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Learning About the Best HR Practices with Brenda Neckvatal

How important are people in a business? Many believe that people are your company’s best asset. And as today’s Seek Go Create guest puts it, people are what make your company go round and round. But due to events of the past year, companies faced quite a few challenges and shifts in perspective and practice. With this in mind, can the best HR practices help your business adjust quickly and effectively?

In this week’s episode, Brenda Neckvatal joins us to talk about HR-related issues. She shares some advice on the best HR practices and HR mistakes companies often make. She also discusses the pros and cons of working from home. Finally, if you’re bringing your employees back to the workplace, Brenda also has some advice on what you should do.

If you want to learn more about the best HR practices for your business, tune in to this episode!

3 Reasons to Listen:

Learn about the best HR practices and important HR rules.
Discover the usual HR-related mistakes made by companies and how to avoid them.
Find out the benefits of working from home and what you should do if you want to bring work back to the office.

Resources

HR Resources
The Best HR Planner on the Planet — Receive Brenda’s guidance and a library of practical and tactical tools, videos, resources, and events for HR practitioners.
HR Coaching & Mentoring — Sign up to get the expertise and experience of a certified human resource professional on HR issues.
Best Practices in Human Resources Podcast
Join Brenda @brendathehrlady with daily shows at the HR Club on the Clubhouse app.
Join the Next Gen Women in HR group on Facebook and help make a difference in the workplace!
Connect with Brenda: Website | LinkedIn
Episode Details

About Brenda

Often referred to as the “HR Force of Nature” by her clients, Brenda Neckvatal is an award-winning human resource professional. With 20 years of progressive HR learning and experience under her belt, she has created many useful tools, including what has been called the best HR planner on the planet with its recommendations on best HR practices.

She also started an HR resources site and has HR mastermind and coaching programs, an HR course for government contractors, entrepreneurs, and much more. She specializes in crisis management and government-contracting HR compliance. With this, she has optimized employee effectiveness and mitigated the high costs associated with making hasty employment-related decisions, providing only the best HR practices for her clients.

Brenda is currently working to help small business leaders, middle managers, and fellow HR professionals in implementing the best HR practices, managing difficult employee problems and creating real-time solutions to ambiguous HR situations.

To learn more, you may visit her website or connect with her on her LinkedIn or Instagram.

Episode Highlights

[03:46] The Importance of People in Business

You can’t do anything without people in your company.
When you have a highly engaged workforce, you already have your business moving in the right direction.
Every single one of your employees must know exactly what they are doing, the importance of that, and what direction they are going in.
People will always rise to the level of your leadership.

[04:17] “When you have a very highly engaged workforce, a workforce that is very dialed in, a workforce that knows the purpose, and they know the ‘why’, doesn't always mean that it's going to be rosy and beautiful. But if they know that, then you've got your business moving in the right direction. That’s what’s key and important.” - Click Here to Tweet This

[05:59] The Biggest Mistakes You Can Make in HR

The first benchmark to be considered a salaried employee is the minimum pay threshold. This is under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Second, you cannot have a part-time employee as a salaried employee unless they’re the company’s owner.
You have to put certain behaviors in place, such as not working more than the number of hours you have set.

[10:21] Thoughts on the Entrepreneurial Mindset

For entrepreneurs, there is a certain mindset of working 24/7 and doing whatever it takes.
To Brenda, there is nothing wrong with that.
What’s important is when you build a business, HR should be a part of your executive leadership team.
This will give a strong competitive advantage to the company.

[16:20] On Working from Home

When you work from home, there are more distractions.
Brenda finds it intriguing that in the last 12 months, we’ve seen businesses figure how to work things out faster.
In business, you have to make fast decisions. But in HR, you not only have to be fast, but you also have to be thorough.
The current situation showed employers that you could still run a company with your employees working from home, and it probably saves them money in the long run.
You need to have the right culture in place and people whom you can trust with you.

[19:16] “In HR, we can't do that (make low-risk decisions). When we make a decision with not enough information, we actually open the company up for risk.” - Click Here to Tweet This

[28:42] On Bringing People Back in the Office

If any company is looking at bringing people back in, they have to follow the local health department’s recommendations.
Next, you have to look at company policy and figure out how to work things out.
Specifically, you have to be careful with mandating vaccines. There are many complicated factors involved, and an employee can come after you in court if something goes wrong.

[30:47] At this point, I don't think that anybody can take into consideration the cultural aspect of returning people to work as a benefit, because numerically, we're beyond the pandemic numbers. - Click Here to Tweet This

[40:49] How Brenda Wound Up in HR

During her early management years, she discovered that she excelled at jobs like making sure the employee files were good.
She found out that she was very capable of managing a group of people and improving their performance.
She applied for an internal position at another company and found that she liked sorting through people’s issues and using business methodologies.
After that, she went back to school to get her degree.

[52:18] Brenda’s HR Rules

There are many assumptions when dealing with employee issues, so you have to get as much concrete, significant, and definitive information as you can.
The body of government that tells you to be compliant with the law is the same body that will put you in a position to violate it.
Be consistent—it does not matter if you are consistently good or consistently bad. What you do for one, you should do for all.
You’re never too small to get caught. You have to evaluate everything that happens in your organization.
There are always two sides to a story. The truth always lies somewhere in the middle of that.

[58:19] “If there’s something that you can create that can benefit people and change something for the better, get it out there.” - Click Here to Tweet This

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To growing and becoming all we are created to be,

Tim