Human Resource Mystery

Thank you to anyone who joined me on my journey this semester in gaining experience within 5 different functional areas (talent acquisition, training and development, benefits/compensation, employee relations, and corporate culture) of HR! This learning opportunity was incredibly unique due to the small size of the Operations department at redpepper, allowing me to take on a wide array of responsibilities pertaining to Human Resources. My fellow interns and I at our redpepper intern photo shoot! I truly feel like I accomplished my goal, and gained a significant amount of research-backed hands-on experience within each functional area, allowing me to understand where I would like my career to take me. Based on experiences during the past 3 months at redpepper, I can comfortably say that I am incredibly interested in continuing my passion for corporate culture (something that I hadn't had tangible experience in previously), and am also very interested in employee relations and

It's hard to believe that the time has come for my final learning share about the fifth functional area of Human Resources that I explored: corporate culture. Although this is often the industry term for this area of HR, redpepper really  dislikes the word "corporate" due to the unique nature (culture!) of the agency, so you will often find me interchangeably using the term "corporate culture" with phrases like "organizational culture" or just "culture." I have long been passionate about corporate culture, or rather the idea of it, but had never gotten hands-on project exposure to it before. Because of this, I was incredibly excited to dip my toes into what organizational culture at a culture-first company like redpepper could look like, to finally confirm (or deny) that this was an area I wanted to focus my career on in the future. To truly learn about corporate culture, I chose to take over the planning for the weekly all-hands Alignment

I'm back for yet another learning share - this time on a topic I was definitely LESS than excited to learn about. For many potential HR generalists (myself included) the words "benefits and compensation" are a terrifying, dark place where you don't talk to people and sit and crunch numbers all day. The first thing that came to mind when I would hear those two words would immediately be "money" and "boring," and so I'm thankful that the past two months at redpepper have taught me otherwise. Through my work in researching and developing a new sabbatical program for the agency, part of their compensation package, I have learned that although salary packages are an important piece of an employee's compensation, there is so  much more that a company can offer to keep employees happy and performing at their best. My first benefits-related assignment was to audit redpepper's current sabbatical program, compare it to industry (and outside) ex