Something to Remember During the Daily Grind: It’s OK to Just Do HR

If you’re highly active in HR and Talent Acquisition in the social space (read: blogs, websites, pod/video casts, webinars, conferences, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), you might be caught up in this mindset that what you’re doing is not what you should be doing.

You’re being told what you should be focusing on by idiots like me, and thousands of others, most of whom don’t even work in HR or Talent Acquisition at this moment.

That’s not a bad thing, because some are brilliant and took their brilliance to the consulting/analyst/vendor side of the fence because the money was better, or the balance was better, or both. This isn’t a consultant vs. practitioner post.

This is a post to remind you that it’s all right if you just put your head down and do actual HR and Recruiting work for a while.
This is a post to tell you that it’s OK not to be instituting the next best practice or innovation.
This is a post to let you know that it’s OK not to be focusing on re-creating HR and Talent Acquisition in your organization.

The things we just do in HR

Sometimes, we just need to keep the train running down the tracks, to allow ourselves to catch our breath, and to get and build a strong team around us so we’re ready for big things in the future. In the meantime, we just do what we do.

We make sure our employees are doing all right. Is there anything we can do to help them be better?
We make sure our employees get paid correctly and that the benefits card works when they show up at the doctor.
We make sure to kick managers in the shin, under the table, when they’re being idiots to their teams.
We make sure new employees have the tools they need when the show up on their first day, and that they feel welcomed into the organization.
We give bad employees the gift of finding a job they will truly love by letting them find that new job on their own time.

Sometimes when I’m writing, I forget what it’s like to have a million priorities in your day and knowing you won’t get to half of them. That’s the daily grind in HR and Talent Acquisition. So, I write about how you should do this or do that, how you should be all innovative and shit, but I get that on many days (sometimes weeks and months!) you just need to do the basics.

Just getting through today

I’ve been there. I struggled to just do the basics many days, when thinking of being the best and innovating seemed so far away from reality that you simply felt like giving up.

That’s when I would tell myself, “Today, I’m just going to do HR.” I’m going to focus on what I’m good at, and focus on what I can control. My goal is to just make it to the next day, where just maybe, that day would allow me to get better.

Yes, it IS OK for you to just do HR today!

This was originally published on Tim Sackett’s blog, The Tim Sackett Project.