As an HR consultant, my mission is to help organizations optimize their human resources processes for maximum efficiency and employee satisfaction. Recently, I had the opportunity to assist a client in onboarding their team to BambooHR’s time-off functions. This experience was not only rewarding but also underscored the critical role that effective time-off management plays in overall organizational success. Here’s a detailed account of this journey and the key takeaways.

Identifying the Need for Improvement

The client’s previous time-off management system was outdated and inefficient, relying heavily on manual tracking methods that led to frequent errors and misunderstandings. It was clear that a more robust and user-friendly solution was needed. After evaluating various HR platforms, we determined that BambooHR provided the most comprehensive and adaptable features to meet the client’s needs.

The Onboarding Process

1. Initial Setup and Configuration:The first step involved customizing BambooHR to align with the client’s unique organizational structure and policies. This included setting up specific time-off categories, defining accrual rules, and configuring approval workflows. BambooHR’s flexibility allowed us to tailor these settings to fit seamlessly with the client’s existing processes.

2. Data Migration:Ensuring accurate data migration was crucial. We meticulously transferred existing time-off data, including accrued and taken leave balances, into BambooHR. Throughout this process, BambooHR’s support team provided invaluable assistance, ensuring a smooth transition.

3. Training and Communication:To ensure a smooth adoption of the new system, we conducted comprehensive training sessions for the client’s team. These sessions covered all aspects of the new time-off management system, from requesting leave to viewing balances and understanding the approval process. We also provided a detailed user guide and FAQs to address any potential questions and ease the transition.

Overcoming Challenges

Implementing a new system often comes with resistance to change. Some team members were initially hesitant to move away from the familiar manual system. To mitigate this, we highlighted the numerous benefits of BambooHR, such as improved transparency, reduced administrative burden, and easy accessibility.

Another challenge was ensuring the accuracy of data during the migration process. We performed multiple rounds of verification to ensure all information was correctly transferred and promptly addressed any discrepancies.

Benefits Realized

Once fully implemented, BambooHR’s time-off functions brought several significant benefits to the client:

1. Improved Accuracy and Transparency:Automated tracking of time-off balances eliminated errors and provided employees with real-time visibility into their leave status. This transparency helped build trust and reduce misunderstandings.

2. Enhanced Efficiency:The streamlined approval workflows made the time-off request process quicker and more efficient for both employees and managers. Notifications and reminders ensured that requests were promptly addressed, reducing delays.

3. Better Reporting and Insights:BambooHR’s robust reporting capabilities allowed the client to generate detailed reports on time-off trends, aiding in informed decision-making and resource planning.

4. Increased Employee Satisfaction:The user-friendly interface and accessibility of BambooHR made it easy for employees to manage their time off, contributing to higher satisfaction levels and a more positive work environment.

Reflecting on the Experience

Onboarding the client’s team to BambooHR’s time-off functions was a transformative experience that highlighted the importance of leveraging technology to enhance HR operations. The journey was not without its challenges, but the benefits far outweighed the obstacles.

For other HR consultants considering a similar transition for their clients, my advice is to invest time in thorough planning, clear communication, and comprehensive training. These steps are crucial to ensuring a smooth implementation and maximizing the advantages of the new system.

I had the pleasure of attending (and helping to organize) Night Vision Toastmasters' 25th Anniversary last week.

I've been a member of the Night Vision Toastmaster Club since early last year. However, I haven't taken a minute to sit back and reflect on how greatly the club has impacted my life (for the better!) until now.

A few months ago, I ran a club brainstorming session to develop our club's tagline, as until then, we didn't have one. We came out of the session with the fantastic slogan "Come Discover What You Can't See." And it's really true - when else in life do you get the opportunity to regularly meet up with a small, supportive group to work on your communication and personal development. It's remarkable what you discover about yourself after even a few regular sessions.

The thing that surprised me the most about Toastmasters is the feedback you receive and give each week. I went from never giving feedback to anyone to giving at least two people feedback each week. I've learned different styles and techniques to deliver effective feedback that encourages the other person to keep growing. It's been so fun to keep developing these skills to find that sweet spot of offering the critical feedback the person needs with the active enthusiasm for them to keep trying and pushing on.

Cody and I finally took a much needed vacation after almost two years going without.

We found a great price on flights to Montreal and jumped at the opportunity to see some of Cody's old haunts from when he lived there. We also discovered our new love of outdoor spas! <3

When we booked our flights, we booked them with the hopes that Pop Montreal might be in operations, and we were in luck! Although the festival wasn't in 100% full swing as in previous years, Cody and I still had the opportunity to see a few (amazing) shows. They were our first live shows in over 2 years, it was definitely a pretty emotional experience for me.

We also got to visit Cody's family's beautiful property out in Lanark County, Ontario.

Obligatory self-congratulatory post.

