Thanksgiving in HR: What Are You Grateful For?

Thanksgiving is a time for family, friends, celebration, and reflection. We can get so wrapped up in daily minutiae, we can often forget to really cherish these intangible elements of our lives, and to truly reflect and be grateful.

And it’s not just the big things that we need to remember and appreciate – there are lots of small gifts in our day-to-day routine in our professional lives that we tend to take for granted. In the spirit of the holiday tomorrow, we wanted to take a moment and shout our appreciation from the rooftops (or at least from our laptops) for these small HR lifesavers:

Michael Moon:

• Analytics in HR: The growth and adoption revolution has exploded, and nothing can stop it now. HR analytics help us demonstrate the value we add to the business as a whole – which is great.


• The merger of talent and learning into a single function: streamlining these massive undertakings is no easy task, but it is well worth the effort.


• Middleware: these tools help connect disparate HR systems, enabling them to co-exist peacefully. This collaboration helps us complete our work more quickly and more efficiently – leaving more time for HR blogging!

Zach Lahey:

• Integration: HR tools are now much better at “playing together,” no matter which vendor produced them. Being able to pick and choose the best HR tech solutions for your needs and knowing that they will work harmoniously is a small miracle we all forget to be grateful for.


• Social in HR: the idea of social anything: social media, social learning, social collaboration – can be scary for organizations. Relinquishing any type of control over a process introduces risk, but the benefits of fostering a collaborative, self-serving workforce are tangible and quantifiable.


• Pre-boarding: If you’ve put all of this work and time into finding and hiring the best candidates possible, you want to make sure they stay! Pre-boarding helps smooth the transition into an organization, and helps the employee engage with the company more quickly and successfully.

Erin Cushing

• Twitter: As a newer member of the HCM space, it’s great to have a place where I can consistently find information and learn from the best in the industry!


• Wellness programs: This is more as an employee than an HCM professional, but as a former college athlete, maintaining a healthy lifestyle is tough in the professional world. Organizations that recognize that and empower employees with wellness programs are great gifts – and savvy employers.


• Readers like you!: Without our great community of HR readers, HCM Essentials wouldn’t exist (and I wouldn’t have a job). So I am most grateful to all of you who come here to read, discover, and share with us, and together make HCM a more robust industry!

What are you most grateful for in your professional life this Thanksgiving? Tell us in the comments!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving in HR: What Are You Grateful For?