dashboards, a status engine that drafts weekly updates, a risk radar, and Gmail, Calendar, and Slack integrations.
Free for Hacking HR members, with a diploma and SHRM, HRCI, and IHRIM credits.
Nothing to set up in advance! Just come and build.
👉 Save your free seat: bit.ly/3TPwSkc
#ProjectManagement #HR #HumanResources #AI #AIinHR #AIatwork #HackingHR
ALT Promotional banner for a free Hacking HR AI bootcamp. Text reads: Upcoming free bootcamp. Build Your AI-Powered Project Management Systems. Level: Advanced. 4 hours total, built live, 2 days. November 3–4, 2026, 6:00–8:00 AM Pacific Time. Register Now. A dark navy background with a glowing green grid, chart, target and gear icons, and a tablet showing a project dashboard. Logos for People & Culture Strategy Institute and Hacking HR.
📌 Imagine losing a key employee on Monday and realizing by Tuesday that nobody else knows how to do half their job.
The processes they managed, the relationships they maintained, the decisions they made without needing approval. Suddenly, everyone is trying to figure out who can take over.
Somewhere in the organization, someone could have been prepared for that responsibility months ago.
That's where succession planning often falls apart.
Companies identify potential successors, put their names in a spreadsheet, and revisit the conversation during the next talent review. Meanwhile, those employees keep doing the same work, with little exposure to the decisions or challenges they'll eventually have to handle.
🔎 Here's a question worth asking at your next leadership meeting: If someone on your team had to step into a critical role tomorrow, what have you actually done to prepare them?
A name on a succession chart won't tell you that.
💬 HR and business leaders, what's the biggest obstacle you've encountered when trying to turn succession plans into actual development opportunities?
🔁 Repost this to get the conversation going beyond HR.
#HackingHR #SuccessionPlanning #TalentManagement #LeadershipDevelopment #HRStrategy
55% of HR professionals surveyed by @LatticeHQ had considered leaving the profession, up from 41% in the previous edition.
If you've delivered layoff news, you know the conversation can linger long after work hours.
You explain severance while someone tries to process losing their income. Then have to support the colleagues who stayed, and they are afraid they'll be next. Later, you're home, still thinking about how that person will tell their family. Many times, you find yourself explaining a decision you challenged behind closed doors.
People expect you to stay composed, even when you need a moment yourself.
That work takes time and emotional energy.
It belongs in the change plan, alongside deadlines and deliverables.
Executives, CHROs, and people managers can take specific actions and make decisions to protect HR's team capacity and wellbeing.
Here are five ways to support HR through change, with a clear role for everyone involved.
👉 What would make the biggest difference for you during the next round of change?
💬 And are there others you would add to this list? Please share in the comments!
#HRLeadership #HRWellbeing #OrganizationalChange #ChangeManagement #WorkplaceCulture
ALT Infographic from Hacking HR titled “Who Supports HR Through Change?” with the subtitle “How to Protect HR Teams’ Capacity and Wellbeing.” Five rows show a decision, action, and responsible parties: 1. Make the workload fit by reviewing responsibilities, pausing projects, moving deadlines, and arranging coverage. Responsible: HR leader and executive sponsor. 2. Share difficult work by assigning communication and follow-up and preparing managers. Responsible: executive sponsor and people managers. 3. Give HR decision authority and escalation routes. Responsible: executive sponsor and HR leader. 4. Provide confidential support outside the situations HR manages, including external counseling or professional peer support. Responsible: organization and support provider. 5. Plan recovery and follow-up by building breathing room and reviewing overtime, deferred work, and team feedback. Responsible: HR leader, backed by the executive sponsor.
A few years ago, Snitcher was a team of four people working in a basement in the Netherlands. Then they hit their first $1 million in ARR.
They used a Notion document and a table to track leave days.
To keep up with the growth they expected, they needed to hire fast, but the Netherlands became a limitation. The people they wanted were out there; they had the experience and the knowledge of Snitcher’s competitors and markets.
But they just happened to live in different countries.
Hiring internationally created another problem: setting up a legal entity in every country where they found great talent. The costs and admin work were too much to absorb.
Then they found out they could hire people without establishing their own entities in each country.
An Employer of Record (EOR) opened the door to:
🔸 A staff engineer in Brazil.
🔸 Business leadership in the United Kingdom.
🔸 Sales professionals in Serbia.
🔸 Customer success managers in the Philippines.
Snitcher also adopted an HR Management solution to bring its processes together as the team expanded.
The team grew 300% in one year.
Some hires moved from interview to contract in as little as two days.
And despite the headcount increase, Snitcher's part-time HR manager supported the larger team without spending additional hours on administration.
🌟 Hiring strategy shapes workforce strategy.
But you must understand which hiring model best supports the workforce you want to build.
👉 Read Snitcher’s success story: remote.sjv.io/2R9OQ7
#WorkforceStrategy #GlobalHiring #TalentAcquisition #WorkforcePlanning @remote
Some people switch off the news to protect their peace. Others keep refreshing their feeds, hoping the next update will help them make sense of things.
These people work alongside each other. Sometimes, we move between both habits ourselves.
Pew Research Center's 2026 report found that 52% of U.S. adults felt worn out by the amount of news. 60% said they had reduced their news intake at some point.
A quieter colleague may be trying to get through the day. Someone who keeps bringing up the headlines may be looking for reassurance. We cannot know without listening.
For leaders, that means making room for different responses while paying attention to what people need at work.
🔸 Can they ask for support privately?
🔸 Do they know what matters this week?
🔸 Will saying they are struggling lead to something helpful?
Here are five ways to make work more manageable when the world feels unpredictable.
👉 What would help your team now?
#HR #HumanResources #Managers #Leadership #psychologicalsafety #workplaceculture