People are often curious about what I actually do all day. The honest answer is that no two days look the same, but let me let you in on a fairly typical one. Come and sit in the passenger seat. Mind the dog hair.
It starts, as most things in my life do, with two dogs. Teddy, my Pomeranian, has strong feelings about the morning and even stronger feelings about cuddles and attention, and there is simply no reasoning with a small dog who believes that any moment you’re not looking directly at him and telling him he’s wonderful is a moment being tragically wasted. Bonnie, our rescue, takes a gentler view. She watches the whole performance from a safe distance with the faint astonishment of someone who still can’t quite believe she’s allowed to be here. Between the two of them, the one demanding the world and the one quietly amazed by it, I get my first reminder of the day that people are different. Different personalities, different communication styles, different needs. And when people is your whole job, you factor all of that in, because getting it wrong doesn’t just mean an awkward moment. It means what started as a small spark quietly becomes something that needs a fire extinguisher and a very long debrief.
By the time they’ve both been appeased and I’m on my way in, I’ve already seen the shape of the day forming on my phone. There’s usually a message from the Founder, MD or CEO, sent at 11.47pm, because that is the hour at which business worries put on their boots and go for a walk around your head. Something’s on their mind. It usually is.
And then there are the other mornings. The ones where there are no messages, you arrive with a beautifully laid out plan for the day, and then… something has happened. Something has always happened. In HR we call it a situation. Everyone else calls it a crisis. Either way, your carefully crafted to-do list has just been demoted to a polite suggestion, and you’re now doing the HR equivalent of arriving at a train smash with a clipboard and a calm voice, because someone has to.
So the first proper thing I do when I arrive isn’t a task. It’s a conversation.
They catch me before I’ve even got my coat off, slightly wound up, ready to part ways with someone in a moment of frustration. Not for a real reason, but for a Tuesday reason, the kind that feels enormous in the moment and faintly ridiculous by Thursday. My job here isn’t to nod along supportively. It’s to gently apply the brakes. To ask the questions that turn “I want them gone by Friday” into “let’s understand what’s actually going on first.” Ten minutes later the temperature has dropped, a fairer plan is in place, and a decision that could have become an expensive afternoon in an employment tribunal has quietly become a manageable conversation instead. Nobody will ever know that moment happened. That is, rather wonderfully, the entire point of it.
Mid-morning is usually where the actual work lives. Things like reviewing a contract before it becomes a problem, because fixing it after is about three times the work, twice the stress, and involves an email chain that could wrap around the building. Writing a policy that actually makes sense to a real human being rather than reading like it was written by someone who’s never met one. And thinking ahead, because I’ve watched businesses scale at pace and I know exactly which bits start creaking when you grow too fast. It’s almost never the product that buckles. It’s the people stuff underneath it, quietly holding its breath and hoping nobody notices. Someone has to spot that before it gives way. That’s usually me. Ideally with coffee.
The coffee is non-negotiable. For anyone familiar with the TV series Gilmore Girls, my (adult) kids bought me a mug that says ‘I drink coffee like a Gilmore’ for a reason! And no, I’m not joking 🤣
But, I’ll tell you a secret, for me, the best part of the day doesn’t happen sitting at my desk. It’s when I’m walking the floor. Catching up with people, having a chat, sharing a laugh, being seen. Because you learn more about how a business is really doing in ten minutes among its people than in any report ever written. And the signs are always there if you know what you’re looking at. Someone who’s gone quiet in meetings. Ideas that have stopped arriving. “Fine” doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting for one very small word.
By the time someone actually hands in their notice, the leaving happened weeks ago. You’re just receiving the paperwork at that point, like the closing credits of a film whose ending you already saw coming. So I pay attention early, while things can still actually change. Because often that’s genuinely all it takes. Someone noticing. Before it’s too late to matter.
Honestly, a good chunk of the job involves translating. Sometimes a team lead with strong feelings about a new hire needs turning into something fair, legal, and much less likely to detonate. Someone needs a hard truth delivered kindly enough that they can actually hear it, rather than just bracing against it. I spend a lot of my day being a diplomat (I should have gone into the Diplomatic Service, I’m told it pays better!! 🤣). Standing between what people feel and what they can safely say out loud. A sort of human airlock. Get it wrong and everything escapes and gets messy. Get it right and nobody ever realises there was anything even getting ready to explode.
Somewhere mid-afternoon, it happens. It always happens. Someone asks a question, raises a concern, or says something in passing that makes a little bell go off in my head: that would make a great post. The kind that might quietly help a hundred other people wrestling with the exact same thing at 11.47pm. So I abandon all dignity, lunge for my notebook, and scribble it down before the idea sprints off and is never seen again (taking care to just note the subject matter and not the person who raised it). Which is roughly how HR: Off the Record gets written. Ideas, I’ve learned, do not wait politely. They bolt like Teddy through an open gate.
And then there are the moments that make the whole thing worthwhile. A nervous new starter who suddenly finds their feet. A manager who handles their first hard conversation well and tells you, slightly amazed at themselves, as though they’ve discovered a hidden talent for it. The Founder, MD or CEO who exhales, properly exhales, possibly for the first time in weeks or even months, because the people side of their business is in safe hands and they can go back to building the thing they set out to build.
That’s the part I’d never trade.
By the end of the day there’s a particular kind of tiredness. Not the empty kind, the full kind, the sort that comes from once more putting your heart and soul into something, because you genuinely care about the people and the business that’s relying on you to get it right.
The dogs greet me at the door as though I’ve returned from several months at sea rather than a day at the office, which frankly never gets old. There’s coffee, obviously. There’s always coffee. And there’s that quiet satisfaction that comes from a day where, mostly, you helped stop several disasters from actually happening. Which, in this job, genuinely counts as a win.
And later, when the house is quiet, there’s usually a little more writing. I’m working on the second book in my Willowbrook series, a cosy bit of fiction that is really, underneath it all, about the same thing my whole working life has been about: how leadership done well makes people feel safe, and how that quietly changes lives. I seem to be completely incapable of leaving the subject alone, even at bedtime. Some people switch off with Netflix. I write about what it looks like when HR and leadership is done right. Make of that what you will. 😄
Because here’s the thing about this work: when it’s done well, it’s nearly invisible. The brilliant person stays. The Founder, MD or CEO sleeps. The hard conversation lands softly. The business grows up without breaking. From the outside it can genuinely look as though nothing happened at all.
But that’s exactly what this job looks like when it’s done well.
And if you’re building something, really building it, that’s the work I’d love to be doing alongside you while you get on with the rest.
Til next time 💜
Jacquie