We’ve made it to the end but it’s the beginning.

To recap quickly:

In part one we wrote down one to three goals we want to achieve in the next twelve months.

In part two, we got underneath the thing we kept calling no time. We named the blockers to our goals and the causes sitting under them.

In part three, I shared eight ways I’ve found more time and focus in my day. I’m still practicing all eight. A few of them I lose and find again because some habits are genuinely hard to break. But when I get back to them, the time and focus return too.

In part four, we went after the work itself. Remember the Tuesday afternoon lightbulb?

If you skipped essay four, I highly recommend it.

Lightbulb moments are for everyone. We took inventory of the work, and we asked whether the work has to be done the way it has always been done and for some of it, whether it still needs to be done at all.

When we ask these questions, the lightbulb moments come to us.

Here we are in part five where we tie it all together.

We started with what we want and then found room to make it happen.

• What work would you do more of if there were room for it?

• What have you been wanting to learn?

• What project is sitting unclaimed that you’d actually love to have?

You already have a head start on this. The goals you wrote in part one were your first answer, written before you had a plan in place. Go back and read them. Some will have changed, because you know more about your work now than you did five parts ago.

Working heart-er

We were told to work harder. Then we were told to work smarter.

My new mantra is “Work heart-er.”

Not always less hard because hard work builds something, and finishing something difficult still feels great.

Not always less smart, either. Working smarter means we are using our brain muscles to find creative ways to work more efficiently, differently. Using our brains is still a good thing and something we should continuously do.

Heart-er is about what the work is, and what it does to you while you’re doing it.

It’s the work that expands you. The kind where you look up and the time has flown by. For some people it’s work that doesn’t feel like work. For example, it’s me writing on Substack these days.

Why does this matter so much to me?

I love to work. I have, most of my career. But I worked so much that my love of work burned out.

Everything in this series is what I learned to get back to the love. Not by working less all the time. Many days, I still work plenty. Some days I work less to keep that burnout from creeping up on me again. By changing what fills the hours though, I am shaping the career and work I want.

This is the small yet transformational shift.

Find the room

You have more of it than you think, and you’ve already found most of it. It’s sitting in three places.

• The work you retired. In part four we noticed what fell in the retire pile. Work that no longer needs to exist is the cleanest time you will ever reclaim, because nobody loses anything when it goes. This is the best place to start.

• The work you changed. Automated, handed to AI, delegated to someone who will learn from it. Those hours still exist, they just aren’t your’s anymore.

• The blockers that weren’t as true as they felt. This is part two. Go back to the ones you rated and see which ones have already shifted.

The honest part

I’m not going to end this series by telling you that you’ll only do work you love.

You won’t.

Some of what fills your week is non-negotiable, and some of it will never expand anything.

There will be months when the love of work will dim and may return. Or it fades entirely. If it fades, come back to the framework in this series to chart out your next 12 months.

The key is knowing that you are never truly stuck.

What now?

Five parts ago it was one page with a few goals on it.

Starting today, do one small action to help you move toward your goals.

The rest will follow slowly, and then noticeably.

Thank you for being here for all five parts and may you find the work that makes you want to work heart-er ❤️‍🔥

With gratitude,
Cristal
Founder, Clahrity | getclahrity.com

Hi Friend,

It’s fourth quarter, and if you’re in HR or People Operations, you already know what that means... open enrollment, year-end, performance reviews, and somewhere in the middle of it all, the question of what next year will look like for your people. This one is for you, my HR pros and people leaders, to help you plan 2027 with intention.

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So often, employee events and recognition moments sneak up on us. More times than I can count, I found myself planning something with a week’s notice, sometimes days, and each time I promised myself that next year I would plan earlier and make it a more meaningful event.

Then the day-to-day would take over... the fires that needed putting out, open enrollment, year-end, performance reviews... and those plans would quietly fall to the wayside. Even so, these recognition moments are so incredibly important to building culture. They give our team members, whether remote or hybrid, an opportunity to connect, to meet, to talk, to celebrate, and to acknowledge the things that matter to them.

Many years ago, I created a simple calendar to help me see what was coming, and I have used it at the organizations where I’ve worked.

For a long time it was simply an HR calendar.

Over time, I began sharing it with the HR and benefits teams, then employee resource groups, then internal communications and events teams, so we could collaborate, lean on each other as resources, combine our budgets and communications, and create cohesive, meaningful events for our employees rather than everyone working in a silo.

