Robin Schooling

What We Leave Behind

It takes a surprisingly small container to hold what a person accumulates over nineteen years at a job.

A single copy paper box will generally do it, and into that box goes the mug from a 2009 charity golf scramble, the gray cardigan that lived on the back of the desk chair since the day the building’s HVAC system was upgraded, and a collapsible umbrella. Also tossed into the box are a bottle of Tums with four left in it, 3 phone chargers, and the framed photograph of a boat that most people walking past assumed belonged to the inhabitant of the cubicle and did not.

The box, once packed, then waits – under a desk, on a credenza, or in the corner of the supply room. It waits until the owner carries it out to his car on his last day or, if he has already been ‘exited’ through no desire of his own, until somebody comes to collect it. (And, if nobody comes to collect it within 90 days or so, it ends up being dumped unceremoniously in the dumpster at the back end of the parking lot).

It’s the visible residue of employment, and it’s generated in every workplace. There are numerous desk plants that have outlived each successive person assigned to water them and drawers full of individually wrapped hard candies and Taco Bell hot sauce packets. Facilities, or sometimes HR, has amassed lots of experience clearing these things out.

Those artifacts, however, are only the surface layer.

Out of the Box

Because the same man from accounting whose windbreaker still hangs in the department closet also left behind the month-end close checklist he built in 2011 during a software conversion. It’s been reformatted twice since then and his initials have long since been scrubbed out of the footer by someone tidying up the template.

Not a single soul on the team could tell you where it came from (or that it came from anywhere at all), since it merely has the type of organizational immortality granted to any process that works well enough so that no one even thinks to question its origins.

He left a joke behind too; one about the fax machine on the third floor that was not especially funny to begin with and that fifteen years of retelling had sanded down the call and response of the punch line into a corporate liturgical response.

What Lies Beneath

Organizations are layered this way though, and once you notice the layers you find them everywhere.

The company logo was designed by a graphic designer in the marketing department who left in 2014 and now does something entirely unrelated in a different city, and yet her instinct about that specific shade of blue survives on every business card, at every trade show booth, and in every email signature.

The file naming convention that governs the shared drive belongs to an operations manager whose name has dropped out of circulation entirely – even though her system has outlived two migrations and a merger.

And the reason the leadership team convenes at 8:15 AM rather than 8 AM goes back to one executive’s commute from the other side of the river. An executive who retired in 2021 and whose traffic patterns continue to shape the calendars of people who never met him.

We tend to discuss legacy inside organizations as a somewhat deliberate exercise including succession planning, leadership development, and the orderly transfer of institutional knowledge from one generation to the next. But the inheritance that shapes the daily texture of a workplace is also there. These are the things that are procedural, linguistic, aesthetic, and largely accidental – things like a spreadsheet formula, a shorthand phrase for a customer archetype, and the particular sequence in which we route approvals because that’s how Denise preferred them – and Denise has been gone since the second Obama administration.

Knowledge management systems and process improvement initiatives will capture and refine the checklists; and do a reasonable and much needed job of helping folks fix broken processes and connect the disconnected systems. But nothing has ever been built that can capture the essence of the humans that have populated the building, created the processes and infused their personalities along the way. The people whose distinctive temperaments and idiosyncrasies have melted into the walls.

Eventually the box gets carried out to a car in the parking lot. Everything else stays exactly where it landed – sediment now – waiting for someone new to dig down far enough to notice it’s there at all.

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When the AI Notetaker Joins Your Meeting

I joined a meeting the other day and, for a moment, it was just me and the notetaker.

Not for the whole thirty minutes – five other people eventually arrived, each with an apology about a call that ran long – but for the first four minutes it was just the two of us. Me and the notetaker. Naturally, I found myself doing the thing you do when you’re alone with someone that’s paying such close attention. I said good morning, sat up a little straighter, and maintained eye contact with, well, no one…

The notetaker sat there in the participant list with its small icon and its parenthetical (Recording) fully present and entirely ready. I thought he was being a bit judgy and faintly reproachful – like that guy I used to work with who always did the pre-work/pre-read before any meeting.

Then the others showed up and the meeting was par for the course: nine people invited, six who came, and four cameras on. During a stretch around minute nine the conversation drifted into a story about a former co-worker we all despised so we shared some hearty guffaws. Then, at about minute twenty-one, Troy and Selena talked over each other, stopped, and then never returned to their respective points. Underneath all of it ran the ordinary current of a working meeting as half the people present were doing something else with most of their attention. Everyone knew this and nobody minded.

The transcript, of course, captured none of that.

Clean, Attributed and Wrong

What the AI transcripts capture in these sorts of meetings is nine thousand words of clean, attributed, evenly weighted discourse in which every participant is fully present, fully engaged, and speaking with equal deliberateness. It reads the way a court reporter’s record of a poker game would read: every bet accurately logged and not a single facial expression described.

