The HR Connection Podcast with Sabrina Baker

Onboarding fails in small businesses not because no one cares but because no one owns it. This episode walks through a complete onboarding framework built for the 1–500 environment: fewer systems, less redundancy, managers executing on instinct rather than process. Covers every phase from offer acceptance through the first 30 days, and closes on the distinction that matters most, what the manager...

This episode started with a LinkedIn message. A practitioner at a 75-person firm, HR department of one, had been listening to episodes on toxic employees and sacred cows, and she asked the question nobody wants to ask out loud: what do you do when the toxic person is the founder? That question is what this episode is built around. Not how to manage up. Not how to influence without authority. What...

If you're managing HR alone for 100, 150, or more employees, you already know the standard advice about time management doesn't apply to you. The problem isn't how you manage your hours. It's how you classify the work coming at you. In this episode, Sabrina breaks down the operating system Acacia uses to run high-volume HR work without burning out; a triage framework, a method for separating templ...

HR Can't Fix What Leadership Won't Own  Most organizations don't have a communication problem. They have a leadership problem, an accountability problem, a decision-making problem, a manager capability problem. Communication is just where those problems become visible. In this episode, Sabrina walks through five scenarios where HR gets handed a symptom and asked to treat it like the disease and wh...

Episode Summary Most small businesses don't get into legal trouble because they lacked a policy. They get into trouble because they had one and didn't follow it. In this episode, Sabrina breaks down the gap between what handbooks say and what leaders actually do and why that gap is where most small-business employment risk lives. This episode pairs with The Policy Nobody Talks About Until You Need...

What No One Tells You About Being the Only HR Voice in the Room If you've ever taken a solo HR role, or you're considering one, this episode is the conversation nobody has with you before you start. Sabrina breaks down four hard truths that come with being the only HR voice in a small business, drawing on 15 years of embedded HR work with employers under 500 employees. In this episode: Truth #1: Y...

In the Trenches with Caitlin Sampson Caitlin Sampson, HR Director at Trivector, a service-disabled veteran-owned small business in Huntsville, Alabama, joins Marie for the second installment of In the Trenches. As a longtime HR department of one, SHRM chapter president, adjunct professor, and mother of two, Caitlin knows firsthand what it means to operate at full capacity with no margin for error....

Compensation problems in small businesses don't announce themselves. They build quietly, starting with offer-time decisions that made sense at the time and were never revisited, until pay gaps have compounded long enough that someone finds out and tells everyone. This episode is for HR practitioners who need to do comp work without a dedicated team, a purpose-built tool, or a large budget. Sabrina...

Most leave policies were written once and never revisited. The result: legal exposure, manager improvisation, and employees navigating a crisis without clear guidance. In this episode, Sabrina and Marie break down why leave of absence is the HR area most likely to catch small employers off guard — and what to do about it. What's covered: The three-layer compliance problem: federal law, state law,...

This episode of the HR Connection addresses the breakdown of performance management in small businesses and the cost of avoidance. Many organizations fall into two patterns: leaders who avoid difficult conversations entirely or leaders who escalate too aggressively. Both create risk, damage culture, and lead to reactive decision-making instead of structured management. Sabrina Baker and Marie Rols...

HR isn't a spectator sport, and neither is this series. In the Trenches is a monthly feature on the HR Connection where co-host Marie Rolston sits down with HR practitioners working inside organizations with 1 to 500 employees. No consultants, no theorists, just the people actually doing the work. In our debut episode, Marie speaks with Ivette Mills, HR Director at 4Cs of Sonoma County, a nonprofi...

Recruiting in a small business rarely lives in a neat, dedicated function. More often, it gets layered on top of an already full HR workload. In this episode, Sabrina and Marie break down what that actually looks like in practice—and how to make it manageable. The conversation focuses on how to approach recruiting when time, resources, and structure are limited. Instead of trying to build a perfec...

Most employee handbooks fail for three reasons: wrong tone, no real training on how to use them, and outdated information employees already learned not to trust. A handbook that sounds like legal boilerplate will be ignored regardless of how complete it is. A handbook is infrastructure for consistency. When it works, managers stop improvising, employees stop getting conflicting answers, and HR sto...

If your most popular episode told you what intentional HR looks like, this one tells you how to actually build it. Sabrina and Marie get tactical with the HR audit process Acacia uses with every new client, no matter what the client thinks they have in place. In this episode, they walk through the three-pillar audit framework (compliance, infrastructure, and strategy), explain why the order of tho...

What does under-resourced HR actually cost? Sabrina and Marie break down the math and walk through every support option available to small business HR.

Finding reliable HR tech reviews for small businesses is nearly impossible — most resources are built for enterprise, and the comparison sites are either outdated or pay-to-play. In this episode, Acacia's Payroll and Operations Manager Penelope walks us through the HR Tech Guide she's been building specifically for small employers: what she's testing, how she's scoring it, and what she's already f...

Eight years in the making. In this episode, Sabrina and Marie pull back the curtain on the HR Department of One Cohort which is a 10-week live program built specifically for HR professionals running solo inside small and growing companies. They talk through why they built it, what the survey data told them, and what makes this different from every webinar or self-paced course you've already forgot...

Documentation is one of the most overlooked habits in small business HR, but it’s also one of the most important. In this episode, Sabrina and Marie break down what HR documentation actually means, why it protects both employees and employers, and the four situations that must always be documented. They also share practical tips for building a documentation habit without creating unnecessary burea...

If you’ve ever stepped into an HR role and felt like everything was a mess, you’re not alone. In this episode, Marie and Sabrina share how to recognize when HR is truly “broken” and what to do next. They walk through the exact framework they use with overwhelmed clients to move from chaos to stability: Stabilize → Streamline → Build. You’ll learn why you can’t fix everything at once, where to begi...

Why does HR always end up being the “bad guy”? In this episode of The HR Connection, Sabrina and Marie dig into a reality almost every HR professional in a small organization knows too well: being asked to deliver bad news you didn’t decide, enforce unpopular policies you didn’t create, and step into tough conversations leaders avoid. From benefit changes and return-to-office mandates to performan...

Do You Actually Need a SHRM Certification to Run HR Well? If you’ve ever felt pressure to get a SHRM certification just to prove you belong in HR, this episode is for you. Marie and Sabrina get honest about why certifications like SHRM-CP are treated as a requirement and why that logic often breaks down in small employer HR and HR departments of one. Marie shares her own experience earning the SHR...

This episode is about the invisible work of leadership: the days you’re tired, unmotivated, and still decide to show up anyway. Marie reflects on a year of growth and the ripple effect that comes from staying with what matters.

If you removed every HR process, system, and tool… what’s the one lesson that would still hold everything together? This episode breaks that down through one story, one truth, and one question to carry into any year: People don’t burn out because they’re doing too much; they burn out because they’re doing too much that doesn’t make sense. In small businesses where priorities shift fast, and everyo...