That calendar is the heart of the 2027 Human Connection and Engagement Kit.

What’s inside the kit

1. The Human Connection Calendar

A fully editable Excel calendar with holidays, cultural celebrations, and health awareness periods already mapped and that can be used as a collaboration document in OneDrive, Google or whatever collaboration platform you use.

For the solo HR professional and the small HR team, it’s a way to see everything coming up one, two, three months or quarters ahead, so you can plan accordingly rather than rushing to create something meaningful at the last minute.

And when you’re ready, it’s built to share with the partners around you.

2. The AI HR Comms Assistant Guide

Many of us don’t have access to an internal communications team or a communications partner, and the newsletters and updates we want to send stay in drafts.

This guide walks you through building the AI assistant I created to write employee communications in my own voice and without a communications budget.

Since I started using it 14 months ago, I haven’t missed a month.

3. The 2027 HR Digital Planner

I created this one specifically for the HR soul, the person doing the work. It includes a calendar of the same observances you’ll find in the calendar, paired with special messaging and reflection prompts just for you.

I am a believer in self-care and reflection and those elements are woven throughout this planner as a reminder that you have to care for yourself before you care for anything else on your list.

No single calendar can capture every meaningful date across every culture and community, so think of this as a foundation to build on with the dates that matter most to your people.

The calendar provides the framework.

Your commitment provides the impact.

Who it’s for

If you are an HR professional or part of a lean team, carrying engagement alongside everything else that lands on your desk, this is for you. It is also for the people leaders who care about connection and want a simple, steady calendar to follow.

The kit is only $27 and available here.

I built this to kit to give HR professionals some time and clarity back; it has helped me greatly.

I hope you enjoy it and that it proves to be a beneficial resource to you.

Subscribe today for more resources I will be sharing to save you time and for some other exciting things coming in 2027 in celebration of HR pros.

With gratitude,
Cristal
Founder, Clahrity | getclahrity.com

It happened on a Tuesday afternoon.

I was doing a task I had done the same way for years. Tedious, manual, mind-numbing. The kind of work your hands can do while your mind is somewhere else entirely.

And then, for no reason I can point to, a question surfaced.

WTF am I doing this this way?

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10 seconds later, I literally felt the lightbulb light up over my head. I had a better way. Faster, cleaner, and honestly not that clever.

Why didn’t I think of this sooner?

I’ve since learned not to spend much time here. The answer to why you didn’t think of it sooner is almost always the same: you were too busy doing it to ask about it.

That’s what full days do to a mind.

I have spent much of my career in HR and People Operations, much of it leading teams whose mission was continuous improvement. Finding the better way was the job.

Which is part of why that Tuesday landed the way it did. I knew how to do this. I just hadn’t turned it on myself in a while.

The frameworks below are the ones I actually used, and still use on my own work, and with my teams when I’m helping someone grow.

But that Tuesday made me curious about something else. If the question showed up on its own, could I make it show up on purpose?

Training the lightbulb

It turns out you can. Not reliably, not on command, but far more often than waiting around for a random Tuesday.

What I do is simple enough to feel like it shouldn’t work. I set a recurring reminder for myself that asks one question:

What can I do differently this week that would make this work better, faster, or more impactful?

That’s it. A phone reminder with a question in it.

Some weeks nothing comes. Other weeks something small does, and occasionally the whole shape of a task changes, because I am finally looking at it from outside lines, that I usually like to color within.

The reminder isn’t groundbreaking. It just interrupts the autopilot we so easily fall into.

Take inventory of your work

Last time you looked at your calendar and where your time goes. This week you’re looking at something different: what the work is actually for.

A few things before you start.

• This is for your eyes only. It is not a job description, not a self-review, and not something you’ll ever hand to anyone.

• You don’t have to do this in one sitting. Give it a few days, even weeks if needed. Tasks surface as you do them, and you’ll remember things on Thursday that you’d never have listed on Monday.

For each task, capture:

• The task. What is it, plainly?

• Who it’s for. What person, team, or function needs it?

• What it’s meant to accomplish. What is the purpose (not the activity)?

• The output. What actually gets produced?

• What it impacts. What changes because this exists?

• The value. What is your honest rating of this task?

That last column is the one that matters, and you can’t fill it in without the two before it. You cannot rate work you don’t understand the purpose of.

Here’s the uncomfortable part. Some of you will get to a row and realize you don’t know. You don’t know who reads it, or what decision it feeds, or why it started.