Sarcasm arrives in the document as sincerity, jokes are preserved as commitments, and the lengthy silence after somebody asks about the potential for layoffs – the single most informative event of the hour! – appears in the file as nothing at all.

Silence, extraordinarily powerful yet absent a voice that our notetaker can turn into notes, loses all meaning.

Then the summary lands, and the summary is its own genre. There are Key Discussion Points, written in a register of pleasant executive neutrality that not a single soul in the meeting would have used. There are Decisions, a generous descriptor, since a decision requires that somebody decide, and what happened was that a senior person said she thought the team was aligned and nobody objected quickly enough.

And there are Action Items which are entirely their own form of fiction. The notetaker has taken someone’s offhand comment – “I can probably take a look at that” – and converted it into a task with an owner, a priority level and a due date.

Nobody Reads the Transcript

None of that concerns me really; these notetakers are a timesaver and an invaluable assistant when folks can’t make a meeting. They’re certainly much more reliable than the person who used to capture “meeting minutes” on the back of a paper agenda.

What concerns me is that the summary becomes the record.

Obviously, nobody reads a nine-thousand-word transcript. And almost nobody opens the recording. So what circulates is the summary. And then, let’s imagine it’s a project or initiative that has regular meetings over months and months and months – what ultimately begins to circulate is a summary of the summaries. All assembled from a shared folder and transcribed and interpreted by a “notetaker.”

Therefore, the institutional memory of what your organization decided in the second quarter now sits three generations of abstraction away from anyone’s specific and human recollection. And every one of those generations was produced by a system that cannot distinguish between a person making a commitment (“I’ll do it!”) and a person being polite (“I can probably take a look at that”).

Understanding that distinction is part of our jobs…isn’t it?

Mr. DeMille, I’m Ready for My Close-Up

So then, I got to wondering, because they know the record will exist – in perpetuity – won’t some people merely begin performing for the notetaker? Maybe somebody will say, a little more loudly than the moment requires, that they want to be clear they raised the timeline concern. Now that is a sentence addressed to no one in the meeting but to everyone in the future.

So the tone begins to shift a few degrees toward “on-the-record;” the way it shifts when the defendant’s attorney walks into the room on Law & Order. Suddenly, the best parts of a meeting – the loose thinking, the half-formed ideas, or the nonsensical brainstorming that might turn into something super cool – will cease to happen because the notetaker is there preserving every single utterance.

It’s the Hawthorne Effect in real life; the disturbance of a system by the act of observation. Now embedded in the Weekly Sync of the Acme Corporation’s Operations Team.

And another thing that gives me pause is that showing up becomes optional in ways it never quite was before. The person who would once have accepted now freely declines because she figures she can catch up later. Invitations expand because that becomes the “mailing list” with one click while attendance and participation erode because it costs less to skip. The notetaker’s summary, after all, becomes the primary version of the event for most of the people it concerns.

The meeting has thusly been converted, without anyone deciding to convert it, from something a group of people did together … into a document a machine produced about them.

Dancing with Myself

Which brings me back to a story I keep hearing from people who swear it happened to them: the recurring invite that ran its full half hour with exactly one participant present, that participant being the notetaker. So, the notetaker transcribed the silence and produced a summary anyway. Two lines (start time/end time) distributed via email to eleven people – none of whom replied.

I’m not arguing for less technology or even fewer notetakers; I would rather have today’s artifacts than the versions from the past when we reconstructed meeting minutes out of memory and self-interest.

But we do have to decide, deliberately, which meetings exist to produce a record, and which exist to produce a judgment. And then we need to staff them accordingly, because if the machine is going to memorialize what was said … someone who was there still must memorialize what was meant.

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Employee Relations is the Whole Ball Game Now

I was perusing the agenda for an upcoming HR conference and noticed something entirely typical. The ballroom gets the AI keynote. The large breakout rooms get talent strategy, skills architecture, and something with “future of” in the title. And then, somewhere down the hall past the coffee station, in a room that will hold forty chairs, there will be a session on conducting workplace investigations. Presented by an employment attorney, it will be attended by the practitioner looking for some last-minute tips because they have a live matter on their desk and need something they can use on Monday.

That room, not the ballroom, is where the profession’s next decade is really being decided – although almost nobody in the building thinks that’s the case. But there’s a rule in play here that has nothing to do with HR: what fills the seats and what wins the games are rarely the same investment.

Just take a look at professional (the American kind) football; no NFL franchise has ever sold a season ticket package on the strength of its offensive line. Who brings in the fans? The star tight end perhaps or the running back destined for the Hall of Fame certainly have their followers. Yet, while the marquee name quarterback gets the folks in the seats, it’s the offensive line that determines whether he’s even still standing upright in December.

