Fractional HR for California businesses
The person you call before you decide.
Six areas of work, delivered as one ongoing relationship rather than a menu of engagements. Most people arrive because of one of them and stay for the rest.
So what is a maven?
Someone who knows their stuff inside and out.
A maven is the trusted expert people turn to when they need a real answer, not textbook theory. That is the whole idea behind Maven Works HR.
It was born from a simple premise: California business owners should not have to become employment law experts just to run their companies. Led by Lindsey Duenat, PHR, we have spent over fifteen years in the trenches with businesses like yours, turning HR headaches into systems that actually work.
We are not here to complicate your life with more paperwork and policies. We are here to simplify it, protect it, and let you focus on what you do best, which is running your business.
Where the work actually goes
Six areas, each headed by the situation that sends people looking rather than by the name of the category.
Employee Relations
Someone on the team is a problem and nobody wants to deal with it
Personality clashes between team members, performance issues that are not improving, difficult conversations that have been put off for months. These get handled professionally rather than avoided, and handled in a way that holds up if anyone later asks how the decision was made.
Compliance & Training
Your managers are making decisions nobody has trained them to make
Practical training on performance documentation, difficult conversations, and harassment prevention, so managers can address problems early instead of escalating them. Most employment risk is created by a well-meaning manager who did not know what not to say.
Leave Management
An employee asked for a leave and nobody knows the rules
Everything from determining eligibility through to managing the return-to-work conversation, step by step, so employees get the support they are entitled to while the business stays protected. Leave is where good intentions most often turn into exposure.
Risk Assessment
You suspect there are gaps but don’t know where
A thorough review of policies, employee files, and day-to-day practice, to find the vulnerabilities before they become expensive. The output is a prioritised list of what to fix, not a document dump.
Employer Documents
Your handbook is out of date, or borrowed from someone else’s business
An employee handbook and California-compliant policies covering everything from time-off requests to workplace conduct, written for how your business actually operates rather than adapted from a template that was built for somebody else.
Onboarding
New hires arrive and figure it out as they go
A structured system that sets clear expectations and builds engagement from the first day, so the first week stops depending on who happens to be free to show someone around.
What the retainer includes
One monthly fee set by team size. No hourly billing, and no working out whether a question was worth asking before you ask it.
- Unlimited advisory calls and email support
- California employment law monitoring and policy updates
- Annual employee handbook review and refresh
- Real-time guidance on employee relations
- Support on hiring, firing, and termination decisions
- Leave of absence administration support
- Policy interpretation for management decisions
- Performance management coaching
What this isn’t
Weighing it against an in-house hire instead? Fractional HR vs a full-time HR manager sets the two side by side on cost, capacity and seniority.
Not a PEO
You keep your payroll provider, your benefits broker, and your workers’ compensation carrier. Nothing moves onto someone else’s platform and nothing about how you employ people changes.
Not payroll or benefits administration
This is advice, not processing. Outsourced HR usually means the admin goes off-site; here the admin stays where it is and the judgement comes in. The work is the call before the decision, not the paperwork after it.
Not a staffing agency
Though full-cycle hiring is available as a project when you need it, rather than as part of the retainer.
Not ready for a retainer
Not ready for a monthly retainer?
Every piece of project work is available on its own: investigations, wage and hour audits, a handbook build, a complex termination. Most people start with one of those, or with the Business Protection Scorecard, and move to a retainer once they can see what they are dealing with.
Not sure which of these you need?
Most people aren’t. They just know something isn’t right. Describe what’s actually happening and you’ll get a straight answer about which part of this is the real problem, and whether you need a retainer at all.
Lindsey Duenat, PHR
Founder, Maven Works HR
Or reach Lindsey directly
Every enquiry gets a reply within one business day, from Lindsey rather than an autoresponder.