Most of us inherited work from someone who inherited it from someone else, and the reason left the building years ago.

This means you have a question to ask.

I have done this myself more than once. I spent real hours on inherited work, never quite sure how it was contributing to the team or the business, and when I finally asked, the answer was that nobody needed it anymore. Nobody had needed it for a while. It had just never occurred to anyone to say so.

Once the inventory is in front of you, every row may fall in one of these three places.

Keep. The work is valuable, you understand why, and the way you’re doing it is fine (for now).

Change. The work matters, but how you’re doing it doesn’t have to stay the same.

Retire. The work no longer needs to exist.

Changing the work

For everything in the keep-but-change pile, three questions to ask.

Can it be automated?

Not everything that feels manual has to be. Workflows, rules, templates, scheduled reports, forms that route themselves. Most systems we already pay for can do considerably more than we ask of them.

Can AI help?

This is where I’d push you to be specific rather than philosophical. Could the policy FAQ answer itself? Could the first draft of that communication start somewhere other than a blank page? Could the summary write itself and you edit it? Start with one task.

Can it be delegated?

I’d push back on how most of us hear that word. Delegation sounds like getting something off your plate, and that’s the smallest part of it.

When you hand work to someone else, three things tend to happen.

• That person learns something they didn’t know before and for someone building a career, the unglamorous work is often where the real understanding lives.

• You gain a backup. The work no longer stops when you’re out, and that is worth more than it sounds the first time you take a real vacation.

• And a fresh set of eyes sees what yours can’t. The person who built a process is the last person who will notice what’s wrong with it. More than once, someone I handed work to came back within a month having improved it in a way I never would have seen.

Inventory Your Work Template 4

144KB ∙ PDF file

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The lightbulb moments are for everyone. Not just the person who’s been doing it for years.

The point of clearing this work is not to have an emptier calendar.

Or maybe it is. No judgment here.

It’s to make room for the work that expands you. The strategic thinking you never get to. The thing you’ve wanted to learn. The project sitting unclaimed that you’d actually love.

You named those goals in part one. This is how you make room for them.

And set the reminder. Whatever day of the week suits you, with that one question in it.

What can I do differently this week that would make this work better, faster, or more impactful?

The lightbulb moments will come more often.

Stay tuned for part five, where we bring all of this together.

With gratitude,
Cristal
Founder, Clahrity | getclahrity.com

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Most of these eight shifts will make complete sense the moment you read them. Knowing them isn’t the hard part. The hard part is practicing them. I’m still practicing. Some are habits I’m still building, and a few I lose and have to find again.

When they do become habits, the time and the focus shows up.

Here they are…

1. Step out of the back-to-back meeting grind
Build breaks and focus time into your schedule. If you’re a manager, this one multiplies…every meeting you shorten, space out, or cancel gives you and your team back time for the work they were hired to do.

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2. Limit hard and heavy conversations to no more than two in a day

A performance conversation, an employee relations issue, a decision someone won’t want to hear... these conversations drain you emotionally and physically. You need time to recover and reset before the next one.

3. Resist the urge to answer emails as they come in
Each reply feels small, and yet each one pulls you out of the work you were in the middle of. Carve out set blocks of time for your inbox instead and let the rest of the time belong to deeper work.

4. When you’re in that email block, answer it the first time
If you know the response, send it. Stop circling back and saving it for later. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read and re-read the same email, putting off a reply I already knew. I don’t even want to know how much time that cost me.

5. Find five minutes to renew your focus
The tried-and-true “walk away and come back” works. Step away from the scene of the work, even if the scene is your kitchen table between video calls. Coming back with fresh focus can solve a problem faster than sitting in front of it for hours.

6. Climb out of the social media rabbit hole
Once upon a time, social media was where we reconnected with long-lost friends and family. Now much of it is scrolling through ads, people selling you the life you want, and funny pet reels (I still love these).

At work, it’s the phone face up next to the laptop, and the quick scroll between meetings that somehow takes fifteen minutes. Track your screen time if you’re ready for a rude awakening... my own stats shook me out of my daze. Set a timer to keep yourself aware and to limit your scrolling.

7. Skip the podcast some days
I love information, and I love listening to experts talk about anything and everything. Some days, though, the input never stops... an episode on the commute, another while I clear my inbox, until all the knowledge, worries, and takeaways leave me feeling like I have less time than when I started.

So let them talk all they want... and let me sing along to a favorite song every now and then.

