My guest today is Eric Grimm, an old friend and someone who’s involved in coffee in a variety of capacities. Eric both works with Ghost Town Oats and The Chocolate Barista; does consulting work for mobile coffee events; and is also the director of positive outcomes at Glitter Cat Barista, an organization started by their wife, Veronica Grimm. Glitter Cat hopes to reimagine the coffee industry by making events like coffee competitions more inclusive, and one of the ways Eric has approached building more accessible spaces is by examining how human resources functions.
Human resources, or HR, is a complicated subject within the food and beverage world. Maybe you’ve heard the phrase, “HR protects companies, not people” and felt it described your experience—or maybe you’ve never interacted with an HR person before. In this episode, Eric explains the intention of a human resources department or point person, highlights their role in setting the culture or tone of a business, and emphasizes the need for workers to understand their rights and how HR can help them.
Of course, that’s not always the case, and this episode shines a light on how hard it can be to advocate for yourself. I learned so much about my own work history in this episode—how I misunderstood labor laws, or made mistakes that I couldn’t identify at the time. I hope this conversation helps you feel empowered in your job, allows you to feel grace for yourself, and that it inspires you to grow and take action. Eric shares a generous amount of empathy and care throughout this episode, and it’s a perspective that’s really resonated with me. Here’s Eric.
Ashley: Eric, let's start by having you introduce yourself.
Eric: Hi, I'm Eric. (Laughs)
Ashley: That’s enough.
Eric: That's it. That's it. I'm Eric.
I am a 13-year coffee industry veteran at this point. I hold a great many positions. I recently referred to myself as a Renaissance Bitch. And I think that that holds very true with what I'm doing right now.
One of the big things that I'm doing is I work for Glitter Cat Barista, which was founded by my wife, Veronica. I hold the position of Director of Positive Outcomes—which is a term from animal sheltering, actually. It just very much fits in with a lot of what I do for the program.
I like to think of myself as an emotional support animal. Anybody who goes through the program, I make sure that they're feeling okay. I make sure that imposter syndrome isn't totally consuming them. I also get to do a great many projects within the program. One of them is directly related to hospitality and HR, which I'm really excited about.
Ashley: Tell me about how this part of Glitter Cat started.
Just to give some background on Glitter Cat: It is a way for people within the coffee industry who maybe don't have access to expensive training materials, coaches, or anything like that to compete in these big barista competitions.
We've talked a little bit about them in the podcast before, but essentially there are these barista competitions, and they're a big deal. There's a lot of bells and whistles, and Glitter Cat helps people of marginalized identities compete in these competitions—but then during COVID-19, [Glitter Cat] transitioned into being a digital competition so that people could still participate, learn about coffee, enter the coffee community, but there are all these other projects that Glitter Cat does in terms of bettering the industry. So how did some of these projects sort of start springing up?
Eric: We like to believe that Glitter Cat is this umbrella organization—that anybody who goes through it probably initially [entered] to compete in some sort of competition, be it the U.S. Coffee Champs or our own DiGiTiTiON. They can do whatever they want to try to re-imagine the coffee industry and we'll support them any way we can.
Back in June of 2020, there was obviously this big national reckoning on race. There were coffee companies just coming out of the woodwork to either respond to their own crises, which kept piling up, and also those who had fewer crises who just put out plans to either hire more Black baristas, promote more Black coffee professionals, make their cafes more welcoming spaces, deal with unconscious bias… And a lot of it was bullshit, frankly. I think a lot of us were put off by certain things and a lot of us still knew that something needed to be done.
So we worked on a commitment to Black coffee professionals and enthusiasts that included something where we would work with retail coffee businesses to try to establish some sort of standards.
I worked on this project initially with Bud Taliaferro [a former Glitter Cat competitor] and we wanted, at first, to be super righteous about it—to be like, “Hey businesses, what are you going to do to be accountable to your promises here? What are you going to do about everything that's going on in the nation currently? What are you going to do in an extended way past the point where the news cycle is constantly reporting on it?”
