🎉 Happy EOW and welcome to the 161 new subscribers this week. Today’s newsletter is 512 words, a 3.9-minute read.
🎰 See you at Transform? If you're headed to Las Vegas next week, come say 'hi' at the ChartHop booth (#108).
MAIN TOPIC
⛔️ Your docs tool isn’t the answer for your employee resources
Employees have constant questions about company policies, expectations, and benefits.
What can I use my L&D stipend on again?
Do we get MLK Day off?
What’s the name of our new vision insurance?
How much am I allowed to expense on food on a business trip?
What does my parental leave policy look like as a UK-based employee at this US-based company?
Why it matters: The People team is usually in charge of supplying the answers to these employment questions.
Backdrop: Traditionally, employee resources lived scattered across some combination of printed or PDF employee handbooks, company intranets (more recently, something like Notion), and payroll/benefits software.
One obvious problem with the multi-location solution is the lack of one single source of truth for information an employee may need.
When the answer isn’t in the first place an employee looks, they’ll bug a person as the next step.
Plus many overlapping sources of employee information makes it painful (and often impossible) to keep every place up to date.
But the other big pain point with intranets that we uncovered in conversations with People leaders like you is access control. Tools like Notion, Sharepoint, or Google Docs make it incredibly easy to share info with specific people, but incredibly difficult to make information available to only specific subgroups of your always-changing organization. For example,
Sharing health benefit details with only employees in the US
Sharing manager tools only with people who are managers
Sharing engineering interview guides with the Engineering department
Sharing payroll process info with the People and Finance team
I’m a huge fan of Notion as a product, but Notion is not the answer. Here at ChartHop, we’ve used Notion as an employee resource hub for long enough to feel the above pain ourselves.
The bottom line: Ultimately, employees should have one place to look for all resources and information related to People Ops.
That’s why our team at ChartHop made employee resource pages part of our new HRIS.
ONE THING WE'RE READING
🗣️ The People Leader vs. Business Leader Debate
Why we liked it: Jennifer Kim takes a click-bait conversation from LinkedIn and forces a more nuanced discussion of the constantly recurring question of whether or not People leaders are business-driven enough.
Best quotes: “It’s like a red herring, because we’re training HR people to be defensive, like ‘I’m going to be asked about X metric today’ not because it’s actually helping them in their role. What are we missing out on by jumping straight to metrics?” - Stacey Nordwall “HR often has this prioritization problem, we strand ourselves on ‘HR island’ by implementing our playbook or ‘bag of HR tricks’ without thinking about what really needs to be done at our organization, right now. And often it’s because they are trying to do too much HR-specific work and doing it all themselves.” - Andrew Bartlow Go deeper with Safe for Work.
🎰 People Ops Jobs Of The Week
You can submit a job here if you’d like it featured on the job board.
You shouldn’t have to compromise on a system as critical as your HRIS. That’s why when it came time to build ChartHop HRIS, we took what we heard from People leaders like you to heart.
So what exactly makes ChartHop HRIS different? You’ll be able to:
Get the whole data story, visually, in one place: Bring all of your people data together so you can confidently pull reports, run analyses, and gain insights at any time. Goodbye spreadsheets!
Configure key elements to meet your needs: Configure everything from fields, user access, forms, and employee profiles to workflows based on events, roles, and data points. Finally, a system that works for you.
Give all employees a great experience with easy, secure access: Make it easy for everyone to find the data they need (without seeing anything they shouldn’t) for a more seamless user experience – and fewer basic data requests for your People team.