Lahoma Hay

I attribute my success to my hard work and to my grandmother, who raised me. She's 90 years old and still alive to this day, bless her. She always pushed me and my cousin, and we're the only ones in our family that have an actual bachelor's and master's degree on my mom's side. She told us, 'I wasn't able to get this, I want y'all to be able to get this. I need y'all to do this, and make sure that you make me proud.' I'm gonna be honest, I did it for me, but in the end, I'm telling you, I did it for my grandmother, and I was so thankful that she was alive to actually come to my graduation and see me walk across that stage. She just asked something simple of us: go to school, get your education. She was like, I wasn't able to help, you know, your mom, you know, back then in the day to do all of that, but she was able to help me and my cousin.

The best career advice I ever received was from my CFO at a manufacturing company where I was working in HR. He told me, 'You always keep pushing to the next level. There's a class to be taken.' I tell all of my junior colleagues the same thing. I don't care if it's a class on Excel, I don't care if there's a class on AI now. Always push yourself and put yourself in a position to say, hey, you know, to the company, will you help pay for this class? If not, he said, don't sit around because the company won't pay for it. You pay for it yourself, and make sure that you keep expanding your knowledge. He said, because these companies will come in and say, hey, we don't need you to do this, because we got this to do it. So you need to keep your skills up. Some people think, well, college, that's it. I'm just gonna get a job. I don't need to learn nothing. Yes, you do. You gotta keep broadening your horizons, because if you don't, you're gonna find yourself without a job. And you're gonna think, just because you got a college degree, that that should suffice your job. That's not gonna suffice a job. You gotta keep your skills up.

What I would give to them is, make sure that you are a people's person. Everybody thinks that you can just jump into HR, and they think, oh, it's an easy job. No, it's not. You have to be able to be a people's person to do this job. It's no different than being a nurse. You know how everybody wants to jump and be a nurse, but they don't have bedside manners? I tell people always, in HR and payroll, because especially with payroll, you're gonna get employees that call you, they're angry about their paychecks, you know, they're gonna call you about benefits, hey, I didn't get my benefit card, da-da-da-da. You have to be able to eloquently speak. Be able to listen first. Let the employee voice how they feel, and then make a plan to help them.

AI has taken over a lot of things, so the biggest things for us was the payroll side, but more so with the HR side. That's why I say keep your skills up. I always tell junior colleagues to learn different things and stay abreast of what's going on in SHRM. AI is trying to take over a lot of things with HR. They're making a system where you don't need an HR generalist to do certain things anymore, so that job title field is really going away, to be honest. But what AI can't do is our audits. When you're in HR, like during open enrollment, before January 1st, you have to make sure everybody's benefits are in there, you gotta make sure everything's pushed over to payroll to make sure deductions come out. What AI can't do is the audit, to see who fell out of the system. Like, say you had children in the system, and let's say one fell out, all those mistakes, that's something AI can't do, that's something we still have to do hands-on. But then they're diminishing the workforce, which means making us work with less people. So when those times come when we have to do those type of things on a job, it makes it harder, because now I have less people trying to do all this work.

First of all, respect. And then with that, trust. To me, that goes hand in hand, because ethics is one of the things I stand on, and I'm all about being a good manager. I don't mind us laughing and talking, and every now and then, we can have a little stuff to eat, but I'm about getting the job done as well, and getting it done the right way.