Initially, it was very like, “Rah rah, we're going to do this and we're going to make everything better.” Then we realized it's not quite that easy.
For one thing, being a business owner is incredibly difficult. It comes with a lot of responsibilities that we're not necessarily aware of, even in some administrative roles, and it just boiled down to: Operations are really tough to change, but they can be changed. And the way that you can change them is through human resources.
Human resources deals with all of this stuff. It's not just who writes your paychecks. It's not just who deals with grievances. It really touches every element of the business.
Initially, we were getting Bud certified to be a human resources associate professional, and then I decided to do it as well while we were working with our two initial beta test companies which are Greenway Coffee Company in Houston and Vertex Coffee Roasters in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I recently just completed my associate human resources professional certification, and it was a wild experience.
Ashley: I have to hope that you got some sort of very fancy certificate that you're going to frame and hang up in your home.
Eric: I did not get a certificate. I got a digital badge, which seems so modern, right? It's the equivalent of what, like a hundred likes on Instagram or something like that?
Ashley: I love the equivalency. Some of the experience that you have wanting to learn more about HR has a little bit to do with your own background I believe, right?
Eric: Yeah, absolutely. I'll be perfectly honest. A lot of my motivation to get HR certified came out of pettiness, which, you know…
Ashley: The founding of Boss Barista is pretty much all pettiness. So I understand that.
Eric: Right? You take your anger about something and you don't say, “Hey, I don't need to be angry.” I just need to make my anger into something. I need to have my anger be a motivating factor to make things better for people. I don't necessarily even need to rub it in the faces of the people who've made me angry before.
But basically my background with HR before was I worked for small coffee companies for years, and there wasn't any HR. There was just a lot of really well-intentioned small business owners who could not handle everything. So grievances went unanswered. A lot of fights happened and often it was just, “Oh, well, I need to move on from this company and find another small company,” which I think is how it works with a lot of people who work with very small companies.
Ashley: I just did an interview with Sierra Yeo from the Kore Directive—she's based in the United Kingdom—and that was a theme that kept coming up in our conversation constantly.
You work at a company, you start out thinking things are great, but the minute that there are problems, there's no recourse for how to deal with them. So then you just keep moving on and it feels like your career just keeps going in this lateral direction because, as we were talking about it, we realized that for a lot of coffee companies, there's no way to deal with conflict.
Eric: Exactly. And it's a maddening experience, just the back and forth, leading with your emotions, which is not necessarily the sign of a good leader, but also is not something that is being taught to leaders. I think, generally you just get into this position, especially if you're a coffee shop manager, of, “Hey, you've been doing a great job as a barista. Maybe even the lead barista, of course you can manage,” but there's not often a guidebook, especially for these smaller companies.
Ashley: So your desire to learn more about HR was partially driven by the work that you were committed to doing for Glitter Cat and partially driven by your past experiences.
I was wondering: What was your conception of HR before you started this course? Because I know for me, the first thing I think of when I think of HR is, “Oh, they're there to protect a company. They're not here to protect me.”
Eric: 100%. And that's what I thought of it.
Eventually when I got into a position where I worked for a bigger company that had HR, that was what was happening. A lot of it was compliance with laws, which obviously needs to happen. There's no way that small business owners can know all of the laws that they need to be compliant with—that many are often breaking. But I also saw so many things that were just incredibly demoralizing, particularly with conflict resolution, that were more about protecting the company from lawsuits than they were advocating for employees.
When I was about to get into this program to do this 10-week course—that would end in a 125-question exam—I thought, “Okay, I just need to take from this what I can. I just need to find out what these laws are, what these standards are, so that I can manipulate it to my will and make it better for employees.”
Ashley: And that's not what you learned?
Eric: Not at all. In fact, HR has best intentions possible, as a concept.
