Hard HR Skills Aren’t Hard To Come By: A One-on-One Interview with Lisa Glenn Nobles at Journeyage

When I think about working in HR, a vision of relationship-building comes naturally to me. I can see myself shaking hands with employees, coaching them on their presentations and goals, planning joyful events during weekly lunches, and providing conflict resolution between teams. 

However, whenever I think about the other work that comes along in the HR field, I get a little bit intimidated. The number skills. The finance skills?? The TECH skills??? Yeah, you’ve lost me. 

But I want to learn these skills! Being able to control the team operations while offering support for employees is what makes an HR superstar. And as I spoke with Lisa Glenn Nobles, I knew I had found that superstar.

Lisa is the Operations Navigator at Journeyage, a company that provides remote, personalized onboarding information for companies to offer their employees when they are hired. Rather than shadowing your supervisor on your first day and trying to retain all of the information, Journeyage develops personalization experiences that make the training and onboarding process about you, whether that be subtly mentioning your favorite food, your name, familiar environments, specific work duties, etc. The software is extremely customizable and its mission is to make work transformative and fun! 

As the Operations Navigator, Lisa takes care of everything at the company beyond sales, customer service, or coding. Lisa is the backbone of Journeyage, handling the company’s administrative work, HR functions, and her favorite part, culture building. 

Lisa explained that the most enjoyable parts of her work were centered around the people. She rattled off a list of her favorite things

• Coaching managers

• Encouraging confidence and conversations with employees

• Building a check-in service for employees and their managers in an online work environment

• Hosting weekly lunch and learns

• Playing Kahoot with employees and bonding together

• Building a Slack channel for the company to shout-out employees when they are exemplifying any of Journeyage’s 16 values

and so on. Her culture building work is incredibly people-focused, and so important, as Lisa says, since “culture is the aggregate of behaviors of the entire company.”

As Lisa explained this side of her job, I became increasingly excited about the possibility of having a career that centers around providing joy and support for others. That is truly where my passion lies and it was comforting to hear that this work exists. But, like any good investigative HR blogger, I had to ask Lisa about the other side of the work to gain some insight on how “hard skills,” those tech and finance skills, work with the culture side of the business.

And insight she gave! Lisa said to me, “Culture building and hard skills work together. One doesn’t work without the other.” 

While Lisa did not start her job with those HR-specific hard skills, either, she soon realized the importance of gaining strength in both areas to best support her company. 

I’m talking a lot about these “hard skills.” But what are they, anyway?

1. The dreaded… Financial skills.

Look. I might be a little bit biased because I only ever took one financial accounting class in college and hated every second of it, but I’m a little afraid of numbers. I was taught at such a young age that I could be “Math/Science smart,” or “English/History smart.” Guess which one came more easily to me.

Lisa explained that I can have both and that gaining these financial skills will be invaluable for building culture and relationships at any company. When Lisa began her job at Journeyage, the CEO told her that she had to learn the budget and payroll on an intimate level in order to better understand all functions of the business. This was a challenge for Lisa, since like me, she did not have a strong background in finance coming from her past experiences in education and ed tech. These were skills she had to learn on the job at Journeyage, but since Lisa cares so much about the company and her employees, this process felt meaningful, just as much as the culture-connecting work. 

Lisa shared (and this stuck with me) that having strength in your financial capabilities builds trustworthiness between you and your employees just as much as planning culture-building initiatives. When employees see that they are being paid on time and the right amount due to Lisa’s meticulousness on the budget and payroll, they feel even more loyalty and connection to the company.

2. Excel.

Ah yes, the tool that everyone says they know how to use in their resume and hope that no one will actually ask them to use it (I’m talking about me here). I am constantly trying to learn Excel and the little tools that come with it, but I seem to have a hard time getting past the whole putting-numbers-into-the-cells part. But again, as Lisa told me, this tool will make my life so much easier in any HR role, just as it has helped her in her work.

Lisa quickly realized how much she would be using Excel at Journeyage, especially as the administrative leader, so she took a free LinkedIn Excel course through LinkedIn Learning. This resource is available to anyone, but she said that once she realized that knowing Excel thoroughly would make her better at her job, her motivation to complete the course grew exponentially. 

Excel is truly the organization formulater and can help with any logistics of bringing a company together. Whether that means separating employee emails from one another into certain groups or pulling information about people’s opinions on leadership from surveys, Excel can work as your assistant for any culture-focused initiative. 

Catch me taking a LinkedIn Learning Excel course next week...

3. Project Management

Much of Lisa’s work surrounds project management, especially as Journeyage continues to grow and provide services and experiences for companies’ onboarding needs. Lisa must understand the softwares that makes up the company in order to move projects forward efficiently. She needs to know the company’s flow and be on top of every file so she can act as support for any employee who needs it.

Project management comes back to the notion of trustworthiness. When employees see Lisa understanding and guiding them in their projects and ideas, they feel the support from her, improving their time at work. And at the end of the day, that is what Lisa wants for all of her employees and clients: an enjoyable experience at their job.

I have never thought about hard skills this way and how much they bleed into every other part of the work I do. I always assumed they were the unfortunately-required boring side to the job, but in actuality, the culture-building and trusting work environment wouldn’t exist without the support of the nitty-gritty skills.

4. PEO systems (otherwise known as Professional Employer Organization systems)

As an HR professional, it makes sense that a lot of Lisa’s administrative work is centered around a system that controls payroll, hiring, timesheets, benefits, and related HR elements. Journeyage uses a system called Rippling to do all of that.

This system directly relates to employee experience and culture work. To show her employees that she values their time, hard work, and loyalty to Journeyage, her skills in Rippling must be strong and attentive. 

When a system works well, that can be a culture-building and customer service in and of itself. Lisa shows her employees that even something as tedious as timesheets and benefits can be smooth and buttery. Doing the best she can at her job counts as culture-building, as her commitment to supporting Journeyage has a “ripple” effect (see what I did there?) to the rest of the company.

All of these skills that often must be learned “on the job” are vital for the success of a company, which Lisa exemplified in our conversation. The passion, commitment, and drive in Lisa’s voice as we spoke gave me so much hope and confidence in myself to learn these once-intimidating skills. 

I want to build culture at my job however I can, and Lisa showed me how I can do that by learning Excel, looking over budgets, and signing off on payroll. I hope to find a career that combines such valuable skills together to transform people’s lives at work.

If you would like to connect with Lisa, you can find her on LinkedIn.