8. Weave wellness into your day, even the workday
I started moving my body more in the mornings (walking, a workout, or just dancing to a great song), and the difference followed me to my desk. Somehow, I have more focus and energy, and the day starts on a positive note.

I hope these eight shifts give you back some time and focus in your days. Stay tuned for part 4, we are almost to the finish line.

With gratitude,

Cristal

Founder, Clahrity | getclahrity.com

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Welcome to part 2 of the 5-week mindset shift series. In part one we focused on our goals and what we would like to achieve in the next 12 months.

Today, we are going to be open and honest with ourselves about blockers that may be preventing us from moving towards our goals.

Before we start, listen to the 5-minute meditation practice included.

Because blocker one for many (including myself) is mental bandwidth.

If your days at work are busy, heavy, stressful and you’re navigating parenthood, caregiving for family members, managing money, a household, and more . . .

Your mind is telling you it is at capacity.

Your mind is telling you there is no room for anything else. It truly feels like it.

This meditation is meant to help you be present with yourself in these few moments.

It may feel uncomfortable at first if your thoughts are racing at 80 miles an hour. I have been practicing mindfulness for four years and there are days, my mind still tells me I don’t have time for it.

I am here to help you unlearn this.

Your mind does have room for 5 minutes of being present with yourself and a few anchoring breaths. This practice isn’t meant to stop the thoughts.

It’s meant to show you that most things will not fall apart if you take 5, 10 or 15 minutes for yourself. There is always time for you, if we commit to it.

Take a few minutes to listen . .

I hope this meditation practice helped. We spend most of our waking hours at work, let’s give ourselves permission to weave some wellness into our workday.

Now using the blocker worksheet attached, write down all the things you think are blocking you from moving towards your goals.

What Are Your Blockers Template 2

918KB ∙ PDF file

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• Is it time?

• Is it money?

• Is it the feeling that you don’t have enough mental bandwidth or space?

Next let’s try to get to the root cause of those blockers.

For example, if the blocker is not enough time, what is the root cause of not having enough time?

• Is it your current workload?

• Too many back-to-back meetings?

If the blocker is fear, what is the root cause?

• Perhaps you have a toxic manager, maybe you fear that you will fail, lose money or time?

Now that you have identified your blockers and their potential root causes, let’s use the next part of the worksheet to think through what you would do if these blockers didn’t exist:

• If I felt I had more than enough money, I would . . .

• If I had 5, 10, 15 more hours in my workweek I would . . .

Next think about each blocker and possible underlying cause and ask yourself:

• How true is this?

Our mind is excellent at making a problem bigger than it actually is.

• Is there a way to solve for this problem or to change this blocker?

Remember, most problems can be figured out, solved and will pass.

Write all your thoughts on the worksheet because as you do, you are creating more space to think clearly.

Thanks for reading part 2 and stay tuned for week 3 where I will share 8 ways, I used to add back time and focus to my life.

With gratitude,

Cristal

Founder, Clahrity | getclahrity.com

Don’t be fooled by my LinkedIn profile. Yes, my LinkedIn profile shows my linear career path and promotions over the last 20+ years working in HR.

To some it appears that I had all my sh*t together, and some days I did and some days not so much.

I worked hard, and then harder with the next promotion in sight each time. I learned a lot, and I cried a lot (in my car in the parking lot).

This is why you will often hear me say:

I am thankful for the lessons and the blessings.

My career has been rewarding but there’s a point in almost every career, often after years of being the reliable one, the one who handles it, the one who takes on more and more, when busy stops feeling the same as productive.

When it stops feeling sustainable.

You realize that taking more on without letting some things go or grinding harder doesn’t earn you what’s next. It’s setting you back in your career or in your personal life.

Maybe you’re circling a promotion. Maybe there’s a project sitting unclaimed that you’d love to work on. Maybe you’re circling your way towards something entirely new.

Welcome to the 5-Part Work Mindset Shift.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll walk you through the mindset shift that continues to help me grow, develop, and make room for the work I want to do.

It’s a shift that I have leaned on to stay successful at work. It’s a shift I now also use to make room for wellbeing and new things I want to learn and experience.

This shift is not about avoiding hard work. Hard work is fulfilling, builds resilience and feels pretty damn great when you’ve tackled a challenge.

This shift is about doing hard work without grinding yourself to the ground by taking on more without limits.

Some of those promotions you see on my LinkedIn profile were a result of taking on more responsibilities and projects without letting go of old responsibilities.