It's officially a wrap! I didn't really mean to plan it out this way, but I've now completed my Louder Than Ten PM course as well as my HR Certificate through SFU.

Feels really good to be done the programs! As I moved through the programs, I realized that what I really wanted to be working on is business operations. Makes sense!

Thankfully, my employers also get it and accepted my proposal to move into a new operations role with the organization (a role that hasn't existed with the org before). I'm now the Operations Manager at The Cultch!

Over this past year, I've been working on my personal and professional growth, but where I repeatedly kept finding myself blocked was on the concept of leadership.

For as long as I can remember, I've had a set, defined image of what being a great leader looks like or means. I built up this idea of a great leader as someone who isn't afraid to stand at the front of a team and takes charge! As an introvert, this concept of what a leader looked like really freaked me out. How could this ever be me?

The topic of leadership came up once again in my Louder Than Ten Project Management course during our module on "People, Skills and Team Building." The focus of this module was on championing our teams and how to unpack limiting beliefs.   As we spoke about our limiting beliefs as a class, I mentioned my discomfort with being in the spotlight, which has translated into my unease with seeking leadership opportunities. (or, at least, what I had perceived as typical leadership roles).

Out of this class module came a personal project. I decided to better understand what others perceived as authentic leadership by interviewing women in leadership roles in my community. I would speak to them about their experiences in leadership and how they arrived where they are today.

I wanted to make sure that I speak with women from within arts & culture and include those from other fields to ensure that I cast a wide net of opinions. I interviewed five professionals from several different sectors -- Human Resources, Project Management, Digital Arts, and Music Management.

The question that I was seeking to understand was if my discomfort with the idea of leading was something unique to me or if others had gone through this hurdle as well.

Each interviewee responded to the questions that resonated with them the most from the list below:

• What are some words of advice that you received from former bosses/mentors/coworkers that have shaped you into the leader you are today?
• What do you consider the most important attributes of successful leaders?
• What's the most important risk you took in your career, and why?
• How do you continue to grow and develop as a leader?
• What are a few resources (i.e. books, podcasts etc.) that have inspired you to be a better leader?*

As expected, everyone had unique perspectives on what they considered essential leadership attributes:

"leadership means dealing with the shit and wearing it."

"a good leader celebrates their own differences as well as those of their team."

"great leaders are those that practice radical candour."

But there were three unanimous attributes that everyone listed – good leaders:

• are empathetic to the needs of others.

• lead through doing.

• know themselves well (have a defined personal brand).

During the class exercise, I concluded that my fear of being in leadership roles was due to my discomfort with being in the spotlight. But what I came away with through these interviews is that I am already displaying characteristics of a good leader. I am already taking on leadership roles -- it's just that I wasn't seeing them through the prescribed stereotypical model that I had built up in my head.

Like many of the women I interviewed, I value collaboration and building trust to build up the confidence of my teammates. I realized that these principles all fall under Servant Leadership, which I've always identified with. I had just always that thought that I had to embody the stereotypical image of a leader first.

It's been almost three months since I bit the bullet and joined NightVision Toastmasters (a "decidedly unstuffy bunch"). It's been a lot of fun so far. The biggest takeaway so far has been the additional skillsets that I'm able to work on every week – it's not just about learning how to speak confidently in front of groups. Despite this being the main reason I joined, I'm excited about the idea of having the chance to work on my active listening and feedback skills each week as well.

This week I had my first opportunity to be the Table Topics Master. The responsibility of the TTM is to create questions and randomly assign speakers – giving folks the chance to practice "off-the-cuff" speaking. The speaker should aim to fill the allotted 2 minutes provided.

This week's Toastmasters' theme was Hanami ("flower viewing") – the traditional Japanese custom of enjoying the transient beauty of flowers. To keep with this theme, I chose questions tied to family traditions and food. It was fun to have the chance to pull from my Anthropology background for once.

Since we currently have our events via Zoom, I took advantage of random name and number generators to add some excitement.

Overall, I'm pleased with how the session went despite some technical elements that I failed to take into account. If I choose to use a random generator next time, I will remember to remove any guest's name for the first spin (the wheel inevitably fell on our guest the first round, which is not great) and include only the names of those with smaller roles the first few rounds.

I loved getting the chance to learn more about our group's family traditions and home life.

The top toot of the week is Freelove Fenner's NEW album (hooray!) – The Punishment Zone.

This week's pick goes to none other than Shame and their newest release Drunk Tank Pink.

“All alone in my home / Yeah I still can’t get to sleep,” chants Steen on the fragmented, angular riffs of ‘March Day’. “I can’t get up / I won’t get up.” As the song reaches its climax, its guitars spiral like a negative thought cycle; chaotic and debilitating. On the lurching Talking Heads-meets-The-Rapture groove of ‘Nigel Hitter’, he’s cycling through tedium (“I can’t see no squares / All I see is circles”), but finding wide-eyed wonder in the smallest chores. “Change the sheets on my bed / I wanna smell fresh linen,” he roars triumphantly, before sinking back into the drudgery of isolation: “Will this day ever end?/ I need a new beginning.”