It came out of labor crises that led to the forming of unions. It was in fact meant to protect employees. It's in fact these bad actors, particularly as you move higher up in these corporate levels, that bend all of that to basically benefit these companies and to keep them not liable for lawsuits.
There was so much to learn. It was really an exhaustive, comprehensive view of HR, which was very exciting and very daunting at times. I can't even say that I have retained all of this information, but still I have this 425-page textbook to refer back to. I have a teacher who I can consult with and send messages to and be like, “Am I interpreting this correctly?”
Because that's the other thing, is you have to interpret laws. And interpreting laws is really, really difficult. Even if they are spelled out to a T, it's really, really difficult to say, “Hey, are you actually being compliant with this? Or are you wiggling out of it? Or is there a little bit of gray area here?”
Ashley: Yeah, that totally makes sense. Because I feel as a barista, when I first started learning about jobs and my rights and things like that, I would maybe ask my employer and maybe they would have a different interpretation of what a law meant. But if I go back to those experiences, I'm like, “Wait, no, that's not quite right.” Or, “Oh, I see how they made this work for them, but this really should have been working for me.”
It's really hard to read laws, especially if you don't have a background in HR or law or if you're 17 and just starting out and learning what work even is. So it's really interesting that you talk about how these laws are meant to be interpreted and how you do need someone who's almost like a translator to explain how they work.
Eric: Yeah. You need that from both ends too. We're not just talking about baristas. Baristas probably need it more because they are, for lack of a better term, lower on the totem pole, and they're not given this information upfront, but also business owners can't possibly know all of this stuff that they have to be compliant with, that they have to take into consideration, both when they're starting their business and as they're growing their business.
It's a lot of stuff to go through. It's a lot of things to have, especially because, even in HR school—which is a very funny thing to say, “HR school,” right?—in HR school, one of the first things you learn is that businesses with fewer than a hundred employees often just don't have an HR manager, which makes sense.
It's like, if you think that you can do it as a business owner, but you also probably don't have the capital to have a pretty expensive person on salary to make sure that all of this stuff is being taken care of.
Ashley: I have to imagine as well, for small coffee companies who have anywhere from two employees to maybe 10 or 20 employees, there's this idea of casual happiness—and I'm going to coin that term, I think—of the idea that, “Oh, we're all together and we're happy. We don't need a ton of rules or guidelines or anything because this just works.”
I imagine that people internalize HR as a way to regiment that experience, which is absolutely not true. I think we're learning from unions like Colectivo and the Tartine Union that rules are actually really, really helpful for creating a framework for people to be happy. But I wonder if that was something that you felt or experienced during your time in coffee—that “We don't want rules because like this just works,” or like, “I don't want someone to tell me how to do things!”
Eric: Absolutely. You feel a sense of terrific independence when you get to be the one person who's working at the coffee shop. You control the music, you control the mood, you control all of that.
I think that's the first thing you think. “Oh, now there have to be rules.” I think that's also what a lot of coffee company owners who don't want their employees to unionize then say, “You have so much freedom. If we go down this path of unionization, or if we go down this path of having very specific HR, then there are all sorts of rules. There are all sorts of rules that everybody needs to follow and it makes it into this regimented existence.”
But that really does not have to happen. There is so much room to interpret, to joyfully interpret, all of these things that can ultimately not only help out baristas, but can help out coffee company owners as well, can make everybody's lives easier. Can put everybody on this right path to as much social justice as you can accomplish in a coffee company.
Ashley: What were some of the most surprising things you learned doing this training?
Eric: I think one of the big things—so I knew about exempt employees before. It was something that I learned a little bit too late after I had become a coffee shop manager and then moved into a different role as a director of events. [I learned that for exempt employees] that salaries have to be at a certain point for you to be exempt from overtime. Administrative, management roles … they fall under this category and finding you…
Ashley: Just really quickly: Can you define exactly what an exempt employee is?
Eric: An exempt employee is an employee who works full-time and who meets a certain salary threshold. It is well above what hourly minimum wage is. [Exempt employees] meet that threshold, which means you do not have to pay them overtime—which makes sense for certain roles, but think about being a coffee shop manager.
