PX Espresso Hour☕with Luke O'Mahoney

022 - Rita Wittek-Verbeek - The Unique Challenges & Opportunities for a Solo People Lead in a Start-up

Season 1 Episode 22

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Summary:

In this conversation, Rita discusses her experience in People Operations within small businesses and startup / scale-ups. She emphasizes the importance of building a strong foundation in HR and the unique challenges and opportunities that come with being a small and lean organization.

Rita also shares insights into the recent acquisition of her company and the potential for growth and change. The conversation highlights the need for trust, clear communication, and a focus on culture as organizations scale.

In this conversation, Luke and Rita discuss various topics related to HR and people management. They explore the importance of creating ownership and agency within organizations, the role of cultural foundations and co-creation in driving success, and the significance of supporting work-life balance.

They also discuss the inclusion of people leaders in decision making, the investment in employee well-being, and the need for a proactive HR function. Additionally, they touch on the superpower of small businesses, the potential drawbacks of businesses getting too big, and the importance of enabling individuals to find joy in their work. They conclude by reflecting on the future of HR and the challenges and opportunities it presents.

Guest Bio:

Rita is hands-on People Leader with a focus on building people-centric workplaces. She loves shaping and driving the people experience forward in international start-up environments setting up the complete employee experience from scratch by building and designing processes, tools, and frameworks for the whole employee lifecycle in a way that makes employees wanna stick around!


Rita is also the Co-founder of the People Ops Community NL, a slack workspace for like-minded HR and PX professionals in the Netherlands to share resources, ideas, and information.

Currently: Director of People at Homerun. Homerun is a radically easy to use hiring tool aimed small to medium sized businesses. We help business to organise and streamline their hiring process even without internal knowledge or a recruiter at hand.

Contact Rita:
Email: rita@homerun.co
LinkedIn: Rita Wittek-Verbeek | LinkedIn

Host Bio:

Luke is the founder of Sapienˣ, a platform which creates content, courses and community for The Post HR Generation.

Email: luke@sapienx.co.uk
LinkedIn: Luke O'Mahoney | LinkedIn
Newsletter: PX Espresso
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Support for this episode of PX Espresso Hour comes from Sana.

Sana is an AI company transforming how organizations learn and access knowledge. Their learning platform and knowledge assistant are truste

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Music by Rockot from Pixabay