And every general manager who has ever decided to skimp up front in order to spend big on skill positions eventually learns this in the same expensive, publicly humiliating way. The glamour and the outcome sit in entirely different places on that football roster – which becomes a genuine problem when the budget got approved on the basis of what looked impressive and flashy in the scouting films.

What’s Left When the Easy Yards Are Gone

I’ve argued that AI functions as a diagnostic for HR rather than a disruption of it, and that the transactional layer – the routing, the processing, the summarizing, the answering of questions that have answers – is heading to the machines regardless of how any of us feel about it. That’s fine; it’s overdue, even. But we ought to be precise about what remains in the pile once the routine work has been carted off, because the profession has been far too vague on that point.

What remains is judgment applied to people, power, and consequence. And in the operating reality of most HR departments, a considerable share of that judgment lives in employee relations: the investigation into the manager whose team keeps turning over, the accommodation request that fits no template anyone has drafted, the conflict between two high performers that three layers of leadership have been carefully declining to notice for eight months, and the termination decision that must be defensible not merely in a legal filing but in the version the employee’s colleagues will tell one another in the parking lot afterward.

None of that gets handed to a piece of tech or some AI model; not because the technology lacks sophistication, but because the work consists of weighing contested accounts from people who each believe themselves, reading a room that doesn’t want to be read, and then owning a decision that alters someone’s livelihood. That is a human being in a small conference room with a legal pad and a great deal of discomfort. It always was.

And it always will be.

The Bad Rap and the Better Argument

Years ago I wrote that employee relations has carried an undeserved bad rap – that it’s the discipline nobody enters HR hoping to practice, saddled with a vocabulary of enforce, investigate, and grievance while recruiting gets the flash and compensation gets the incentive design. That was true then and it’s true now; what’s changed is the stakes attached to it.

Because competent ER work is invisible by design. A well-run investigation produces a documented file, a defensible decision, and a workplace where the thing quietly stops happening; it’s an outcome with no dashboard, no percentage improvement, and no compelling narrative for a PowerPoint presentation. The failures, by contrast, are extraordinarily visible; they arrive as a demand letter, a viral Facebook post, a jury verdict, or a five-year pattern that a plaintiff’s attorney assembles into a story your general counsel reads aloud to the executive team in a tone that nobody enjoys.

So let me say plainly what doesn’t get said often enough: the practitioners doing this work are carrying a genuinely difficult load, usually with grace, usually without recognition, and usually while absorbing the emotional weight of everyone else’s worst week. They sit with people on the hardest days of those people’s working lives.

That’s real and consequential HR work, and it deserves considerably more respect than the profession has historically extended to it.

Film Study

Here’s where the strong ER programs distinguish themselves, and where technology becomes genuinely useful rather than merely purchased.

A good coaching staff doesn’t wait until Sunday to discover a tendency; they spend the week in the film room, watching for the patterns – the guard who tips the run or the coverage that breaks down on third and long. Advance scouting exists precisely because problems announce themselves well before they cost you a game – provided somebody is watching closely enough to notice.

Employee relations generates exactly that kind of footage; complaints cluster by department, by manager, by shift, or in the six months following a reorganization. Accommodation requests spike in functions where the workload assumptions stopped being realistic two years ago. Investigations recur in the same corner of the business with different names attached. All of that is signal, sitting in a case management system, waiting for someone to treat it as intelligence rather than as a filing obligation.

This is where the tools earn their keep. Pattern detection across thousands of cases, thematic analysis, trend identification across time and business unit – machines are great at that (considerably better than a human reviewing files by hand at 11 PM). The ER professional who walks into an operations review and says “we have three separate matters in your Southeast region in ninety days, they share a root cause, and here is what I’d recommend before this becomes something none of us can fix” is doing strategic HR work of the highest order. That practitioner isn’t the enforcer of policy; they’re the scout who saw it coming.

The judgment stays human even as the pattern-finding gets help. That’s the trade the technology makes available … and the organizations getting it right are pulling meaningfully ahead.

The Position We Refuse to Draft For

Now consider how the profession invests in this. Employee relations is, in most organizations, where you place the person who is unflappable and doesn’t say much. There’s rarely a defined career path into it and almost never one out of it. The development budget flows to the HRIS implementation, the certifications, and the leadership cohort, while the ER specialist receives a webinar on recent agency guidance plus a standing invitation to call outside counsel when matters turn sticky. The role sits several layers down the org chart, reports through operations, and appears on precisely zero slides in the CHRO’s strategy slide deck.

