How to Make Sense of Human Resources and Operations

Running a 30-person team is no small feat, and is absolutely a group effort to ensure everyone is happy and healthy. Sometimes those helping hands come in the form of a service rather than a person however. Our Director of Operations Colleen Carroll talks about one such tool, and the positive impact it's had on our company and culture, in this week's Secret Sauce podcast. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to the Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is our short podcast, up to 10 minutes, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, an account manager at Palantir, and today’s advice comes to us from Colleen Carroll, our who is going to talk about a tool we use in human resources called Bamboo HR. Colleen Carroll [CC]: Hi, I’m Colleen Carroll, the Director of Operations here at Palantir, and today I’m going to talk about Bamboo HR. It’s important to me, as the Director of Operations, to develop a culture within the team where the team is informed, where they feel independent, and they feel empowered. And one of the areas that I think is overlooked quite often in companies is the employee resources side of things. And quite honestly the term is “people operations” or “employee engagement “ . . . there’s a lot of terms for it . . . but all the resources and things that relate to being an employee of a company. In my past, I’ve experienced first-hand what it is to be an employee and be in the dark. The things that often times you’re in the dark about are, “what was that 401k percentage that I had put on my check that doesn’t show up on my check stub?” and, “what are all the things that I can elect to take advantage of, the benefits that the company offers me,” “what does the company think my PTO [paid time off] balance is?” It’s little things, but it’s things that when you’re in the dark about them you start to worry, or anticipate, that something might be wrong, and you don’t know who to talk to about it. And again, having working for a large institution in the past, it wasn’t clear what those services and resources were, and you didn’t know who to talk to, and yet it could be easily answered in a five minute question. So at Palantir I made it my job to be that resource. And it was easy to do for a very long time because we were a small team. And I felt it was important that people could reach out to me and say, “hey, what benefits are available to me, and why is this a good benefit?” But as the company grew, it got harder to be that centralized resource. I didn’t always have the answer right away, which I always liked to do. But more importantly it became a situation where it was inefficient. The amount of time that was needed on my side, as well as the employee side, to understand the benefits before we could even get to a point of asking specific questions . . . and through my little bit of research I realized that there were tools out there that do this. They often call them HRIS systems. APD is a payroll-related system that also does some of this. But all of them felt too big, too large, and didn’t really meet the culture of Palantir.  And one day I came across Bamboo HR. And it’s mission statement, or it’s promise I should say, was that, ‘if you’re in people operations and you have a bazillion spreadsheets out there, then Bamboo HR is the right thing for you.’ And that caught my attention right away, because I had at least 20 spreadsheets to help me manage all the things that related to the employees here at Palantir.  But then there was the big gotcha, and it was, “do you need help managing PTO balances and communicating that to your team?” So I looked into it and, sure enough, that was exactly what Bamboo was able to offer us. And that was the hook! I took on Bamboo to help us manage paid time off (PTO) and to be able to put that information in the hands of our staff so that they didn’t have to come to m