I took on more work, worked more hours while also being a mom and caregiver to family members. I love to work but I worked so much that my love of work burned out.

Until I learned to work differently, some may call it working smarter.

I call it working heart-er.

A way to do hard work with heart, in a way that makes you feel excited and expanded about the work you are doing and that allows you to make room for the other things you want to do and experience.

So, let’s get started with part one of the work mindset shift. Each part will build on the last.

Part 1: Ask yourself, what are my goals?

This is going to look different for everyone. A promotion. A career change. A new skill you’ve been circling for a while. A project no one has claimed yet. More challenging work. More time for the things that excite and expand you.

I’ve put together a template to help you think out loud on paper. This isn’t meant to be more work, and it isn’t meant to be finished in one sitting. Give it three days, four or more days. There are no right or wrong answers here.

What Are Your Goals Template 1

2.95MB ∙ PDF file

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Whatever the reason, this mindset shift is meant to help you work toward those goals.

(Remember: This is not a performance review. If the word goal doesn’t resonate, change it. Maybe it’s aspirations or milestones. This is your life, your career. Make this your own.)

Write down one to three goals you want to accomplish in the next 12 months. Be as specific as possible. Some examples below:

• I will be promoted to [role], I will take on [project], I will learn how to [skill, hobby, topic], I will [anything you have your heart set on]

• Place these goals somewhere you’ll see them daily such as your desk, your mirror. Or set them as a daily reminder on your phone.

Let them be a constant reminder of what you’re working toward.

The shift starts small. Sometimes you won’t notice the shift in your thinking, but you will start to feel it. Feeling stuck rarely lifts all at once. It lifts slowly, in small but transformational steps.

Thank you for being here for this first part. Stay tuned for part two.

With gratitude,

Cristal

Founder, Clahrity | getclahrity.com

It wasn’t.

People around me, my coworkers, my friends, were promoted while I was working just as hard and just as long, if not more. I felt surprised, disappointed, angry, then finally confused. The confusion stayed with me longest. I compared myself to peers and friends who were landing promotions and couldn’t find the answer... so I landed on the conclusion that I must be lacking in skill or competence. I was unworthy of that promotion.

The rule I had been following was not a bad rule, and no one handed it to me to cause harm. Head down, and work hard, and the rewards will come. Working hard still matters. Some people do notice when you show up. Some of the leaders I worked for genuinely appreciated my commitment, and they told me so.

The rule just wasn’t complete.

When I evaluated the work I had inherited and the methods of doing the work, it was time-consuming, tedious, manual and boring but someone had to do it at some point. I also realized I didn’t even understand the purpose of the work or if it was still relevant to the business in the current day.

What changed was not how much I worked (I still work hard, just in different ways). It was what I worked on and the value of that work.

Two questions to ask yourself:

If you are in that stretch right now, working long, working hard and wondering why the door hasn’t opened, these are the two questions I would hand my younger self before anything else.

1. Is the work I am doing adding value to the company?

If the honest answer is no, that is not a judgment on you. It usually means the work you inherited is no longer visible or relevant, and it is time to work differently. Time to work on different things. Time to start having conversations with a manager or mentor on what those possibilities could be for your career.

2. Is the work I am doing adding value to my life, my career and my growth?

This is my favorite question and one that I have asked myself several times over the course of my 20+ year career. This question isn’t centered around a company and its performance metrics.

The focus of this question is you. If you answer no to this question, that feeling of being stuck is important information. It might mean asking to be part of a project outside your lane, volunteering for the initiative nobody has claimed, or building a skill your role does not currently require or for another role.

The key is continuous learning. Continuous learning is not a phase you finish. It’s the key to more opportunities that help you get to that next step or a completely different career.

I know this isn’t simple, and I know that plenty of good people do everything right and still wait longer than they should for those promotions in work and in life. What I have come to believe is that the mantra I was handed was not wrong, it was just incomplete. Head down, work hard... and then look up frequently to ask whether the work is still worth your time and effort.

This is the first in a weekly series about changing the way you work. Over the next few weeks, I will share how I take inventory of the work I am doing, how I decide what to stop, and how I make room to change it. Subscribe if you would like to receive the series.

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With gratitude,
Cristal
Founder, Clahrity | getclahrity.com

Last week I took my daughter to her very first concert. Shakira.

We went with one of my dearest friends and her daughter, two generations of Latinas singing every word, our hips moving to rhythms of strength, beauty and culture. My daughter and I looked up at that stage and saw a woman who has moved the world without ever asking permission to take up space in it. She takes up all of it, and the world is better for it.

