What changed when I became the only HR person

For six years I worked in a large retail HR team. There was an employee relations specialist, a reward team, a learning team and a very patient HR systems analyst. When something landed on my desk that was not mine, I knew exactly whose it was.

My first month as the only HR person at a sixty-person startup, I kept a list of every request that reached me. It had ninety-three lines. They ranged from an employment contract for a new country to a founder asking whether we “should do OKRs.”

The assumption I brought with me

I assumed that being useful meant being responsive. In my old team, a fast answer was a kindness, because the answer usually existed. Here, most answers did not exist yet. Being fast meant inventing policy in a Slack thread.

What shifted

The turning point was small. A manager apologized for “bothering me with something so minor” — a question about a notice period that I had been sitting on for a week because it was tangled up with a contract template I had not finished. He was not bothering me. I had simply never told anyone what I was working on, so everything looked equally ignored.

That week I wrote a one-page note: what I do now, what I will do next quarter, and what I don’t do yet. It included the things I was deliberately not building, like a formal performance cycle. I shared it in our all-hands and pinned it.

The note did not reduce the work. It reduced the number of people wondering whether their request had disappeared.

What I do differently

I say “not yet” more, and I attach a month to it. I ask leaders to choose between two things rather than asking whether they want both. And I update the note every quarter, including the items that slipped. People have been more forgiving of slipped dates they can see than of silence.

What remains unresolved

I still do not know how to handle requests that are small, urgent and emotionally heavy — a manager who needs help today with a difficult conversation. They never fit on a quarterly note, and they are often the most important thing I do all week. I would value hearing how other team-of-one practitioners protect time for those without letting everything else slide.