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I work for a relatively small company of about 60 or so people, and I’ll let you in on a secret my bosses wouldn’t want me to tell you: We don’t have a designated HR person. In fact, our HR person doubles as an accountant for our company. After having researched extensively about the HR industry for the past couple of months, I’m honestly baffled how he’s able to do it. How could you handle benefits, insurance, perks, and balance the books on top of everything else? I asked the man, the myth, the legend, Garrett, how he’s been able to juggle everything at the same time at our company. Here’s what I learned.
The first thing on Garrett’s mind was the lengthy process of on-boarding new hires:
As someone who recently went through this process (I’ve only been working here for about eight months), I can confidently say that Garrett relies heavily on Pendant for new hires. In fact, here’s a record of a brief Slack exchange between Garrett and I (please ignore my misspelling of the word “form”) that answered all my questions:
Upon clicking on those links, I was immediately brought to the exact firm form that I needed to fill out to get my newborn insured. And thank goodness I was able to find the right documentation, lest I end up like my poor friend.
I have another example! Here is another brief exchange between Garrett and I where I asked about joining the company cell phone plan:
Yet again, Garrett was able to point me in the right direction within a few seconds.
However, Garrett recently told me there’s an even easier way to share information on Pendant: the “Send Page” feature. You can easily send specific articles to employees by clicking on the three-dot icon and selecting “Send Page.”
Going forward, I know to check my email inbox if Garrett has any information to send me.
I asked Garrett to summarize how Pendant makes his life easier on the HR side of his job, and this is what he had to say:
Considering the time of the year, I also asked Garrett about how Pendant helps him manage open-enrollment season for insurances:
I literally stopped writing this blog post to complete my open enrollment, and it was incredibly useful to have so many resources at my fingertips with Pendant. At my previous company, open-enrollment season usually meant scouring my email inbox looking for information about each insurance plan and ultimately just deciding to pick the middle option for basically every choice. This time around, I had everything spelled out for me on Pendant:
As the months have gone on, I find myself only “slacking” Garrett about attending basketball games rather than constant HR-related questions. Whenever I do have a question, I instinctively go to Pendant, and after about eight months of usage, I’ve yet to see a question that I couldn’t get answered.
Small companies don’t always have the budget to pay for a designated HR person, let alone an HR team. But every owner knows that human resources are an essential, and inevitable part of running a business. Employees will always have questions about benefits, perks, and day-to-day expectations.
Rather than taking time out of someone’s day, answering one-off questions, your employees can go directly to an HR database with all the answers. What’s more, employees can use an AI assistant to quickly find solutions to questions (rather than having to ping your own Garrett a bunch of times).
The point is that, with Pendant, you can free up much more time for your employees to focus on other tasks. If you have a Garrett on your team, someone who juggles various responsibilities including HR, then Pendant would make their lives much easier, and make your team more productive.
