So You’re Suddenly HR Now

Over the past few months, the three of us have been sitting with a painful truth: things are very hard right now. We’re seeing it across all the sectors we work with: food systems, climate, economic development, health care, human rights - you name it. As of this publishing date, it might get even harder if 501c3 status for environmental organizations is also at stake.

We’re seeing a specific kind of fatigue, the kind that sets in when success no longer feels like thriving. For many of the people we serve, it feels more like plugging holes in a dam with your fingers. We’ve been sitting on zoom with the COOs who are writing the furlough announcement for their next team meeting; with the CEOs who are looking into fundraising stop-gaps to prevent layoffs as a result of the federal funding freezes; with teams who are re-writing their websites and federal grant proposals to protect the communities they love while also protecting the funding sources.

This is a time of collapse and change. We are in a collective season of loss—of certainty, of funding, of protection. There’s fear. There’s grief. And it hurts; especially for the smallest organizations (those with fewer than 50 people) who are closest to the people they serve. You are the ones showing up every day, trying to keep people safe, connected, and intact.

So before anything else, we want to say: thank you. Thank you for holding so much. Thank you for showing up through exhaustion, confusion, and complexity. Thank you for keeping your teams and communities stitched together, one act of care at a time.

At Soil and Shadow, we offer fractional People Operations and HR support for organizations like yours. And one pattern we’ve seen emerging is this: as teams contract, consolidate, or simply freeze hiring to stay solvent, someone internal ends up holding HR and People Ops. Sometimes it’s a new hire. Sometimes it’s an operations lead or program manager who never got formal training. Other times it’s someone who's been doing this work for a while but needs a new level of clarity and sophistication to meet this moment.

This article is for you.

We’ve written it to offer context, calm, and confidence, drawn from the real patterns we’re seeing with small teams like yours. It won’t solve everything, but it will give you something to hold onto: a framework, a bit of orientation, and the knowledge that you’re not alone.

While the terms “HR” and “People Operations” often get used interchangeably, they hold distinct, complementary roles within a healthy organization. Understanding the difference (especially for small teams!) can help you decide where to focus your energy when capacity is stretched.

Think of HR as the roots of your organization. It holds the structural systems: policies, compliance, documentation, hiring practices, and benefits. HR is what anchors your work legally and administratively. It ensures your team is protected and your operations are sound. It’s where you set boundaries and build the frameworks that hold people safely and clearly.

People Operations, on the other hand, is more like the canopy. It supports growth, culture, morale, engagement (everything that helps people not just function, but flourish together). While HR asks “What are the rules, and are we following them?” People Ops asks “How do we build trust and alignment, so we can thrive together here?”

Within HR and People Operations, there’s a series of functions that cover the entire employee experience, from recruitment to offboarding. Those include:

Our full comparison table includes the contribution of each function to high performance and wellbeing, the risks if poorly implemented, and real-life experience from us on how to engage them. If you’d like a copy, reach out to us and we’re happy to share (it’ll likely be included in a future article!)

Now that we’ve laid out the landscape of HR and People Operations, the natural next question is: How do I prioritize in these challenging times? Because let’s be honest: looking at the full scope of responsibility can feel overwhelming, especially when your team is already stretched thin.

Here’s the good news: you don’t need to tackle everything at once. In fact, during periods of contraction or uncertainty, it’s often more effective to pare things down. Focus on the few areas that hold the most leverage: the ones that prevent unnecessary tension, protect trust, and help your culture stay intact even under pressure. These are the foundational elements that make the difference between a team just surviving and a team staying grounded through change.

Many small teams handle performance informally - and in some cases, that works. But when stress is high, the usual rhythm can fall apart. Miscommunication increases. Implicit bias sneaks in. Expectations get blurry. Feedback, if it happens at all, tends to arrive too late, after trust has already taken a hit.