You and I have both been coffee shop managers before. It's not only a full-time role, but you have to be available to deal with crises. Are you keeping track of your hours when you're doing that?
Ashley: Sometimes? If I was getting paid—there are certain jobs that I got paid hourly, and some jobs that I got paid a lump salary. I mean, it really depends, but let's talk about that salary exemption, because I have to imagine that most coffee shop managers who are maybe in that latter position of not necessarily keeping track of their hours, maybe getting a lump sum every week or month, probably don't meet that threshold salary.
Eric: Quite possibly. I certainly wasn't. So right now the annual salary of an exempt employee should be $35,568 nationally.
Ashley: Okay.
Eric: And there are seven states that have different rules from that: that put it above, either slightly or considerably. Some states have different laws depending on how many employees you have. So for example, in California, if fewer than 25 employees make X amount of money, fewer than 26 employees for the whole company, exempt employees make more money.
And it's the same in Washington State, and oddly Alaska is one of the seven states that has higher than the minimum requirement. California and New York are—not surprisingly—the highest. I want to know if you can guess what the minimum is in California. So we're talking about in California, if you have more than 26 employees, and New York is specific to New York City.
Ashley: Okay. I lived in both states. I have worked as a manager in both states. I'm going to tell you what I made in those positions and see if it met the minimum threshold. So I worked at a coffee shop in Oakland and I was making $18 an hour as the manager, but I was paid a salary-ish. So it was kind of a hybrid, but there were solo shifts, so I also collected tips. So it was weird, but $18 an hour got me to about $40k... I'm doing the math right now. It's like 18 times 40 times 52 got me to $37,000 a year.
Eric: In building up your salary from tips or potentially bonuses in California and New York, you have to be making at least $58,000 a year.
Ashley: (Bursts out laughing) Okay. Okay. My first coffee shop job was—not my first coffee shop, but my first manager job was in 2012. So maybe the laws have changed since then, but it was in New York, New York City. I was making $600 a week as the manager and I was not taking any tips. Which is wild. So $600 times 40 times 52 is—nope, that's wrong math. $600 in a week times 52 … I was making $31,000 a year as a manager.
Eric: I'd have to check it to see if that is in fact compliant for 2012, because [the salary threshold] even went up from 2020 to 2021. But three years ago, when I was in a different administrative position and I found out what managers were supposed to be making, because it correlated to my salary as the manager of a different department, that it was in the $57,000 range.
Ashley: I've never made that much money.
Eric: It's wild. To be clear, also in California, if you have fewer than 25 employees, which a lot of smaller businesses do, it's $54,000, but even still, that's a considerable amount of money that you may or may not be making.
Ashley: Right. And that's an important thing for people to know, especially when they do make that jump from barista to some sort of job that is salaried, because that's usually the progression of these jobs, right? You're a barista, you're making an hourly wage, you're taking home tips, and then you have to weigh if that next promotion is even worth it. Because for a lot of these positions, you know, it was an open secret at a lot of places that I worked where the managers or people in salary positions made less than the baristas because of tips. And because of these constraints, these like restrictions on salaries.
Eric: Exactly. I think that's probably one of my biggest takeaways from this entire experience of learning the general ins and outs of HR, is that people just don't know these things and the information is out there, but it's out there in a lot of different places.
Even in trying to get this condensed information in table form, it took me a while to search it out. This isn't necessarily on government websites, on the Department of Labor website in digestible form. You really have to hunt for this information.
I know that a lot of smaller coffee businesses are struggling with this. I know even medium-to-large-size coffee businesses, where the owners are still doing all of this, they're still taking on all of this … and it's too much, it's too much for all these people to keep all of this stuff straight, which is why, beyond the initial idea of us just making businesses more accountable and doing better as far as Black employees go, as far as Black customers go, you have to be doing better for everybody.
