HR Is Not Your Friend. This Woman Built The Company That Is.

Employees have a complicated relationship with human resources (HR). There is a commonly held belief that “HR is not your friend,” and many employees don’t trust HR to help them navigate workplace issues. “As a recruiter, I’ve also seen employees assume HR has unlimited power,” shared recruitment manager Jalonni Weaver. “The truth is that HR is often balancing the needs of employees, leadership, legal requirements, budgets, and business objectives all at the same time. It’s rarely as simple as choosing one side. That said, I understand why some employees feel distrustful. Not every HR professional leads with empathy, transparency, or consistency and when employees have negative experiences, those stories tend to travel much further than the positive ones.”

Keisha Toussaint is an HR professional with more than a decade of experience. After building systems, leading HR transformations and guiding leaders on workplace culture, performance, and employee relations issues within corporations, she decided to start her own independent HR company, BCC’d HR, to bridge the gaps that often go unaddressed within corporations. “I just feel like I had this spiritual awakening,” Toussaint shared, “where I was just like ‘Keisha, follow what is destined for you. You literally went to grad school for this. This was a passion of yours.’ When I started to fall out of love with [human resources], I’m like, ‘why am I falling out of love with it?’ I was just gonna just step out on faith. I'm quitting my job, I have no backup plan, and I'm just gonna do it. And I was like, I wanna be HR for employees, because I think that's what is needed.”

Toussaint explained how much of the work she’s been doing with clients has involved helping employees navigate issues like Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs), which is a strategy used “to help underperforming employees understand the actions they need to take to succeed in their role and remain in good standing with the company,” according to Indeed. “A lot of [cases I work on] come from PIPs,” Toussaint explained. “When employees are put on a PIP, they’re like, ‘I feel like my manager's out to get me. I'm not really sure what's going on.’ And I'm like, ‘okay, walk me through what's going on.’ And they're like, ‘well, I've been working with my manager, like all of a sudden, there's like a performance issue.’ And I'm like, ‘well, did you sign the PIP?’ And they're like, ‘I was about to, but then I came across your service,’ and I'm like, ‘okay, we're walking through it.’ Nine times out of ten, people don't understand that they have all the rights to rebut [a PIP]. And a lot of the times, when someone's put on a PIP, you only get the manager side and not the employee.”

“Another common case I’ve been working on is severances, with all the layoffs and stuff that's been happening,” Toussaint shared. “So, severance has been a big thing where I'm just like, ‘do not sign the first set of severance.’ That's, like, the lowest blow that they can give you. There was one client I had where she had a day left to sign [her severance]. And I'm like, ‘you know, you can ask for an extension, right?’ And she's like, ‘I didn't know that.’ I said, ‘the company is giving you the severance because they want you to sign away all your rights. You can never sue them.’ I was like, ‘ask for additional time,’ and we ended up negotiating 20K extra in severance for her, but had she not come to me, she would have just signed.”

Another type of issue Toussaint has helped clients with is salary negotiations. “There are also some cases I have where people are getting job offers and they want to negotiate their salary, but they don’t know what to negotiate. That's probably one of my favorite ones, because people don't think that they can negotiate. You can literally negotiate anything. I've worked with executives where they were able to negotiate annual round trips to Caribbean islands.”

Toussaint also shared how the DEI rollbacks have impacted employees from an HR perspective. “Now that DEI has been like eliminated from organizations, it has just amplified people being publicly racist. Employees are not being seen; there’s programming that doesn't benefit them anymore. Employees of color feel like there's no safety net,” Toussaint explained. “Budgets have been cut, people are feeling less confident in the workplace, they're feeling a lot more scared of what's next.”

“Now stats like DEI don’t even matter anymore,” Toussaint explained. “That was something that was big for me because it was important to hire people of color, specifically Black employees, but now it was just like, ‘oh, they're not really a culture fit.’ And I'm like, what does that even mean? You're hearing the word culture fit again, and I'm like, ‘wow, we're getting back to this space again.’ So, it's really disheartening to see that.”

“If you're going to go to HR,” Toussaint indicated, “you need to go with a strategy. If you don't go to HR, if you wanted to sue the company, you can't. You give the company an opportunity to fix the situation. If you're going to go to HR, I know how to speak to HR language from top to bottom. I know it very, very well. I'm an expert in this. People are like, well, I want my own independent HR. I want someone who can tell me what my company isn't telling me and that’s why BCC’d HR exists.”