EA - About My Job: Staff Support Associate by Phoebe F Freidin

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: About My Job: Staff Support Associate, published by Phoebe F Freidin on September 15, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryI've been working for around a year and a half on the Operations team at Effective Ventures, on the Staff Support team. This has been an incredible rollercoaster of experiences, with wonderful colleagues and many lessons learned. I often reflect on how differently the past few years might have gone if I hadn't taken a chance on a role I wasn't sure I'd be good at. I'm glad I did! It's given me a much broader perspective on how different organisations within EA run, allowed me to meet and support so many kind and impactful people, and given me the space to grow and develop skills I didn't know I had.We are hiring someone to join our Staff Support team for a similar role. If you're interested, please apply here or get in touch with [email protected] if you have questions.We are also hiring for two roles on our US legal team: US General Counsel and US Assistant General Counsel.The JobAs an HR Associate, my role, broadly, has been:To manage the process, administration and bookkeeping of onboarding and offboarding of employees and contractors, ensuring these were smooth and positive for the employees and that they had all the relevant information and supportTo oversee the payroll processes for US and UK employees, incorporating salary changes, bonuses, leave and expensesMiscellaneous systems administration and requests (e.g. Google Workspace, Notion, Slack), responding to HR questions on Slack, staff data reports, verification letters, pension opt-outs.The job wasn't quite what I expected. A few surprises included:The company structureUntil my first day, I thought I would be working at "little CEA", i.e. the current Centre for Effective Altruism, rather than the legal entity, eventually renamed Effective Ventures. In practice, this meant that instead of taking on an HR role for one organisation, I quickly discovered that I would actually be supporting the HR operations for around 150 employees across 11 different EA organisations. Luckily for me, this made the role more interesting, complex and challenging than I had expected.The ownership and responsibilitiesI was pleasantly surprised by how much ownership I was able to take of projects in this role. I was presented with the challenge of creating a workflow to efficiently track and execute the onboarding of around 10 employees per month across the different organisations, each with slightly different system access requirements and onboarding needs. I was managed by the Head of Staff Support, who would give direction, advice and feedback when requested, but otherwise it was empowering to be given the space to create a system from the ground up. The role slowly incorporated more processes, until I was tracking not only the joining experience, but the entire employee (and contractor) life-cycle from first day to last, and the various developments along their journey.A year and a half later, most of the steps that I started off doing manually (creating contracts and modifications, drafting welcome emails, creating calendar events and reminders to managers, etc.) I have now been able to automate using a web of interacting automations on Zapier (a no-code automation software). If you work in operations, I can't recommend Zapier enough.That HR is neither evil nor boringGoing into the role, I knew that there would be a large administrative aspect. I was prepared to seek motivation from the 'multiplier effect' impact alone, and to possibly reach an excitement plateau pretty quickly. But I was wrong on both accounts. As well as finding purpose and value in saving many people a lot of time on work that they would find tedious or time-consuming, I found the work itself satisfying and engagin...