You have to have the opportunity to ask questions in a judgment-free zone, which is what I want to do. That's what I want to be for people. I want to be that for baristas as well. I want people to come to me and say, “Hey, is this enough money for this?” And people do, which is wonderful, but I want to spread that out beyond people I know. I want you to be able to come to me and say, “Hey, I don't know if this is fishy, but it might be fishy, right?”
Ashley: You and I are probably both uniquely poised in that we both see a lot of those questions. I get a lot of questions about like, “I got offered this amount. This was my previous position. What should I do?” Or, “Is this enough money?” Sometimes I'll do that kind of searching where I’ll go to Department of Labor websites. I'll go through statutes and laws for specific states—but you're right. Number one, this information is really hard to find. But if a person's asking me this question, I have to imagine that there are 10 more people with that question and they just don't know who to ask.
Eric: Absolutely. This seems to be a major issue across this industry. It has been as long as we've worked in it.
Ashley: Exactly.
Eric: I believe that the answer is not to tut-tut the people who are doing it wrong. I still want to lead from the idea that people just don't know any better and then present them that information and go from there.
It can be tailored to each company. I do want to offer consulting services at this point to make it easier on businesses, other than just giving them a bunch of information and say, “Have at it, interpret it yourself, go for it.”
I think that this comes into play with two different possible options. With baristas: Come to me, my DMs are open, ask me whatever questions you have about human resources, operations—obviously we've just been talking about salaries and that's a huge part of human resources—but even in just like the ethic of being in a company and employee rights, I want to be there for you in order to do that.
Businesses, especially businesses owned by the marginalized communities that we serve through Glitter Cat, I also want to help you out as well. Businesses not owned by people from marginalized communities: I can also help you out. It might cost a little bit more.
Ashley: As it should.
One thing that I want to talk about is what an employee who works at a company that doesn't have an HR program can begin to do to advocate for their rights, because it can be really daunting if you don't have that structure in place, or you don't have a structure to depend on. What are some of the things that you've learned that baristas should at least be aware of—beyond exempt versus non-exempt? What are some things that they should take away from a conversation with someone like you?
Eric: I think that they need to know that there are government agencies that specifically deal with all of this. That's the big thing—that you can make appeals to those agencies, for better or worse, potentially report a business that is doing unlawful labor practices, which a lot of them are.
I think that you can also hopefully approach it as more as a conversation with business owners in order to just see where they are to see if the intentions are right or they're just falling short because they don't necessarily know any better. Perhaps they're completely exhausted, which is often an excuse that we run up against. That is no excuse, really, but still to try to get your finger on the pulse of where business owners are actually at, as far as their employees are concerned, and to determine if it's good for you to stay with that business.
What I hope will happen through our work through this, and hopefully through people being inspired by our work through this, is that they will start to have not just a bare minimum, but great standards for what it is to run companies and to serve employees in that capacity, because your job is your life, whether we like it or not.
It's not your whole life necessarily, but it's a significant portion of your life. You think about it when you go home, it's very difficult, especially with the emotional labor that comes with working in a coffee company, particularly in customer-facing roles, to leave it behind. You do need it and you do need to be treated well. You do need to be advocated for.
Ashley: It seems like the general understanding here is that the more we set these expectations up in individuals, in people—be it people who are looking for jobs like baristas, who are maybe entering the fields or going to another position, or people who own and run coffee shops—that the expectation will just be met equally.
Like I'll go into a job interview and say and ask, “What are your salary minimums?” or something like that. That's kind of an off-the-cuff question, but the idea is that I'll be empowered to ask these questions more. The more that I know about these things, and once more employees kind of set that expectation—no, that's not right either.
Eric: No, go with it because I'm getting spurred from it.
Ashley: Yeah, okay. So—I don't want the expectation to necessarily come from employees because that's unfair, but at the same time employees have the power to change what's happening by setting these expectations. It's one of those things where like, yes, coffee shops need to be paying their baristas more money, but if this is a long-term goal and baristas need that money now, then they also have to advocate for themselves. Does that make sense?
