Day in the Life of a Human Resources and Office Administrator

Want to make a big difference at a small organization? As a Human Resources and Office Administrator, you will play a pivotal role in ensuring the overall success and efficiency of our agency. This role is multifaceted - it involves working collaboratively with everyone on the team to ensure their success and happiness, as well as conducting important administrative tasks that will keep our office operating day to day.

It will involve a lot of important functions on your plate at once, so if you are organized and like fast-paced, varied work, you will surely succeed in this role. Sound like something you’re interested in? If so, you’re probably curious about what a day in the life might look like in this role.

Well, if I’m being completely honest … I don’t really know. But that’s only because this is a brand new role for us at Berry Insurance. We have a good idea of all the tasks that we want our Human Resources and Office Administrator to be doing day to day, but the person stepping into this role is really going to be molding their own procedures and paving the way for Berry Insurance’s HR strategy.

With that being said, what I can confidently do is explain to you what we expect a day in the life of this position to look like, and dive deeper into each job responsibility than I can do on a job description.

So let’s get into it!

Provide support to team

As the sole Human Resources professional for our 12-person company, you’ll play a crucial role in fostering a supportive and communicative work environment for the entire team and ensuring that everyone feels heard and valued.

While we tend to be pretty drama-free over here, you’ll serve as an ear to listen for the entire team when issues or frustrations arise. Acting as the bridge between employees and leadership, you'll serve as a trusted point of contact for addressing concerns, questions, and feedback. 

Whether it's resolving interpersonal conflicts, addressing performance issues, or navigating workplace policies, your ability to listen and provide feedback will be essential.

Develop HR policies

As you step into this role, you'll have the opportunity to make a meaningful impact on our organization's growth and success by championing HR policies and practices that empower our team members and drive our mission forward.

This will include seeking feedback from the team to create and update policies that reflect best practices and comply with legal requirements. Whether it's refining our remote work policy or enhancing our diversity and inclusion initiatives, your input will be invaluable in fostering a supportive and equitable workplace.

We believe in investing in our team members' growth and professional development. You'll have the opportunity to organize training sessions, workshops, and other learning opportunities to help employees enhance their skills and reach their full potential. From onboarding new hires to organizing leadership development programs, you'll play a key role in nurturing talent and positivity across the organization.

Administer benefits

As the Human Resources and Office Administrator, you'll oversee our benefits programs, managing annual enrollment and addressing benefit-related employee inquiries. 

Your role will involve coordinating with insurance providers, ensuring smooth administration of benefits, and serving as the primary point of contact for employees regarding their benefits including health and vision insurance, Health Reimbursement Arrangement (HRA), Flexible Spending Account (FSA), group term life insurance, long-term disability, simple IRA, and our PTO program. 

We know benefits can be confusing and a dreaded thing to try to figure out (at least that’s how we all feel about it) so having someone on site to help us all navigate our benefit packages will be a tremendous weight off our shoulders.

Process payroll

Yay, payday! It’s everyone’s favorite day.

Your role will involve meticulously processing payroll to ensure accurate and timely compensation for all team members. From calculating hours worked to managing deductions and tax withholdings, you'll oversee every aspect of the payroll process.

Recruit and onboard

Our agency has grown quite a bit these past few years (hence why we need your role).

As part of your duties, you’ll play a role in nearly every stage of recruiting, including posting job openings and reviewing resumes, conducting interviews and selecting the best candidates. 

Additionally, you'll be an important piece of the onboarding process, ensuring that new team members receive a warm welcome and have all the resources they need to hit the ground running.

Maintain employee records

You’ll also be the keeper of our employee records, ensuring compliance with both state and federal regulations as well as legal requirements regarding confidentiality and data security and our own internal policies .

Your role will involve maintaining accurate and up-to-date records for all employees, including personal information, employment history, performance evaluations, and any relevant documentation.

Participate in team meetings

Like any company, we have meetings. (But don’t worry, they aren’t those types of meetings that could have been an email. They are actually very valuable and generally pretty fun.)

Every other Thursday, we have full-team meetings, where we share wins, go over new marketing content or ideas, talk about the latest book we’re reading as a team, or conduct exercises to help us grow professionally and personally.

We also meet in the lobby every morning for a short stand up meeting where catch up on what’s going on both professionally and personally (let’s be real, it usually turns into non-work-related talk pretty quickly)

Keep office stocked up and effective:

One of the most important parts of your job will be to make sure our office is running like a well-oiled machine in terms of both processes and equipment. 

This will involve frequent and effective communication both internally and externally.

Internally, your input will be invaluable in refining our office processes and workflows. By working closely with management, you’ll identify areas where efficiency can be enhanced and implement solutions to streamline our operations.

You will also have to coordinate our meeting schedules, sending out meeting invitations, scheduling conference spaces, and compiling relevant reports and files to keep discussions focused and productive.

Phones are a very important part of what we do and you will be an important part of managing our phone system by updating phone directories and managing holiday schedules and emergency line rotations.

Similarly, you will also have to keep our internal materials organized, ensuring that all documents are current, including annual updates and postings of employment law notices in our office space.

You’ll often have to communicate outside the organization as well, liaising with external vendors to maintain a clean, safe, and functional office environment. From our landlord, IT vendors, phone and internet vendors, office suppliers, and more, you’ll ensure that our office space remains conducive to productivity and well-being.

Ensure organization is meeting licensing and legal requirements:

As the Human Resources and Office Administrator, you’ll take the lead in ensuring that we meet all necessary licensing and legal obligations, leaving no stone unturned in our commitment to compliance.

You’ll work with town and state officials to ensure that we adhere to all local regulations. This includes completing inventory assessments, filing necessary paperwork for town property, confirming tax filing status with our accountant, renewing town business certificates, and filing state annual reports and workers’ compensation audits. 

You’ll also be responsible for renewing agency licenses and ensuring that our team members fulfill any required continuing education credits for their individual licenses. 

Other general administrative tasks: 

In addition to your core responsibilities, you'll also tackle a variety of general administrative tasks to keep us all running smoothly and efficiently.

This may include tasks such as data entry, budgeting, downloading carrier commission statements, downloading invoices, etc.

Not the most exciting of tasks, but still very important!

Are you our next Human Resources and Office Administrator?

What do you think? Could you picture this being a day in your life? You stuck around for nearly 1,500 words, so that HAS to be a good sign, right?

Like we said, this position is brand new, and has plenty of room for you to mold it and make it your own, but we certainly expect it to be fast-paced, varied, fun, and crucial to our organization. 

We are really excited to get our next teammate up and running in this role, so fingers crossed that it could be you!

If you want to apply to this role, check out our careers page.

If you are curious about what it’s like to work for an insurance agency and wondering if it is right for you, read this article where our team shares their opinion on Benefits of Working for a Small Family-run Insurance Agency.