HR’s Best Chance to Shape a Decision Comes Before There’s a Policy to Defend

When a reorganization or return-to-office policy is announced, HR is often the function that has to explain it, answer questions about it, and absorb the reaction to it. By then, the decision itself belongs to someone else. The opportunity for HR comes earlier, when employees are still saying what isn’t going to work, and leaders can still do something about it.

Briana Beatty, Chief Human Resources Officer at The Wilkinson Firm, has spent about 11 years across people management and HR in retail, hospitality, cloud services, and consulting. She started as a server at a small family-owned restaurant chain expanding out of Georgia and moved into corporate to jump-start its HR department, all while taking HR classes. That background informs how she thinks about getting HR into the conversation early.

“A lot of companies are realizing that relationships run the company. Whether it’s promotions, acquisitions, mergers, whatever the case may be, you have to have some type of connection to get you to that conversation,” Beatty says. For her, those connections are the route into the conversation, built from time spent inside other departments that brings information to her early enough to be worth passing along.

Context comes from the work HR doesn’t do

Beatty pushes for time inside functions that have nothing to do with her own, learning what an IT team handles day to day and how the company actually makes money. In a distribution or logistics setting, that can mean spending time on the floor. In a remote-first company, she looks for other ways to stay visible, through reports and newsletters that circulate beyond HR or events scheduled during working hours.

“If you’re not present and you’re not visible, then it’s going to be hard for you to form that trust,” she says. Trust turns visibility into a source of information, since people tend to raise a problem with someone they already know rather than routing it through a process. That context also gives HR a better read on where strain is building, which matters even more when the manager role itself has been pared down through three decades of cost pressure.

Early feedback changes what gets built

At a cloud services company where she worked, leadership was weighing a return-to-office push after several years in which most of the workforce had been hybrid or fully remote. The straightforward route would have been to settle on a schedule, announce it, and hand HR the job of managing whatever came back. Instead, her team surveyed employees while the policy was still open, asking how comfortable people felt about coming into an office once or twice a month and whether being able to see teammates in real time changed how productive they felt compared with working through a screen. The answers gave leadership a picture of where the plan would meet resistance while the schedule and the rollout were both still adjustable.

“We were able to get some really good feedback about that before that implementation process came out, so we were able to actually fix a lot of those kinks before we got to implementation,” Beatty says. Without that step, as she puts it, the team would have been “just fighting fires” after launch, working through the same objections with a policy already announced and considerably harder to walk back.

Culture and the conditions people work under are moving up the executive agenda more broadly, which is the same shift Beatty is describing at a smaller scale. SHRM’s 2026 CHRO research finds 31% of CHROs naming workplace culture a top priority for the year, up from 15% a year earlier, alongside leadership and manager development at 46%.

Behavior reveals what surveys miss

Beatty uses engagement surveys alongside other signals of how employees feel about the company. One of those signals is who is willing to recommend it. Her referral program pays $500 once a referred hire passes 90 days, and she keeps every submission on a metric dashboard, tracking what comes in against what eventually gets paid. A referral puts an employee’s own recommendation behind the company, which makes the number worth reading alongside a survey score. “One of the biggest key indicators of employee happiness is your referrals. Who better to promote your business than the people who work for the business?” Beatty says.

BambooHR’s 2026 Employee Happiness Report measures a related form of advocacy through employee Net Promoter Score, asking employees how likely they are to recommend their organization as a place to work. It finds that companies scoring in the excellent range lose 46% fewer employees each year than companies with negative scores. Absence data has become another way of reading culture, giving HR a picture of the organization that a scheduled survey wouldn’t return.

AI raises the value of interpretation

Beatty leans on AI for handbook and email templates, and for pulling policy material from a range of sources into something she can adapt. “For some of those more creative, more mundane tasks that don’t have a lot of strategy, just to give you the bones and the framework is something that I’m starting to rely on that’s made my processes a lot smoother,” she says.

The time savings matter because the work that remains depends more heavily on context: knowing how a policy will affect a particular team, what employees are likely to question and what a leader needs to hear before making a decision. AI can produce the draft. The usefulness of the advice still depends on knowing the organization.

None of that changes who signs. Beatty is direct that HR’s authority is advisory, and she thinks treating it as anything else misreads the job. What proximity buys is a chance to be heard while the decision is still open. “We are advisors at heart. Our job is to provide you with the facts of the situation and what our professional recommendation for that is,” Beatty says. “Ultimately that decision is going to lie on that leader, and your job is to make sure that you paint that picture as clearly as possible.”