Eric: 100%. And it happens at the very beginning. It happens in the interview process. I think if you can think about times where you were interviewed—did you ask a lot of questions, especially in the beginning when you were first getting into coffee?
Ashley: No, I didn't, I started asking more questions later.
Eric: What was the response when you were asking more questions in interviews?
Ashley: I think—so I think it's hard for me to use my experience as—no, that's not true.
I would've said it would've been hard for me to use my experience, just because at the time, towards the later part of my career, I was working for Barista Magazine, I think people were a little bit more afraid of me.
But I did actually apply for a job where I—recently, not that long ago—where I asked about salaries and instead of them answering the question, they asked me what my salary expectation was. I remember having a moment where I was like, “Don't answer that question,” but I did. They mentioned that their salary range was perhaps a little bit lower [than my salary expectation], and then they stopped talking to me.
Eric: Mm. I mean, this gets back to an issue that you and I have been talking about for years, which is salary transparency. Why aren't these on job descriptions? Because would they have significantly fewer employees if they actually listed what the salary range was?
Ashley: Or what will we think about that organization once we found out what the salaries were?
Eric: Exactly. And perhaps look quick to judgment.
I mean, I'm stupidly optimistic. I'd like to believe that people can change once confronted with the error of their ways, especially with paying people enough, but the long and short of it is if that were really true, I think we would have seen, especially once all of the wage surveys went out a few years ago and we saw the wide range of what people were making as baristas—it didn't change a bit.
Ashley: No.
Eric: Which is really disappointing, but it is ultimately putting, I think, a little bit more pressure and setting more standards.
The companies who truly want to make a difference in this industry: Be radical about it. Have wage transparency. It's not actually going to affect you in a negative way if you were putting your best effort forward, you know?
Ashley: Yeah, totally.
Right as the pandemic started—no, maybe even before—I interviewed one of the founders of Oddly Correct Coffee, and they are super transparent about their wages. Every job description says, “We start at this amount.”
They have a wage guarantee as well. So you are guaranteed to make $18 an hour, be it through a mix of wages and tips. Or if your tips do not get you up to $18 an hour, they will compensate you for that. But they're super transparent about it. They will list for you how this works. And if they can do it—they're not a huge company. It's not about having a ton of muscle behind your company—then why can't other companies do it?
I think it comes from them being very organized. When I had this conversation on Boss Barista—you can go backwards, it happens in January of 2020—they spoke very specifically about just having a plan and having things written down.
Eric: I think a lot of companies are afraid to do that. They're afraid of anybody peeking behind the curtain in any sort of way. And look, you can keep things close to the chest. Absolutely. Especially where it protects people.
But if it's not protecting people, don't keep it close to the chest. In fact, not only is it not protecting your employees, it's not protecting industry at large. Companies have to make these big grand gestures because other companies have to be compared against them. That's the way capitalism works. Isn't it?
Ashley: Something that I think is really interesting about this discussion that we're having about HR—and I want to extrapolate it a little bit outward—is that it's not necessarily just a responsibility to your employees, even though I would argue that that's your first responsibility and I think you would agree with that, but it's also a responsibility to the coffee industry at large. If we believe that this industry will continue going and continue to be a bastion of coffee, then we have to invest in people's ability to work within the industry.
Eric: 100%. Absolutely. That's what I hope to continue to do with this HR program.
I don't just want to be a gatekeeper of this information that I've learned, this information I have in this enormous fucking textbook. I want not only for people to have that information, I want to make more HR professionals. I want to get a lot of people up to this point where they are HR-certified. Even if they don't become heads of HR at coffee companies or wherever they end up going, it'll still empower them with more information to be better leaders, to set this example that eventually people will have to follow if they want good talent, if they want to get baristas in at an entry level and then have those people help grow their companies.
Ashley: Are there any suggestions that you have for coffee companies who are maybe listening to this and thinking, “Well, I can't employ an HR professional. Maybe I'm not necessarily interested in a consultant for a one-time thing.”
