Here’s the scene:

You walk into work and open your office door.  You see two employees yelling at each other, a young woman in a suit with a resume, a man at a table with his pay stubs spread out on a table with stacks and stacks of receipts, a woman who appears to be having contractions and may give birth any moment, a man who’s arm is bleeding and bandaged and he’s missing two teeth, a 30 year old woman wearing a miniskirt and half-shirt, and a woman speaking heatedly into her cell phone in a foreign language.  You also notice a really foul smell coming from someone in the room.

What do you do?  What do you think happened?  Who do you talk to first to figure it all out?

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Have you seen the movie ‘The Hangover‘?  The scenerio above is similar to a scene early in the movie where a group of men who are in Vegas to attend a bachelor party awaken in their hotel suite to find many odd, scary, and unusual things in the room.  They don’t remember anything about the night before so they have to try to piece together were they have been, who they met, and what happened.  Oh, that and where the groom is since they lose him in the course of the night’s events.

It’s a great movie!

So, what does this have to do with HR?  Oddly enough, everything.

If you’ve worked in HR for very long, you know that you can walk into any one of those situations on any given day. Likely, they won’t all be in your office at the same time, which is a good thing.  I certainly have had my share of “issues” crop up in a day, several that I mentioned above really happened to me. And, much like in the hangover, a good HR pro will need the ability to look at the situation before him or her and work backward to piece together what happened so they can make a recommendation of what to do.

Here’s the contest:  Tell me what issues you see in my little scenerio (*hint* employee relations, FMLA, etc.) in the comments. For everyone that makes a real attempt, your name will go into a drawing I’ll do next Monday.  The winner receives the book ‘Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your Employees to Give It Their All, and They’ll Give You Even More’ by Mark Murphy.