This is especially important for social impact teams, where diversity and inter-disciplinary collaboration are core to the work culture. While intentional differentiation fuels creativity and innovation, it also creates natural friction. Navigating that friction well requires emotional generosity, comfort with nuance, and consistent trust-building. But when stress goes up, those capacities often shrink.

That’s why simple, steady feedback systems matter. They protect your culture from unraveling. Even if longer 1:1s aren’t possible right now, hold space for 15-minute weekly check-ins. Use a quick retrospective format—what worked, what didn’t, and what you’d shift next time. And make it easy to document those conversations in your project management tools, so expectations stay clear.

We’ve seen too many teams lately lose their feedback muscle, then lose alignment. Most interpersonal conflicts don’t start with malice. They start with missed signals, unspoken or unaddressed assumptions, and drifting priorities. Feedback is your first line of prevention, and your best chance to keep trust intact when the pace picks up.

We’ve facilitated more mediations in the last few months than we did through most of last year. And it’s not because people are doing anything wrong, it’s because many teams and staff members are in a tender, volatile time. People are maxed out. Emotions are close to the surface. Change is constant. And most employee handbooks don’t account for the everyday tensions that arise under those conditions.

What helps is having a simple, proactive process in place. We recommend a one-page guide. Not a legal document, just a clear and accessible reference. It should outline how your team approaches tension: who helps facilitate, what steps to take, and the norms you want to uphold when things get hard. This kind of clarity makes people feel safer speaking up in the first place.

Normalize conflict. It’s not failure; it’s a feature of working in a dynamic, diverse team. And it’s navigable, especially when you have tools. We often turn to behavioral science from John and Julie Gottman to support our clients. Their research, while rooted in personal relationships, translates beautifully to professional ones. Three principles we return to often:

• Stay aware of the “Four Horsemen” of destructive conflict—criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt—and gently shift when you see them.

• Aim for a “magic ratio” of five positive interactions for every negative one. That ratio helps nervous systems stay regulated.

• If you feel yourself getting flooded (your nervous system goes into “fight or flight”, you notice that you’re having trouble staying regulated, etc). Offer space. Build in recovery before re-engaging.

Supporting healthy conflict preserves dignity, clarity, and forward motion for everyone involved.

Most small teams aren’t able to pay top-of-market salaries. It’s the reality of working in social entreprenuership. But when stress increases it’s easy for this status-quo to start feeling personal, especially for team members with less institutional power. That erosion of trust doesn’t usually show up all at once. It builds slowly, and it can undermine even the strongest cultures if left unaddressed.

If raises aren’t possible, focus on transparency. Talk openly with your team about how compensation decisions are made, what your current constraints are, and how you’re showing care in other ways. Offering flexible hours, transportation support, or wellness stipends may not solve everything, but they signal thoughtfulness. More importantly, they affirm that you see the whole person.

Above all, don’t go silent. When leaders name what’s real and stay in relationship through financial strain, people feel seen. When they’re left to guess, assumptions rush in and trust erodes.

When facing high-stakes situations (such as rising tensions, potential bias, or organizational misalignment) neutrality matters as much as technical skill. In these moments, involving a trusted outside consultant can be less about outsourcing and more about strategically protecting your team’s health, cohesion, and outcomes.

The right question isn’t “Should we outsource?” but rather, “Where are we experiencing dissonance, and would an external perspective help us navigate it with greater clarity and care?”

Targeted outside support can often prevent larger costs later: teams that invest early in the right intervention avoid greater expenses related to staff turnover, misalignment, burnout, or even legal risks. In one example, a $10,000 investment in facilitation and conflict management saved a small organization an estimated $50,000 in subsequent recovery costs.

While newer tools like Large Language Models (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude) are becoming useful for drafting documents, summarizing information, and supporting workflow during staffing shortages, they have clear limits (but please - use them for these things, it helps!). No AI system can replace the nuance required for handling conflict, emotional complexity, or human relationships. Technology can assist in managing tasks, but it cannot substitute for the trust-building and practiced nervous-system awareness during moments of organizational strain. (Our team is hard at work experimenting with the best ways to use LLMs to support small teams, so it’s on our mind!)

