Insights
Practical writing on HR strategy, leadership, compliance, and building organizations that last.
Practical guides with working templates and interactive tools to meet you where you are. Browse by topic or read them all.
Good performance documentation makes your next conversation with an employee easier — and any final decision more likely fair. What to record, how to write facts another person can verify, how to choose the next step that fits the situation, and a performance improvement plan template you can copy or print.
What a human resources consultant actually does day to day, the common ways organizations engage one — project, retainer, fractional, or outsourced — the signs it's time to bring in help, and how to evaluate the right fit. Includes four interactive consultation-brief worksheets you can fill in before you talk to anyone.
Four complete exit interview templates — for standard resignations, regrettable high-performer departures, manager or executive exits, and written questionnaires — plus when and how to conduct the conversation, what not to ask, how to encourage candor without over-promising privacy, and how to read patterns without overreacting to one comment.
W-2 and 1099 are tax-reporting forms — the real question is whether the working relationship supports employee or independent-contractor status. A plain-English guide to the IRS's three evidence categories, what doesn't decide status by itself, and four interactive worksheets for planning a new hire, auditing an existing 1099 relationship, converting to W-2, or responding to a concern or agency notice.
When a background report from a third-party agency contributes to a hiring or employment decision, the federal process generally includes a pre-adverse action step before the decision becomes final. A plain-English guide to the two-notice sequence, what goes in the packet, why there's no universal waiting period, and four interactive tools: a pre-decision readiness checklist, a pre-adverse action notice and packet cover template, a candidate response and dispute log, and a final-decision checklist with an adverse-action notice starting point.
A termination letter documents a decision — it cannot repair a rushed or poorly investigated one. A plain-English guide to what belongs in the letter versus the internal decision record, who should review, how to plan the meeting, and four complete templates with copy and print controls: performance-based, policy violation, layoff, and job abandonment — plus a pre-termination risk check, consistency comparison, and final-pay checklist.
Your employee handbook should reflect how your organization actually operates — not a compliance trophy, and not a document that outlived the way you work. Five operational questions that tell you whether your handbook is current, usable, and right-sized: whether managers and employees actually use it, whether it makes promises you never meant to make, and who owns the updates.
As organizations grow, compensation decisions made informally start to strain. A calm approach to building the smallest useful pay structure for your current stage — how jobs relate to each other, anchoring ranges to real market data, and writing down how exceptions happen — without over-engineering it or building a corporate compensation department you do not need.
We write from real questions organizations bring to us. Let us know what you’re wrestling with.