Workplace MVP LIVE from SHRM 2022: Brad Harper, Bambee
Brad Harper, an HR Business Partner with Bambee, joined host Jamie Gassmann in the R3 Continuum booth. Brad shared how Bambee helps smaller companies manage their HR functions, what’s he is seeing from his clients, what he learned about empathy and accountability, and more.
Workplace MVP is underwritten and presented by R3 Continuum and produced by the Minneapolis-St.Paul Studio of Business RadioX®.
This show was originally broadcast live from the 2022 SHRM Annual Conference held at the New Orleans Convention Center in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Brad Harper, HR Business Partner, Bambee
With the help of your dedicated HR Manager, Bambee puts your HR on autopilot to streamline your HR, and automate your onboarding, policies, and even employee training.
Today, Bambee’s HR Autopilot keeps over 10,000 American Businesses HR compliant all year long, with up-to-date HR policies, mandatory training, and regular, two-way feedback between you and your employees.
- HR rules change. Audits let you identify any HR gaps, and then we help you with an action plan to get your internal practices up-to-date to keep protecting your company and employees.
- HR Autopilot makes sure all core, protective policies are current, signed by your employees, and reaffirmed semi-annually. Then, your dedicated HR Manager crafts any custom HR policies your business needs.
- Bambee takes care of important and often-mandatory training like sexual harassment, workplace safety, and business ethics – and reports back to you on everyone’s progress.
- Bambee’s Report Cards help you track your staff against their goals, and open up a regular dialogue to give praise, constructive feedback, or take corrective action.
- Employee Voices lets your employees share concerns and alert you to potential problems. But it doesn’t have to be bad news – it’s also a great way for your staff to express gratitude, anonymously or publicly.
Comply with EEOC Document Retention Standards. Federal & state laws mandate that certain company files be held for a certain period of time. Plus, never guess who signed what – or where your important HR documents are. They’re all gathered safely in your Smart Cabinet.
About Workplace MVP
Every day, around the world, organizations of all sizes face disruptive events and situations. Within those workplaces are everyday heroes in human resources, risk management, security, business continuity, and the C-suite. They don’t call themselves heroes though. On the contrary, they simply show up every day, laboring for the well-being of employees in their care, readying the workplace for and planning responses to disruption. This show, Workplace MVP, confers on these heroes the designation they deserve, Workplace MVP (Most Valuable Professionals), and gives them the forum to tell their story. As you hear their experiences, you will learn first-hand, real-life approaches to readying the workplace, responses to crisis situations, and overcoming challenges of disruption. Visit our show archive here.
Workplace MVP Host Jamie Gassmann
In addition to serving as the host to the Workplace MVP podcast, Jamie Gassmann is the Director of Marketing at R3 Continuum (R3c). Collectively, she has more than fourteen years of marketing experience. Across her tenure, she has experience working in and with various industries including banking, real estate, retail, crisis management, insurance, business continuity, and more. She holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Mass Communications with special interest in Advertising and Public Relations and a Master of Business Administration from Paseka School of Business, Minnesota State University.
R3 Continuum
R3 Continuum is a global leader in workplace behavioral health and security solutions. R3c helps ensure the psychological and physical safety of organizations and their people in today’s ever-changing and often unpredictable world. Through their continuum of tailored solutions, including evaluations, crisis response, executive optimization, protective services, and more, they help organizations maintain and cultivate a workplace of wellbeing so that their people can thrive. Learn more about R3c at www.r3c.com.
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TRANSCRIPT
Intro: [00:00:03] Broadcasting live from SHRM 2022 at the New Orleans Convention Center, it’s time for Workplace MVP. Brought to you by R3 Continuum, a global leader in helping workplaces thrive during disruptive times. Now, here’s your host.
Jamie Gassmann: [00:00:20] Hey, everyone. Your host, Jamie Gassmann. And I am coming to you from the SHRM 2022 Exhibit Hall in our show sponsor’s booth, R3 Continuum. And joining me is Brad Harper from Bambee.com. Welcome to the show, Brad.
Brad Harper: [00:00:35] Hey, Jamie. Thanks so much for having me.
Jamie Gassmann: [00:00:37] Yeah. It’s great to have you. I’m glad you stopped by. So, tell me a little bit about your background. I know you’re not an HR leader, but you do support a bunch of them. So, share with me a little bit about how you got into that industry and just kind of your career journey to this point.
Brad Harper: [00:00:50] Yeah. Sure. So, I’ve been in human resources for about 14 years, and I’ve recently joined on with a company named Bambee. They are a company headquartered out of downtown Los Angeles. And what they do is, is they support small businesses throughout the United States.
Brad Harper: [00:01:07] We saw a need for small businesses in the U.S. that can’t afford a dedicated HR manager. You know, on average a dedicated HR manager or internal, $80,000, $90,000 a year. And what we realized was, for those small businesses that had less than 100 employees, a lot of times those businesses don’t have a dedicated HR point person. But they still need to follow State and Federal Laws. They still need to provide a support system for employees.
Brad Harper: [00:01:42] And so, what we’ve done is, is we have designed a product. Bambee.com is a website. It’s a digital infrastructure for a lot of the HR policies, supplemental trainings, a lot of the things that a small business needs to succeed, all the tools and the resources. But in addition to that, on top of it, they get a dedicated HR manager.
