Meet Jennie Knowles, Head of HR at Sendoso.

How did you find yourself in HR?

A long time ago, I worked with children in a before- and after-school program, and the program needed some administrative help in the corporate office. It only had one HR person, and she asked if I could come in and just start going through résumés and making sure all the sites had all the posters—very basic admin HR.

I just started thinking, “You know what? I always thought I would work with kids, but this is a nice change” after many years of working with kids to do more of the back-of-the-house, adult work.

And I found my way in. I was going to college when that was happening, and it was almost a perfect match with my degree. I got my bachelor’s in Psychology, and I thought, “You know what? Instead of a psychologist’s office, I bet you HR, from what I understand, tackles similar issues.” I continued seeking out HR opportunities. After I graduated college, I went to a big-box store to do HR for its team and have been working my way and discovering the type of HR I really love to do. I’ve been very fortunate.

Retail is quite the place to cut your teeth.

For lack of a better way of saying this, it will teach you if you love it or you hate it right away.

That’s for sure.

I think I was only there about 6 months, and I decided that I didn’t know if retail HR was the kind of HR I wanted to do, so I moved away from retail quite quickly.

I worked retail for a while, and it was always a chaotic place. And you’re talking high turnover, especially at the larger chains. The nuts-and-bolts HR stuff was probably pretty overwhelming, I imagine.

Yeah, it’s a different beast, that is for sure. A lot of these big-box stores are 24-hour operations. So it is not an “8:00 to 5:00” gig. You are working overnight to make sure the shipping team has access to you and then turning around and still working all day long because you have payroll to process. It’s intense.

What lessons did you take with you from that when you switched to any HR role that you were maybe a little bit more suited for?

The biggest lesson I would say is it really helped me understand that, as an HR professional supporting the entire organization, you better know how your organization runs. It’s not cool for you to say, “I don’t know how this department runs or the priorities of this department or what’s going on there, its peaks, and its pitfalls.” It really solidified that business partner mentality across the entire company for me because each of the stores had its own executive team in four different areas. That was really eye-opening for me to say, “Wait a minute. Listen to the logistics executives; although it’s not my specialty, I may get information out of there that’s going to help me when an issue comes up.” I understand the process better, faster, and quicker because I’m exposed to the entire business.

I think the biggest lesson is it doesn’t work to just sit in your office all day long. You’ve got to be out there learning that business so you can help if issues come along and understand the totality of how it affects the pieces.

After that, did you ever run into an issue at another organization where maybe it wasn’t set up for someone like you to have access to the whole organization? I know some leaders are obsessed with making verticals, columns, pillars, or whatever an organization has decided to call them. I know HR often is in a unique position to understand the whole business, but it wouldn’t shock me to learn that maybe you found someplace where that was something alien to them.

Unfortunately, I still think there’s work to be done to get HR a seat at the table, regardless of whether the company wants to make silos or columns and have business partners for each one. I’ve definitely been in all those companies. But I had a company in particular where HR was an admin function and that was it. It wasn’t interested in HR seeing the other parts of the business. I wasn’t on the executive team, and this was a relatively small company. I think there are still some very traditional companies out there that think of HR not as a partner but more as just an admin function.

It’s surprising to me when they’re stewards of your payroll and money, which is a huge expense to a business. I’m responsible for a lot of money regardless of the finance team. So I think it’s so weird to me when they don’t have a seat at the table, and that could just be the top HR person having a seat at the table. But as long as that person trickles that information down, that’s really important to me to just be there and absorb the information.

I mean, when things are working well, the role of HR is essentially an ambassador between the employees and the leadership, which puts them in a very powerful position to have their finger on the pulse, to understand the impact of certain policies and procedures that maybe are about to be enacted, and to really know how to implement recruiting. It’s every aspect that builds your business. It’s always interesting to me when I learn of companies that either don’t understand or don’t care to have that as part of their company.

Yeah. I think the type of culture people are creating becomes pretty well known pretty quickly. And, I’m not saying culture is Ping-Pong tables and foosball and all that kind of stuff. I’m saying the real culture of this together—success is fun; let’s build this rocket ship together.

I’m giggling a little bit because every single time somebody talks about culture and the physical accoutrements, they always talk about Ping-Pong specifically. Ping-Pong’s become the poster boy of the start-up culture.

It’s very early 2000s. Google said the company had a Ping-Pong table, so other companies felt like they needed a Ping-Pong table. The reality of the situation is that what people didn’t understand was that Google created this physical environment because it didn’t want anyone to leave. It was designed for the engineer who was there at 7:00 p.m. still to get a quick 5-minute break and get back to work. It was not designed for the salesperson to be playing Ping-Pong right in the middle of the workday. I think it’s really interesting when people are like, “We have a great culture; we have a Ping-Pong table.” And I think, “Why do you have that Ping-Pong table?”

You’re right. Most places aren’t really set up to allow somebody to go whenever he or she wants and spend 10 or 20 minutes playing a game.

It’s really fun to do a, let’s call it a tournament. Hey, you get to play against the CEO today. That is fun. But that is part of a onetime company event. At least in the companies that I am trying to associate myself with now, success is fun. We’re not having fun if we’re all losing here and, sorry, playing Ping-Pong, unless it’s on, I guess, your lunch break or something, but it’s not part of building the rocket ship.

I’m glad that got exposed for what it was as quickly as it did because it sort of went hand in hand with this concept that you just have as many perks as you can, and you didn’t have to spend a lot of money on those perks, and then that was just going to magically work for your employees without really understanding the fact that if you’re going to do that kind of stuff, you’re going to have to build a culture around it—one that supports people feeling comfortable and safe taking breaks, for example, or having the time because their workload isn’t as extreme as it is for most people to do something like that. It has to be part of a package. It can’t be the only thing.

Yeah, I totally agree. I think there are tons of benefits out there that don’t actually cost companies a whole lot of money, but the value to employees is extreme. I don’t know why those sometimes are looked at as overly traditional, but in my opinion, I feel like employees actually have a longer retention at these companies because they’re actually worth something to the employees without them costing a whole lot to the company...

Source: HR Daily Advisor