Around the same time, my phone was full of a different story.

My phone blew up with messages and news articles about a congressman from Texas who stood in a hearing and questioned whether “Latina Power” merch belonged in the Smithsonian... whether that phrase, that idea, was appropriate for a museum of American history. The question landed like it was meant to make us smaller. Instead, it sent hundreds, maybe thousands, of us reaching for the microphone.

I was standing in a stadium full of women who already knew the answer to that question.

Latina power is Latinas all over the globe lifting themselves, their families, and their communities to do good in this world. It is elevating others. It is living the opportunities our mothers and grandmothers were denied, and making sure we open these opportunities to future generations.

Growing up Latina, I learned early that I was expected to work hard, to be a caregiver before I was ever old enough to be cared for. Look down. Work hard. Don’t ask too many questions. The rewards will come if you behave, if you stay quiet, if you earn it.

I believed that for a long time, well into my late thirties.

I’ve learned since that keeping your head down, being silent, and putting others first is self-abandonment and neglect of the beautiful and strong women we are. We are resilient. We are strong. We are smart. We are bold. We are love.

I want my daughter to understand that Latina power has never been about the oppression of anyone else. It does not rise by pushing another group down. It is not a threat to anyone’s history. It is a community of strength, and strength like ours multiplies. When we take care of ourselves, when we love who we truly are, we are finally able to elevate the people and communities around us. That is the whole point. That is the inheritance.

So yes, Latina Power merch is appropriate. And it is so much more than the words they put on it. We have always been part of this story, and we always will be.

This is Latina power.

With gratitude,
Cristal
Founder, Clahrity | getclahrity.com

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I remember complaining to a mentor once about a system that felt like it was missing every bell and whistle I wanted. He let me get it all out, and then he asked me one question: what is the problem you are trying to solve?

I did not have a clean answer. That question is still the lens I reach for every time I am evaluating a new HR tech stack. What has stayed with me since is simple: great tech does not save us from undefined problems. It just turns up the volume on them.

HR professionals are told that the right system will solve all their problems, and the sales decks are built to make us believe it. We get enamored with the possibilities, the long term vision, and the conversation moves to procurement before the question of what we are actually solving has been asked. I have been there too. 🫣

Three things worth slowing down for before you swap or buy.

1. Define the problem you are actually trying to solve. Not the problem the sales team named for you. Not the problem your peer at another company is fixing. Yours, in the language of your team, your company, and your work. If you cannot describe it, or the problem description changes from week to week, the system will not solve it for you.

2. Once you identify the problem, focus on the solutions to that problem. The bells and whistles are the fun part. They will be there waiting in eighteen months if you grow into them. They will also pull your evaluation off course if you let them. Buy for the problem you have today, not the version of the ecosystem you are hoping to become. Otherwise your newly purchased $100k tool may be sitting on a shelf, unused.

3. Before you replace, ask questions of what you already have. Sometimes the system has not failed. It has just gone stale because other priorities took the oxygen for a while. Is an upgrade available? Are there features you never turned on? Is there a workflow tweak that solves 80 percent of what is frustrating you? Ask your vendor for a subject matter expert to run an optimization review, too. If you do not ask, the vendor may have no idea you have a problem, or that a change is even on the table.

I have seen companies move to a new tool and shortly want to go back to their old one. Implementations are not for the faint of heart. There should be a mandatory recovery period after each one. 😴

Tech is a tool, not a rescue. The clarity has to come first.

To help with that first step, I put together a one-page checklist of questions worth asking before you buy or swap any HR tech: the HR Tech Assessment One-Pager. This one comes with a small milestone attached... it’s the first checklist I’ve published as a Claude artifact, and I am excited to finally share it!

For my PDF lovers, this one is for you. Save it, sit with it, bring it into your next vendor conversation

Tech Stack Evaluation Checklist

251KB ∙ PDF file

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With gratitude,
Cristal
Founder, Clahrity | getclahrity.com

If you have been putting off using AI in HR because you were not sure where to start, or because everything you have seen feels built for enterprise teams with a comms department behind them, this is the on-ramp I wish someone had handed me.

I am familiar with the experience of being on a lean HR team with no dedicated communications partner, no budget line item for a comms platform. What I have is Claude, about an hour of setup, and a system that now drafts my employee newsletters in my own voice, every single month, without me starting from a blank page.