Brad Harper: [00:02:06] And that dedicated HR manager provides risk mitigation. They provide guidance on how to navigate some of the very complex issues that come up. You know, when it comes to equal opportunity employment, when it comes to sexual harassment, a lot of those compliance areas that can be very sticky points that a lot of times small business owners, they don’t know how to navigate and handle that with their employees. So, that is what Bambee provides. It’s been a great learning opportunity for me and I’m thrilled to be with the company.
Jamie Gassmann: [00:02:43] Yeah, no. I think it sounds like a great site and a great product because, to your point, they all have to still follow the same guidelines. But not only that, employees are still looking for the same things from their employer, whether they’re small or they’re large.
Jamie Gassmann: [00:02:58] So, talk to me a little bit about some of the areas. I know you mentioned that mental health is a really important area for you. What are some of the support areas that you cover within a mental health space?
Brad Harper: [00:03:07] Sure. So, what I’ve noticed recently is, you know, we’re kind of coming out of COVID. There’s a feeling that a lot of people have this post-pandemic fatigue. And so, morale continues to be, like, such a big conversation starter for a lot of the clients that we serve at Bambee. You know, there’s a lot of areas where employees have fatigue. They need to kind of be reignited from a passion standpoint, from a standpoint of getting them back up and going again.
Brad Harper: [00:03:44] So, what we’re noticing is clients, a lot of employers, feeling fatigue. Fatigue is something that comes up quite often and they’re struggling with that. And we certainly do provide a lot of services, not only from a policy standpoint when it comes to compliance, but also from a training.
Brad Harper: [00:04:04] Our company has a database of over 700 different trainings that are catalogued, so a lot of them are very specific kind of compliance or hard skills. But we’ve also got a lot of soft skills, a lot of things that, you know, you learn over your career over time on how to be a better communicator, how to engage. So, that’s something that we are noticing a common thread with right now kind of coming out of post-pandemic.
Jamie Gassmann: [00:04:34] Yeah. Absolutely. I’ve heard that in other areas, too, and kind of that ongoing stress and burnout that employees are facing still trying to balance some of the impacts from the COVID pandemic.
Jamie Gassmann: [00:04:46] Now, I understand this is your first time at SHRM, so what are you excited about here to take away with you? You know, what is kind of one of your main motivators for coming to the show this year?
Brad Harper: [00:04:56] Yes. So, I would say that one of the things that has always solidified me as an HR professional is empathy. You know, people are exhausted. People are tired. People are drained. In HR, and even outside of HR, it’s a common thread. It’s something that regardless of where I’m at, if I’m on an airplane, if I’m at Starbucks standing in line waiting to grab an Americano, a constant thing that I’m discussing with strangers is people are just exhausted. And the one thing that I’m looking for out of SHRM is I’m looking how to reignite the area that I’ve always deemed as my strength, and that is empathy.
Brad Harper: [00:05:49] You know, I’ve been officing from home for the past two, two-and-a-half years, so I’ve been doing a lot of remote work. But we have integrated back into our downtown corporate headquarters. And I think a lot of people are feeling sluggish. I think there’s burnout. I think it’s real. I think it’s valid. And I think unless companies can truly say that it’s real, you’re never going to be able to move past the problem.
Brad Harper: [00:06:23] I’m one of those HR managers that I want to get to the root cause. I want to really identify what is the main issue, what is the problem. Because, you know, in order to kind of move forward in identifying what kind of solutions are you going to create, unless you’re being really honest about the problems that lie ahead of you, you will never create the correct solutions. And so, that’s really something I’m looking forward to.
Brad Harper: [00:06:46] I can tell you, today I attended my first session and it was around empathy and accountability, and how do you balance the two of those things, how do you do a dance. You know, accountability is this, like, hard line measurable where you’re trying to achieve results and you’ve really got to get in there and deliver numbers. But empathy is this soft skill, this soft piece that you really do need in order to balance the two of those things.
Brad Harper: [00:07:19] And I think that a lot of companies can really learn from taking a more empathetic approach in the next six months, even to the next year, on how do you attract talent, how do you retain talent, how do you keep talent, how do you promote talent, how do you promote internally. I believe that the companies in the United States that are going to use empathy as the core of everything that they do in the next 12 months are going to be the most successful companies moving forward.
Jamie Gassmann: [00:07:52] Yeah. That is such a powerful thought. I love that. And, you know, it’s kind of a new normal in this workplace. Employees, they’re needing things a little differently than what they’ve gotten before. So, that’s amazing. Great information. I love it.
Jamie Gassmann: [00:08:07] So, thank you so much for joining us. Again, if you’re interested in learning a little bit more, go to bambee.com, B-A-M-B-E-E.com. And the lucky ones will get Brad Harper as their HR manager. I love it. Thank you so much for joining us.
Brad Harper: [00:08:22] That’s so nice of you to say. I really appreciate it. I’ve really enjoyed my time with you today. Thank you.
Jamie Gassmann: [00:08:25] You’re very welcome. Thank you again.
Outro: [00:08:31] Thank you for joining us on Workplace MVP. R3 Continuum is a proud sponsor of this show, and is delighted to celebrate most valuable professionals who work diligently to secure safe workplaces where employees can thrive.