Is there a model that a company like this can employ where maybe someone in their business gets HR-certified and they work 10 hours a week on this or something like that? Are there ways to incorporate some of the practices that you've outlined?
Eric: I think so. Absolutely. For one thing I want to put out the initial idea that I have, that I have absolutely no time to do, because it would be my one focus, which is I wanted to create an HR collective.
Basically one or multiple people overseeing HR services for multiple companies that had fewer employees and could charge a reasonable price per employee. That would help out with conflict resolution. It would help out with setting proper wage standards, with keeping companies compliant. Somebody needs to take up that idea. So that's my call to action for everybody.
In the meantime, my HR certification, with the class to learn how to take the exam and the exam itself, was about a thousand dollars, which I don't think is a whole lot of money to invest either in business owners themselves doing that or in [employers paying] employees to oversee it for, like you said, not necessarily 40 hours a week of a full-time job, but to give them a potential salary increase and to give them a skill that they can also potentially take somewhere else.
I think what you and I have talked about at certain points, but that still doesn't get said enough, is investing in employees beyond their time with you is really, really crucial. It's not only crucial just as somebody who's trying to steward people. Who's trying to make professionals out of people. It's better for your company, because if you say, “Hey, I know that there's potentially a time beyond our company for you,” often, I think they'll stay. Often, I think they will be able to invest in your company, because they'll know that you don't just care about them when you are in the shop. When you are answering emails, you care about them beyond that.
Ashley: That's a really, really good point that I don't think enough coffee companies take into account. And I think that one of the things that I've repeated more than I've repeated anything else—okay, I'm going to say that that's like the third thing I've repeated the most.
The first thing I probably repeat the most is document everything, which is an important part of this conversation. The second thing I've probably repeated is your boss is not your friend. But the third thing I've probably repeated is that baristas or anybody that works for you—when they leave, they're your alumni, they're the people who are going to talk your business up, or they're going to tell people, “Don't buy coffee from this person.” Or, “I had a terrible time working here, and this is why.”
I know that you and I have had fond conversations of the people we have worked for who we have really enjoyed, and being able to share that is really exciting. So realizing that the people that you employ are going to maybe leave or carry with them experiences that are going to go beyond just your time with them, I think, is really, really critical. I feel like people get really, really stuck on this idea that knowledge must stay within this business. I'm not really sure where that comes from.
Eric: It comes from nervousness and from competition, doesn't it? The idea that we're all competing with each other when in fact, we're just trying to keep this industry afloat, we're trying to keep this industry accountable and we're trying to keep it equitable for as many people as possible. At least I think a lot of us are, so yeah.
I can't help but think how wonderful it was when I was in a supervisory position and people would come up to me and ask me for a recommendation while they were still working for me for another job—that was a brilliant experience. That meant that they trusted me.
They trusted me and the idea that they would be able to move on to something that would be better for their work-life balance, or better for them money-wise—certainly because I could never imagine that I would pay them enough—was wonderful. It was a really enriching feeling.
Ashley: It feels like, as we wrap up this conversation, that we've obviously talked about lots of concrete things, knowing the difference between exempt employees and non-exempt employees, knowing how much you should be paid if you’re salaried … These are all really important, but we also talked really holistically about just an approach to employment that it feels like HR gives you the framework to build.
Eric: Yes, absolutely. The amount of things that it covers in a company—it covers everything in the company and that I could never have imagined, especially when you're getting most of your HR services from whatever your payroll company is: No, they actually set the culture and they should set the culture for your company.
Whether that's you as an employer who have some grounding in HR doing that, or whether you have an HR manager, you can't forget it. HR is setting the culture for your company that will last beyond a lot of people's employment there.
Ashley: Eric, thank you for taking time to chat with me. I really appreciate it.
Eric: Thank you, Ashley.
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Eric Grimm on HR and Setting Workplace Culture