Being perceived as a pleasant person to work with

Pleasant ≠ friendly

when you have the opportunity, consult with the people who have to utilize your policies with their subordinates before you finalize the policies that they have to follow.

Understanding how the business makes money is hard

keep a diary of how you handled certain situations that you weren’t prepared for or expecting

Rely on the policies.

Get to know the other operations teams outside of HR such as Finance and IT.

Build relationships and show interest.

If someone comes to you with an HR question and you don’t know, respond with “I don’t know, but let me find out and I’ll get back to you”

Saying let me verify sounds a lot better than I don’t know

Ask questions when you don’t understand why something is the way it is

there is always a reason something is done a certain way. But that doesn’t mean it’s a GOOD reason

don't get tricked into thinking someone's emergency is now yours

HR doesn’t hire and HR doesn’t fire

Stop volunteering for every task

Do not get close to people that work with you.

Take some “you” time every single week to decompress and compartmentalize your thoughts and work stress

Ask a ton of questions and write everything down. Everything. Organize notes.

Always keep an open mind, even when something seems solid

Be friendly, even when you don’t want to be but never let someone disrespect you.

By far the fastest way to learn best practices if you have a good leader.

Set reminders for everything so you don't have to spend time thinking about what you needed to do.

When you ask someone something, you can put it in the OneNote so then when the question inevitably comes up again, you will not have to bug the same person with the same question.

It takes anyone a good solid 6 months of getting a sense of your role

taking a lot of notes and actually referring back to them.

Fake it til you make it - I'm really good at public speaking so act confident even when you don't feel confident. It makes a world of difference when you're trying to get people to listen to you (do it nicely).

Take notes and ask a lot of questions, get a large notebook and start different pages for different things (the systems you use, SOPs, etc.)

Take your time on certain things

Remember that HR is internal customer service, people like their questions to be taken seriously and them answered

Be comfortable by not being anyone's favorite.

Just because a manager should do something does not mean they will and you will have to do a lot of hand holding in some cases.

Another important thing to remember is that for each worker; THEIR request is the most urgent.

Don’t be afraid to politely say that they will have to wait as there are other pressing issues at hand

If you set a trend of jumping on every little demand; they will walk all over you.