Employee communications is one of those things I want to do well and consistently, but on a smaller HR team without a dedicated communications partner, the work often gets squeezed into the corners of the calendar, or into a Sunday afternoon I had planned to spend somewhere else.

The drift is rarely intentional, and it usually starts with the best of motives. We tell ourselves we will send the benefits update once we have time to write it well, or that we will wait until we have a real newsletter to put it in. The intent is to deliver something thoughtful. The result, more often than not, is that the message does not go out at all.

What I have come back to, again and again, is that the perfect newsletter is not what people actually need. They need to know what is happening with their benefits before the deadline arrives. They need to know what to expect during the performance review cycle. They need to know where to find the answer the third time they go looking for it. Sometimes the communication is just repeating something you already told them, on a different day, in a slightly different way, so it is front and center when they actually need it.

So I built an employee communications assistant in Claude Cowork... not for the impressive newsletter (although it’s becoming more impressive with each iteration), but for the small, consistent comms that serve people when I do not have three uninterrupted hours to spare. It helps me draft in my own voice, hold to a regular cadence, and send the message that needs to go out today. And if you have been AI-curious but stuck on where a solo HR person even begins, this is one real, specific place to start.

The system, at a glance

The build has seven steps, and I am sharing all of them in the full walkthrough... the exact prompts I used, the decisions I worked through, and what to expect at each stage. Here is the shape of it.

I started by capturing my own voice, in detail, through a long interview with Claude that became a reusable profile. From there, I turned that voice into a skill, so Claude applies it automatically any time I ask for an employee communication, without me re-explaining myself every time. Then I built the piece that keeps the whole year organized... an interactive communications calendar with every month pre-loaded, key observances included, and a place to track each newsletter from not-started to sent.

Each month, I fill in that calendar like a whiteboard: the topics I want to cover, the key HR dates, a draft due date, and a send date. When it is time to write, one click drafts the newsletter in my voice, using everything I have already told the system. From there, I ask Claude to format it for wherever it is going... Outlook, Slack, an intranet post, a different language... and I spend about ten minutes making the whole thing mine, from the color palette to the fields my team actually uses.

Get the full build

I am giving away two things to go along with this piece... the complete step-by-step walkthrough, with every prompt I used and the decisions behind them, and the 2026 Human Connection Calendar I built as the starting point for the observances piece, with federal holidays, cultural observance, and awareness months already mapped to a month.

How I Built My Ee Comms Assistant 06

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2026 Clahrity Human Connection Calendar

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If you are on a small HR team carrying communications alongside everything else, this is for you. And if you want to walk through building your own version, or you get stuck somewhere in the setup, email me at cristal@getclahrity.com. I would love to help.

With gratitude,

Cristal
Founder, Clahrity | getclahrity.com

Twenty years in HR has given me a lot of gifts. Pattern recognition is one of them... and also, if I’m honest, one of the trickier ones to carry well.

Here’s what I mean. Someone asks for time on my calendar, and before they’ve said a word, a voice in my head is already narrating. This reminds me of so-and-so. I’ve been through this before. I know how this plays out. All of it built from real experience. None of it necessarily true about the person sitting in front of me.

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There’s a practice in mindfulness called beginner’s mind. The idea is to approach every experience as if it were the first time, without the weight of the story you already have about it. It’s become one of the practices I lean on as an HR leader managing conflict.

Something I’ve learned about myself is that after years of doing this work, I walk into many conversations already carrying assumptions from prior ones. About what the person will say. About what they need from me. About how the whole thing resolves. My prior experience has shaped beliefs that tell me, quite confidently, how the story goes.

Those beliefs aren’t always right.

Prior experience is useful. It helps me anticipate. It gives me context I wouldn’t otherwise have. But left unchecked, it can also close the door before the person across from me has even spoken.

So now, when I notice those signals... this reminds me, I’ve seen this before, I know how this plays out... I try to treat them as information, not instruction. I let myself acknowledge them, and then I make an intentional choice to set them down, because this conversation may or may not resemble the one my instincts are pointing to. That choice is what beginner’s mind protects.

In practice, it looks like:

• Asking more questions to get more context, even when I think I already know the answer

• Actively listening for the piece of the story I didn’t see coming

• Remembering that the person across from me is carrying their own experiences, assumptions, and biases too

Prior experience is a tool that helps me navigate conflict. Beginner’s mind is what keeps the communication, and the understanding, open.