We have, in other words, spent years drafting quarterbacks and hoping the line would hold.

I’ve written before about pressure-testing your HR function – asking where you’re over-resourced in the wrong places and under-resourced where it counts. That question has a sharper answer in 2026 than it did when I first posed it. When throughput disappears and the advisory work is claimed by whoever can credibly claim it, what remains as unambiguously, defensibly HR’s is the hard human stuff: the consequential decisions about people, carrying legal weight and moral weight at once, which cannot be shipped to a vendor.

The function’s credibility, then, comes to rest on the competence of the practitioners the profession has invested in least; people who have perhaps been hired for temperament rather than developed for skill, kept out of the succession plan, and never quite included in the conversation about where any of this is headed.

You can build a line. It requires drafting for it, paying for it, and enduring a season or two in which the investment shows up in nothing the fans care about.

What you cannot do is discover in week 14 that you needed a strong line all along.

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Send in the Clowns: HR’s Problem with Conference Themes

Somewhere right now, a volunteer conference committee is deciding between “HR Under the Big Top” and “Lights, Camera, HR!” for their HR professional association’s annual event. This means there will either be a logo with a circus tent or a logo with a film reel and a klieg light. There may be costumes. Someone will suggest a photo booth with feather boas and crazy hats, and everyone will agree this is a wonderful idea.

I would like to gently ask: what are we doing?

Because as far as I can tell, HR is the only profession that does this. Your local CPA society is not hosting “Under the Sea with the Accountants.” The bar association has never once themed its annual meeting as “Let’s Luau!” Even the marketing and PR associations — the people who theme things for a living, the folks you’d absolutely expect to show up in matching t-shirts with a tagline — manage to hold professional conferences that are simply called professional conferences. They gather, they learn, they network, and they go home without anyone having dressed as a pirate.

But SHRM chapters and state councils? They simply cannot resist. Year after year, event after event, they wrap serious professional development in carnival packaging, as though a full day of sessions on compliance, compensation strategy, and workforce planning cannot possibly be endured unless it arrives dressed as Hollywood, Vegas, the Roaring Twenties, or a superhero universe.

What, I keep wondering, is wrong with “The [Your City Here] HR Association Annual Conference”? It’s clear. It’s professional. It tells attendees — and, more importantly, tells the executives approving their registration fees — exactly what this is: an industry association gathering for the purpose of professional education. That’s a brand. A perfectly respectable one, in fact, and one that every other profession seems content to use.

The Infantilization Problem

Here’s my deeper concern, and it goes beyond aesthetic taste (though my aesthetic objections are considerable). The themes infantilize us.

When we package our professional development in dress-up-day wrapping, we signal — to ourselves and to everyone watching — that the content alone isn’t enough. That HR practitioners need to be coaxed into learning the way toddlers are coaxed into eating vegetables: hide it inside something fun. Other professions assume their members will show up for substance because the substance matters. We apparently assume our members need a costume contest.

And there’s a second, thornier layer to this. HR remains a female-dominated profession, and it has spent decades fighting the perception that it’s the corporate equivalent of the social committee — the department that plans the potlucks, orders the retirement cakes, and decorates for the holiday party. That stereotype is unfair, tired, and has done measurable damage to HR’s organizational standing and reputation. So when our own professional associations voluntarily lean into it — and when the most visible public artifact of our professional community is a conference that looks like a themed bridal shower — we’re doing our critics’ work for them. We’re confirming, in glitter and balloon arches, exactly what they already suspected: that HR is a profession run by people who would rather be event planners.

Now let me say this loudly — I want to be perfectly clear that the individuals on these committees are usually volunteers giving their time, and the impulse comes from a generous place — a desire to make events welcoming and memorable. I don’t doubt the intent; I doubt the calculus. Because “memorable” and “credible” are not the same.

The Spectacle Becomes a Pattern

I wrote recently about SHRM’s long courtship of celebrity keynotes and what it reveals: a profession seeking external validation because it isn’t quite sure it believes in its own substance. The themed conferences are the same insecurity at local scale; big SHRM chases Oprah while chapters and state councils chase a Party City line of credit. Both are bets that the packaging will carry what, or so it’s feared, the content cannot.

But the content can carry it. The work HR does — navigating AI transformation, rebuilding trust in fractured workplaces, advising leaders through genuinely hard decisions — is substantive enough to fill a conference agenda without a single sequin. And the practitioners doing that work deserve professional gatherings that treat them like the professionals they are.

Attorneys convene. Accountants convene. Engineers convene. But HR professionals, somehow, get a Wild West-themed party with coffee service, breakout sessions and bandanas in the swag bags.

HR’s most well-worn cliché is “we want a seat at the table.” Perhaps we could start by not showing up to our own events in a costume.

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