Rhian Daly - NME

How do you define a good leader? What is your leadership style?

These are a few of the questions that came out of last weeks, "People Skills and Team Building" module, in my PM course with Louder Than Ten.

In class we spoke a lot about limiting beliefs, particularly their impact on us and their ability to hold us back from what we want to achieve.

After a really insightful exercise, I realized that I have a really hard time holding power, or feeling comfortable being in a position of power. This is a particularly tricky one for me as I work towards more leadership roles.

The assignment that came out of this exercise is to interview women in leadership roles to gain insight and learn about their experiences from their journey in becoming a leader. I hope to interview a few women in the arts and culture field and a few from outside my domain to get a well rounded picture.

This project will (hopefully) help me to better articulate the type of leader I am now and the leader I want to grow into.

The questions I'm interested in unpacking are:

• What are some words of advice that you received from former bosses/mentors/coworkers that have shaped you into the leader you are today?

• What do you consider the most important attributes of successful leaders?

• What’s the most important risk you took in your career and why?

• How do you continue to grow and develop as a leader?

• What are a few resources (ie. books, podcasts etc.) that have inspired you to be a better leader?

• What is a key leadership lesson you’ve learned throughout your career?

• What advice do you have for women aiming for leadership positions?

Though we didn't get to see nearly as many live shows as we would have in any other year, we did manage to see quite a few excellent live-streams. We were also so lucky to have some incredible albums come out as well.

In no particular order, these were a few of my favourites  this year:

Sault: UNTITLED (Black is) & UNTITLED (Rise)

Kelly Lee Owens: Inner Song

Against All Logic: 2017-2019

Caribou: Suddenly

Loving: If I Am Only My Thoughts

Yaeji: What We Drew

Backxwash: God Has Nothing to Do with This Leave Him Out of It

Lomelda: Hannah

Julianna Barwick: Healing is a Miracle

Moses Sumney: græ

Lido Pimienta: Miss Columbia

Khotin: Finds You Well

Cindy Lee: What's Tonight to Eternity

Destroyer: Have We Met

Run the Jewels: RTJ4

U.S. Girls: Heavy Light

Adrianne Lenker: songs

Angel Olsen: Whole New Mess

Flung: Shaky but My Hair is Grown

Nap Eyes: Snapshot of a Beginner

It seems like forever ago, but just short of a few months ago, the "Systems Transform" team (a namesake playing on the Transform Cabaret) embarked on our journey to migrate our ad hoc systems to Google Workspace. I'm so happy to say that we have finally closed this chapter of our project!

We're so grateful for the help we received from Object.Work! I doubt this project would have gone as smoothly as it did without their help.

In this year "Systems Transform" successfully onboarded all  staff onto:

• Slack
• Asana
• Gmail and Google Workspace



We moved from using three separate filing systems (Dropbox, Private Google Workspace account, and storage on individual desktops) all into Shared Drives. We moved our email client from private server using Outlook, to Gmail.

It's been such a pleasure to help our team navigate and find a process that works for everyone.

We didn't know it at the time, but I'm so grateful that we brought Slack in when we did (a few months prior to the pandemic) – so our team was up and running when it came time to move to remote work.

I'm looking forward to bringing in the new year and tackling the projects that come our way!

This weeks top pick goes to London's PVA with their new EP Toner.

PVA take cues from 808s and Heartbreak-era Kanye, Kraftwerk, and New York’s ‘No Wave’ scene of the late 1970s. The result is a live show that is unique, energetic, utterly captivating – and continually developing. The culmination of these shows is is PVA’s debut single, “Divine Intervention”. Recorded and released by South London’s Speedy Wunderground, the label that helped shine a light on the scene surrounding bands like Warmduscher, Black Midi, and Black Country, New Road, “Divine Intervention” is a chthonic disco tune, based around chugging synths, anxiety-inducing guitar riffs, and deadpan vocals. Speedy Wunderground’s Pierre Hall describes it as sounding like “Patti Smith fronting Factory Floor”.

Ollie Plumb - Dazed

Toronto's LAL and their new album Meteors Could Come Down.

Meteors Could Come Down is a mercurially transportive project, the signature downtempo and ambient elements of LAL's earlier recordings less pronouncedly articulated, the album's melodies occurring as more spontaneously crafted and possibly scat-inspired. With Meteors Could Come Down, LAL revel in minimalism, finding fresh ways to blend the au naturel qualities of Kazi's voice and Murray's posthumanist soundscapes.

John Amen - Exclaim