Good morning!
Hope you have your coffee ready because it is 9:15 on a Monday morning and I am bringing you along for my day as an HR Intern at Karl Lagerfeld!
So buckle up, have a sip of that delicious black coffee or cappuccino, and let’s open my mailbox!
As every day, I am starting my day between 9 and 9:30 by reading and categorizing emails that we got throughout the week. Who are we? Oh sorry, I meant the HR Retail Team – consisting of one manager, two business partners, one payroll specialist, one compliance officer, one HR Officer, and me – the intern! As an HR Retail team we are handling the resources in stores – all around Europe in our stores (from Ireland, through Switzerland and Italy to Poland), that is over 450 employees from outlets and full-price stores with around 60 managers. Since in most of those countries weekends are a normal working day for the team, on Monday you can be more than sure to expect many emails with various queries, or topics. From informational, through payroll related to finally the most urgent and scary ones – about incidents, stealing, or serious complaints/arguments on the shop floor.
After I have sorted and categorized the emails to each member of the team I go to my personal inbox and my category and read through all of them. I flag the urgent ones, reply immediately to the simple ones or forward them to my team with a question if my proposed answer is correct. Once I am done, I start working on the urgent ones – most often they are related to the HR system and lack of access to it or some errors that managers experienced during the weekend so I inform IT about them.
A huge part of my internship focuses on creating contracts for new employees and guiding them through the onboarding process making sure we are compliant with regulations in each country. As I go through the notifications with new hires, promotions, contract changes, or terminations I first focus on the most urgent ones and start preparing the documents. Once done I either put them for electronic signatures or print and hand them to our CFO for validation and signature. After she signs I send the documents to stores. Once this is done – it is lunchtime! Usually, I opt for a croissant and a soup or a salad, while on Fridays we opt for Italian or Asian!
After lunch, I handle the rest of the emails or have team meetings – where we update each other on what is happening and figure out together answers to more complex issues or projects. If I have time, I work on my projects – I check if the HR system is up to date or create and upgrade templates for contracts in each country. I am really happy with the opportunity of being able to take on my own projects – during my internship not only I have updated or created templates of documents for each country but also improved onboarding processes and created guidelines on some activities or processes like health centers and insurance or lunch vouchers. This way, the information about the benefits and how to proceed with onboarding tasks, enroll or order those things is more accessible not only to employees but also to future interns making the company’s work more efficient and smooth.
And there it is-17:15 on the clock. Time flies when you enjoy what you are doing! The last check is the inbox and I turn off my laptop for the day. See you tomorrow! 🙂