Investing wisely means identifying where external support will most effectively help your organization regain alignment, trust, and momentum. The following areas often warrant consideration for outside expertise.

Anytime you’re writing or codifying something - policies, performance management structures, compensation bands, benefits - it’s worth asking: Are we too close to this to see clearly? These documents shape how power is distributed, how equity is upheld, and how trust is built (or broken) across the organization.

If you’re getting internal pushback on policies that feel outdated, inconsistent, or biased (or you’re noticing tension spike when new documentation is rolled out) it’s a sign to bring in external eyes. A few hours with a consultant can surface misalignments you may not even know are there and help you course-correct before those frictions grow.

Take compensation as an example. We recently supported a team navigating pay equity concerns. Their internal HR lead was thoughtful and competent, but didn’t have the bandwidth (or neutrality) to guide a review process that felt fair to everyone. Compensation strategy is evolving quickly, especially for small, purpose-driven orgs. Doing it well requires both technical skill and relational sensitivity. Outside support helps hold both.

This second category includes areas like performance management, learning and development, employee experience, workplace culture, and inclusion. Technically, these can be handled in-house. But when team dynamics get heavy (or when structures no longer match the lived reality) bringing in support can provide a needed reset.

Sometimes, it’s about redesigning what already exists. We often help teams fine-tune their project management systems so that weekly check-ins feed directly into quarterly and annual reviews. We make sure the feedback flows both ways, and that inclusion is built into every layer, from meeting templates to recognition rituals. The goal isn’t perfection. It’s alignment. Done well, performance systems reduce bias, decentralize accountability, and bring clarity across the team.

But if you’re designing under pressure, it can be hard to know what matters most, or where your system is unintentionally reinforcing inequity. That’s where experienced outside support helps you see the full picture.

Finally, if you’re going to invest in training this year, make it this: conflict navigation, feedback (giving, receiving, and integrating), and recognizing bias. We’ve found that these are foundational relational skills that ripple into every other part of your organizational culture. And they matter even more when your team is small, emotionally invested, and working across differences.

You don’t need a multi-day retreat to make an impact. Even a 90-minute lunch-and-learn can give your team shared language and tools that carry forward. But if you can gather in person (even just for a day!) do it. Facilitated time together creates space for reset, repair, and reconnection. Especially canceled offsites or deferred gatherings (which we’re seeing a lot of this year), these moments of intentional culture care are often the difference between slow attrition and renewed momentum.

Spending well means choosing investments that support your people in staying connected, clear, and whole, especially in hard seasons.

Let’s return to where we began. Thank you.

The emotional labor of holding People Operations and HR, especially when it’s just one piece of your already full plate, is no small thing. So much of this work happens behind the scenes. Coaching someone through a hard conversation, updating policies late at night, tracking feedback loops in your head even when you’re off the clock. Our dominant culture rarely acknowledges the toll: the physiological cost of presence, the decision fatigue, the quiet vigilance it takes to keep people connected and cared for.

We see you.

And more importantly, we want you to remember: you are not doing this in isolation. There are resources, there is support, and there are people (like us!) who’ve chosen this work because we believe that care is culture and infrastructure is a form of love. But beyond tools and frameworks, what sustains this work is something even more elemental: connection.

One of the gifts of working on a small team in the social impact space is the way we stay human, even inside the hardest seasons. We remember how to laugh in the middle of grief. We create meaning when everything feels uncertain. And we build relationships rich in depth and humor and heart, even when time is scarce and funding is tight. That is the work.

And if the weight gets too heavy, reach out. We’re here. There are others like us as well, fractional People Ops and HR practitioners who know this terrain and can walk alongside you, not just as consultants, but as collaborators in care.