sfHR Consulting is a human resources practice serving California employers. It does the ordinary work of an HR department, for organizations that do not have one, and the specialist work that an existing HR department cannot reasonably be expected to carry alone.
The work is scoped in writing before it begins, and what it produces belongs to the client: memoranda, determinations with their reasoning, policies, files, in a form the organization keeps and can use after the engagement ends. There is no account management layer between a client and the work.
At a glance
- Human resources consulting, HR outsourcing, and payroll outsourcing
- California employers, principally 25 to 500 employees
- Not a law firm; not a professional employer organization; does not conduct workplace investigations; sells no insurance or software
- Certified in human resources by SHRM
- Serving employers across the San Francisco Bay Area and throughout California
The principal
Sharam Kohan
Sharam Kohan founded this practice after more than twenty-five years inside organizations, in senior management and executive human resources roles across health care, technology, manufacturing, energy, hospitality, retail, and the nonprofit sector. The conviction behind the practice comes out of that work. Human resources is not the administrative department it is usually taken to be. It is the stewardship of the asset a company’s success most depends on, and it is done well or badly at the level of structure rather than sentiment.
He holds an LL.M. from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, with a certificate in business law, and completed graduate legal study at Temple University Beasley School of Law concentrated in employment law and employment discrimination. He is certified in human resources by SHRM.
That training is why this practice can tell you what a California statute actually requires rather than what a summary of it says. It is also why it knows where the line sits. sfHR does not practice law and does not give legal advice. Part of the service is recognizing the moment a question has stopped being a human resources question and belongs with your employment counsel, and saying so early rather than late.
He served as a Human Relations Commissioner in Alameda County, in a district covering portions of Oakland, Emeryville, and Berkeley, and has held director positions on Bay Area nonprofit boards.
He is the author of The Honest Organization and What Is Quietly Killing Your Company, both concerned with how organizations distribute knowledge, authority, and cost, and with why institutions fail structurally rather than culturally. Away from business and people operations, his interests run to philosophy, and to Sartre in particular. His Sartre’s Conception of Freedom develops an account of situated and distributive answerability: what a person can fairly be held answerable for when the situation, rather than the will, holds most of the power. That question is not as far from this work as it sounds. It is the question underneath every decision about who in an organization knew what, who could have acted, and who is going to carry the cost.
How engagements run
Scope in writing, then the work.
Consulting disappoints in predictable ways. Scope that was agreed in a conversation and never written down. A proposal that promised more than the engagement delivered. A client who reaches the end of a project unable to say what was actually done, because nothing was left behind except advice somebody has to remember.
So every engagement here begins the same way: scope, deliverables, response times, fees, and the boundary with legal advice, agreed in writing before work starts. If something is not in that letter, it is not agreed. Where the scope genuinely changes, it is re-quoted rather than absorbed and billed later as a surprise.
The other half of that discipline is refusal. Where a matter falls outside what this practice can do properly, it is referred to somebody qualified rather than attempted, and you are told at once rather than left waiting.
Alongside your other advisers
Most clients already have an employment lawyer, a benefits broker, a payroll platform, and an accountant. None of them is displaced here, and no referral fee is paid or received in either direction.
The usual effect on your legal costs is downward. Counsel bills for judgment; an HR function that hands over an orderly record removes the hours otherwise spent assembling one.
Confidentiality
Personnel information is handled as a service provider handles it: used only to perform the engagement, never sold, never used to train anything, and returned or deleted at the end on your instruction. Conflicts are checked before work is accepted.
How this practice thinks
Four positions.
HR is an institutional function, not a personality
Organizations habitually treat employment problems as problems of individual character: a difficult manager, a disgruntled employee. Most of the time the individual is responding rationally to a structure that gave them no alternative. Fix the structure and the personalities become manageable. Fix the personalities and the same problem arrives with new names.
The record is the deliverable
Advice that leaves no document behind has to be remembered, and memory is exactly what fails under pressure. Every piece of work here produces something you keep: a memorandum, a determination with its reasoning, a policy, a file. That is what an employer is left with when the person who did the work is gone.
Fairness and defensibility are the same discipline
The practices that make an employer hard to sue are, almost without exception, the practices that make it a decent place to work: consistent treatment, stated expectations, a real opportunity to respond, decisions explained. Employers who pursue only the legal half get a compliance program nobody believes in. The two are worth doing together.
Say what you cannot do
The most expensive advice an employer receives is confident advice from someone outside their competence. This practice states its boundary in writing, refers what belongs elsewhere, and would rather lose a piece of work than take one it cannot do properly.