I know this isn’t simple. Letting go of a story you’ve earned through experience takes practice, and I don’t always get there in the first minute of a conversation. But here’s where I land: the person in front of me deserves my full attention, not a rerun of my last conversation.

The views I share here are my own and do not represent any current or former employer.

Not because change is bad. Not because people are resistant. But because what’s being changed meant something to them, and no one took the time to say so.

Successful change management isn’t only about having the right strategy or the right rollout plan. It’s about honoring what came before while building a bridge to what lies ahead.

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The wisdom of starting with what works

Early in my career, I made the classic mistake of walking into a new organization and questioning everything with an air of superiority... as if the systems I found were evidence of incompetence rather than the result of people doing the best they could with what they had. What I didn’t understand yet was that processes are usually created for valid reasons: limited resources, different business priorities, the best information available at the time.

When we approach change with humility, acknowledging that what exists today likely made sense when it was built, we demonstrate respect, not just for the systems, but for the people who created and maintained them.

3 ways to lead change with grace and gratitude

1. Start with what’s working

Before proposing what needs to change, genuinely explore what doesn’t. Ask your team: “What aspects of our current approach have served us well?” and “What elements should we carry forward as we evolve?” This isn’t just courtesy. It reduces defensiveness, builds trust, and helps you identify what’s actually worth keeping.

2. Acknowledge the journey that led to today

Take time to name the history. Express genuine appreciation for those who built and maintained what exists now. This isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake... it positions change as building on good work rather than erasing it. Consider creating a small transition moment that celebrates what’s being completed before launching what’s next. These rituals give people emotional closure and help them mentally step into the new chapter.

3. Invite your veterans into the process

The people who have been there the longest carry something that doesn’t show up in any project brief: institutional knowledge, hidden dependencies, unwritten rules, history that explains why something is the way it is. Bring them in as advisors, ask them to flag what might get missed, and let them mentor others through the transition. This transforms potential resistance into genuine contribution, and ensures that what’s valuable isn’t lost simply because it was never documented.

The impression change leaves behind

How we lead through change leaves a lasting mark on people’s relationship with leadership. When team members experience a transition that was handled with care, they develop greater trust and greater resilience for what may come next.

One of the things I know to be true: change is inevitable. What’s not inevitable is how we carry people through it. That part is a choice.

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The views I share here are my own and do not represent any current or former employer.

I almost didn’t write this.

Not because I didn’t know what to say, but because I’ve spent so much of my career writing things for other people to sign that I forgot what it feels like to just... write something I am passionate about. This newsletter is me remembering that.

Hi. I’m Cristal.

I’ve been in HR for nearly 20 years -- in benefits and wellness, HR tech, HR operations, change management, and all the things that happen in the margins of a job description. I love this field. I also know what it costs. I know the particular exhaustion of being the person who tries to hold everything together and becomes the go-to for everything.

A couple of years ago, after 13 years at a job I was genuinely good at, I left. I didn’t have a backup plan. I didn’t have another job lined up (more on this in a future issue -- I don’t recommend it for everyone). Just the quiet, honest recognition that I had given so much for so long that I had to pause temporarily in order to find my way back.

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What I found, in the slower and quieter stretch that followed, was that I still loved HR. I just didn’t want to return to it the same way I’d left it -- without tools for navigating the noise, without space for the human being doing the work, without a community that understood what this field actually asks of us.

That’s where Clahrity started. First as an HR consulting company, and eventually as the HR learning and connection community it’s becoming now -- including this newsletter.

Get ClaHRity is the space I wish had existed when I needed it. I’m going to write to you honestly, the way I wish someone had written to me -- about communications, about building connection inside organizations, about what it looks like to do this work with more clarity and less noise. I’ll weave in mindfulness, because it changed how I show up for myself and for others. And I’ll talk about AI, because it is actively reshaping our work and that conversation deserves more than hype or fear.

Every issue will give you something real -- something you can actually use, or simply sit with.

What I won’t do is perform certainty I don’t have, pretend the field is simpler than it is, or write anything that sounds like it came from a policy manual. Life is too short and your time is too valuable.

One of the things I’ve learned -- sometimes the hard way -- is that while we can do anything, we can’t do everything at the same time. This newsletter is my attempt to do one thing well: show up for the HR professionals who show up for everyone else, and create a space where we can learn, connect, and breathe a little easier, together.

I’m glad you found this. I hope it gives you even a small exhale.

With gratitude,
Cristal
Founder, Clahrity | getclahrity.com

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The views I share here are my own and do not represent any current or former employer.