The Culture Architect: How to Set the Tone as an HR Department of One

Wow, you get this whole department all to yourself? Time to surface as many violations as you can! Surely you’ll receive credit for all of the good stuff you enabled or encouraged, too. And you’ll never, ever suffer burnout!

When you are the Builder of Culture, you’re also the Protector of Values. You can good-cop bad-cop all day, but they’ll only remember the bad cop if we’re not careful.

• Consistency is the most important quality an HR department of one can have.
• Daily connection should be so easy and natural that it’s mostly hands-off.
• Informal conversations, optional participation, and low-admin company culture tools are your best friends.

Solo HR best practices for a strong company culture

Please don’t book a Zoom magician. Yet, anyway. Your big superpower as a one-person culture architect is going to be consistency. Doing these four things early on gets people on your side later.

Revisit your written communication tone and style.

Look at your emails to team members and be honest. Do you sound like a legal professional or part of the team? Is there a real aura of redress when you have to be corrective?

Company policy is about keeping things fair for everyone. It’s better to say that than quote handbook stuff at people. Speaking of handbooks, use words that both are and are related to company core values. Use them regularly in all types of exchanges, not just ones where you have to flex your big HR badge.

Use company culture tools that shape behavior, not add processes.

Everyone has to own their behavior, right? If you instruct everyone to use a tool that requires extra work, training, or an additional login, you are taking time away from tasks that are more important to them. You own their less-than-enthusiastic response and low participation.

Anything you introduce should sit right in the conversation and workflow. This is the only way it will be used daily for small things that actually build culture and not just performance and point-gathering.

And don’t make it feel like HR.

The other part of that is not making it mandatory or telling people to use it. You use it. Elements of gamification and hello, a cute little 🌮, are silly and sort of fun. This keeps your HR department of one from becoming the company's surveillance arm.

It’s never guaranteed to catch on. But if it’s easy and lighthearted, the chances increase that it will. You have to be present where those positive everyday connections happen because when you do have to correct someone, your comments have more credibility.

Protect core values, and pause when necessary.

What you say no to will be the biggest cultural influence you have. Brainstorm some phrases you’ll use as your culture veto among leadership. If someone isn’t aligned during the hiring process, hit pause and use that phrase early on. “How is this behavior helping to build team trust?” You’re the one on the hook when a bad fit hurts culture, after all.

This is a common issue when teams are growing fast. Cultures suffer because the company needs bodies, and they end up making concessions. If it persists even after your veto, request clarity and perhaps a revision of what values are truly being put into practice.

Culture maintenance for the HR department of one

Your solo HR best practices create a foundation. Some tools may feel set-and-forget, but doing these three things two to four times a month keeps progress on track.

Replace boilerplate survey questions with more relevant inquiries.

On the daily, stories matter more than scoring. A one-person department on a small team isn’t getting big stat-sig.

Questions such as “Who deserves some thanks that I may not know about?” are more useful and actionable than “How likely are you to recommend our company as a good place to work?” “What’s slowing you down right now?” helps deliver more immediate solutions than “Agree or disagree: I have everything needed to do my job.”

Identify recognition debts.

Every week, do a brief investigation into contributions that went unrecognized. If these pile up, it becomes a debt. A few examples:

• Someone who did an onboarding task while you weren’t there
• The “off hours” employee in a far-flung time zone who fixed a bug overnight
• A team member who cleaned up a document or organized/renamed files
• The employee who de-escalated a tense exchange between coworkers

One of the big ones is customer or client reviews. If no one is mentioned by name in the positive comment, do your best to find out. Either way, put it in the chat during celebrations or shoutouts.

Catch up with the people who are really influencing behavior.

Are decisions made in DMs? Were you hired after the founder-era lore began? That means missing information. You need regular, informal, zero-agenda 15-minute check-ins with these three people, and they can exist at any level on the org chart.

1. Who breaks news to the team. This might not be a manager giving updates. It may be the person who explains what the update actually means for everyone.

2. Who takes over the chat. This is the person who keeps a conversation going in a certain direction. Even or especially in water-cooler style channels.

3. Who acts like an insider. The team member or leader who takes an interest in filling new hires in on stuff that perhaps isn’t covered during onboarding.

The 5 mistakes every one-person HR department should avoid

Avoiding burnout and sustaining the culture without daily interference is entirely possible. Just watch out for any of these behaviors.

1. Becoming a culture cop. Daily flagging and incessant values reminders subtract from recognition when it isn’t yet a team habit. An HR department of one has to avoid being a hall monitor and stay focused on narrating the good stuff just as often.

2. Surveying and not listening. When team members try to call attention to something, respond, even if you can’t resolve the issue. If feedback disappears into a void, participation will suffer everywhere.

3. Acting bigger than you are. Organizationally speaking, anyway. Avoid big enterprise corporate solutions with additional logins and more admin for you. If your company culture tools need a rollout, it’s not right for a one-person HR department.

4. Avoiding hard conversations. People doing this solo often delay tough convos because they feel they have no one to back them up if needed. Approach these conversations with factual observations (“You made this error”), not statements people feel they must defend themselves against (“You’re not putting your best into this”).

5. Seeing yourself as the culture. It has to survive without you, or it's your culture and not theirs. Automating some events, like milestones, is one way to get around this. In any case, all celebrations and recognition shouldn’t start with you.

You’re never alone with HeyTaco 🌮

If you want recognition and small wins to be consistent enough to become culture, it has to be an everyday habit. HeyTaco has a daily use rate that’s leaps and bounds above other culture tools. The best part is, it’ll be the easiest part of your job.

Take Outbound Sales Pro. They’re a team of high-performing salespeople whose culture is shaped by their Head of Marketing, AJ. The last thing AJ needs on his plate is a bunch of extra admin. His remote team of 60 uses HeyTaco Deluxe because:

• They’re a Slack-first bunch. It’s important that their tools aren’t disruptive to the flow of work or communication.
• There’s almost no admin. OSP doesn’t even have a formal HR department. HeyTaco helps them continue to get by without one.
• The automation is reliable. The Milestones feature helps them celebrate more often, where other bots failed.
• They’ve built team rituals off of it. Building habits together naturally leads to rituals that only fortify those bonds.

Compare plans, start for free, and let the whole team help you carry the culture.