The HR Connection Podcast with Sabrina Baker

Sabrina Baker, founder and CEO of Acacia HR Solutions, breaks down why she stepped back from major HR conferences after years attending as an attendee, speaker, blogger, and conference organizer, and what she recommends instead for HR practitioners in the 1-500 employee range.

Segments:

• Sabrina's conference background: attendee, blogger/"blog squad," speaker, and multi-year co-chair of the Illinois...

Most organizations hire, manage, and develop based on skill set alone and ignore the other half of every person: personality. In a team of five hundred, that gap gets absorbed. In a team of twelve, it becomes the culture.

Sabrina is certified in Myers-Briggs and Hogan. In this episode she addresses the science objection directly, then walks through the four ways ignoring personality damages small teams and the one shift that fixes ...

Sabrina walks through a real case: a role elimination executed while the employee was on paternity leave. Every step was legally defensible. He sued anyway. The client settled, not because they were wrong, but because trial risk on a paternity-leave termination isn't worth the exposure regardless of the underlying facts.

What this episode covers:

• The timing decision: execute during leave or wait fo...

Onboarding fails in small businesses not because no one cares but because no one owns it. This episode walks through a complete onboarding framework built for the 1–500 environment: fewer systems, less redundancy, managers executing on instinct rather than process. Covers every phase from offer acceptance through the first 30 days, and closes on the distinction that matters most, what the manager executes versus what HR owns.

This episode started with a LinkedIn message. A practitioner at a 75-person firm, HR department of one, had been listening to episodes on toxic employees and sacred cows, and she asked the question nobody wants to ask out loud: what do you do when the toxic person is the founder? That question is what this episode is built around. Not how to manage up. Not how to influence without authority. What to actually do when the person crea...

If you're managing HR alone for 100, 150, or more employees, you already know the standard advice about time management doesn't apply to you. The problem isn't how you manage your hours. It's how you classify the work coming at you.

In this episode, Sabrina breaks down the operating system Acacia uses to run high-volume HR work without burning out; a triage framework, a method for separating templatable work from judgment work, and...

HR Can't Fix What Leadership Won't Own 

Most organizations don't have a communication problem. They have a leadership problem, an accountability problem, a decision-making problem, a manager capability problem. Communication is just where those problems become visible.

In this episode, Sabrina walks through five scenarios where HR gets handed a symptom and asked to treat it like the disease and why the predictable HR response ...

Episode Summary

Most small businesses don't get into legal trouble because they lacked a policy. They get into trouble because they had one and didn't follow it. In this episode, Sabrina breaks down the gap between what handbooks say and what leaders actually do and why that gap is where most small-business employment risk lives.

This episode pairs with The Policy Nobody Talks About Until You Need It (leave of absence) and the HR C...

What No One Tells You About Being the Only HR Voice in the Room

If you've ever taken a solo HR role, or you're considering one, this episode is the conversation nobody has with you before you start. Sabrina breaks down four hard truths that come with being the only HR voice in a small business, drawing on 15 years of embedded HR work with employers under 500 employees.

In this episode:

Truth #1: You can be completely right and comp...

In the Trenches with Caitlin Sampson

Caitlin Sampson, HR Director at Trivector, a service-disabled veteran-owned small business in Huntsville, Alabama, joins Marie for the second installment of In the Trenches. As a longtime HR department of one, SHRM chapter president, adjunct professor, and mother of two, Caitlin knows firsthand what it means to operate at full capacity with no margin for error.

She unpacks the perfectionist trap...

Compensation problems in small businesses don't announce themselves. They build quietly, starting with offer-time decisions that made sense at the time and were never revisited, until pay gaps have compounded long enough that someone finds out and tells everyone.

This epis...

Most leave policies were written once and never revisited. The result: legal exposure, manager improvisation, and employees navigating a crisis without clear guidance.

In this episode, Sabrina and Marie break down why leave of absence is the HR area most likely to catch small employers off guard — and what to do about it.

What's covered:

• The three-layer compliance problem: federal law, state ...

This episode of the HR Connection addresses the breakdown of performance management in small businesses and the cost of avoidance. Many organizations fall into two patterns: leaders who avoid difficult conversations entirely or leaders who escalate too aggressively. Both create risk, damage culture, and lead to reactive decision-making instead of structured management.

Sabrina Baker and Marie Rolston outline a practical framework d...

HR isn't a spectator sport, and neither is this series.

In the Trenches is a monthly feature on the HR Connection where co-host Marie Rolston sits down with HR practitioners working inside organizations with 1 to 500 employees. No consultants, no theorists, just the people actually doing the work.

In our debut episode, Marie speaks with Ivette Mills, HR Director at 4Cs of Sonoma County, a nonprofit serving families across Sonoma Co...

Recruiting in a small business rarely lives in a neat, dedicated function. More often, it gets layered on top of an already full HR workload. In this episode, Sabrina and Marie break down what that actually looks like in practice—and how to make it manageable.

The conversation focuses on how to approach recruiting when time, resources, and structure are limited. Instead of trying to build a perfect process, this episode walks...

Most employee handbooks fail for three reasons: wrong tone, no real training on how to use them, and outdated information employees already learned not to trust.

A handbook that sounds like legal boilerplate will be ignored regardless of how complete it is. A handbook is infrastructure for consistency.

When it works, managers stop improvising, employees stop getting conflicting answers, and HR stops fielding the same questions repe...

If your most popular episode told you what intentional HR looks like, this one tells you how to actually build it. Sabrina and Marie get tactical with the HR audit process Acacia uses with every new client, no matter what the client thinks they have in place.

In this episo...

Finding reliable HR tech reviews for small businesses is nearly impossible — most resources are built for enterprise, and the comparison sites are either outdated or pay-to-play. In this episode, Acacia's Payroll and Operations Manager Penelope walks us through the HR Tech Guide she's been building specifically for small employers: what she's testing, how she's scoring it, and what she's already finding that might surprise yo...