Every HR team knows the feeling: you write your to-do list the night before, and by the time you've had your first cup of coffee, it's already obsolete. That familiar chaos was the starting point for the latest episode of HR at the Table®, Verified First's recurring webinar series for HR and talent acquisition leaders.
This installment, People & Process: Building Smarter HR Operations for Your Team, featured Ramona Agrela, Senior Vice President of UCI Health and Vice Chancellor of Human Resources at UC Irvine. Agrela oversees HR programs, policies, and support for nearly 34,000 employees across UC Irvine's academic campus, College of Health Sciences, and a health system that includes seven hospitals and more than 200 ambulatory sites. She's spent 26 years with the university, including two decades leading its HR function.
Across the conversation, Agrela offered a clear-eyed, experience-tested view of how HR teams can reduce administrative drag, manage change without losing people's trust, and keep culture alive even when the daily task list feels endless. Keep reading to see her key insights on HR operations.
Agrela's first observation reframed a problem most HR professionals recognize instantly: the challenge isn't any single task; it's volume and competing urgency. HR teams manage hiring, employee relations, compliance, org changes, performance management, and workforce planning all at once, and every requester believes their issue deserves top priority. As she put it, HR professionals spend enormous mental energy simply reprioritizing minute by minute rather than moving impactful projects forward.
That pressure has intensified as the function itself has evolved. Leadership no longer treats HR as a purely administrative service — it now expects strategic advice, operational expertise, and change leadership, all layered on top of the day-to-day service work. Agrela sees this as good news, since it reflects years of HR earning a seat at the table. But it also raises the stakes on credibility. At UC Irvine, her team works to "find the yes" with clients whenever possible, and when they can't say yes outright, they focus on explaining why, offering alternatives, and solving the underlying problem rather than simply declining a request. Her reasoning: an unresolved issue, or a client who feels dismissed, doesn't go away — it comes back, often with less trust attached.
On technology's role in reducing that burden, Agrela was direct: automation should remove friction, not replace relationships. UC Irvine has automated much of the transactional side of onboarding, allowing new hires to complete paperwork before their first day so they can spend it building connections instead of filling out forms. But she was equally clear that technology handles transactions while people build trust and belonging. UC Irvine even modeled its new-hire orientation after the university's freshman convocation, aiming for energy and excitement rather than a checklist experience — right down to sending new employees a branded swag box before their first day on campus.
Her guiding principle for freed-up capacity: efficiency gives you time, but the client experience is where you choose to spend it. The goal isn't to make HR more efficient for its own sake — it's to redirect that reclaimed time toward leadership coaching, workforce planning, retention strategy, and the kind of client interactions that actually move the organization forward.
Shifting to change management, Agrela pointed to a common blind spot: organizations spend most of their energy designing the solution and very little preparing people for the journey. She's drawn to John Kotter's 8-step change model, not as a rigid formula but as a reminder that successful change is about building commitment to a new way of working — not simply rolling out a new process.
She illustrated this with UC Irvine Health's acquisition of four hospitals a few years ago. More than 4,200 employees suddenly faced enormous uncertainty about their roles, their sites, and their future. Rather than rushing integration, Agrela's team spent a full year on-site — listening, answering questions, and staying visible, even before the acquisition was finalized. Her reasoning: people need to see and hear from leadership directly, not just receive an email, in order to build the trust that change requires.
A few principles ran through her advice on managing resistance and buy-in:
Feedback loops matter here, too. While surveys have their place, Agrela said her team leans heavily on focus groups and direct conversations, even when they're uncomfortable to hear. A redesigned performance management system, for example, only gained traction after her team ran a 360-degree focus group with leaders, supervisors, and frontline staff to understand exactly why adoption was lagging.
For Agrela, day-to-day operations and long-term, people-first culture aren't competing priorities — they're inseparable. Culture, in her view, isn't built during an annual retreat; it's built through thousands of everyday interactions: every hiring decision, every coaching conversation, every difficult email.
At UC Irvine, that philosophy shows up in concrete practices. The team runs an annual HR Innovation Day, giving staff a full day away from daily tasks to work in teams on process improvements, new tools, or creative solutions — reinforcing that HR itself deserves the same investment in growth and ownership it champions for the rest of the organization. To keep mission and purpose from fading into the background of daily work, UC Irvine HR uses a laminated "placemat" that visually maps out its strategic plan and North Star — empower people's success — and revisits it constantly in meetings.
Agrela was candid that building a culture of innovation requires psychological safety first. Teams need to feel it's safe to question existing processes, and leaders need to be genuinely open to experimentation. For HR leaders navigating a less receptive leadership team, her advice was to start small: run a low-stakes pilot in a single department, let people see and experience the results firsthand, and use that proof point to earn support for a broader rollout.
Her closing piece of advice for HR professionals looking to move from reactive to strategic: stop measuring activity and start measuring impact. Instead of tracking how many calls were fielded or forms processed, track the outcomes that matter — client experience, employee success, and the specific difference HR made that week. And don't wait for leadership to ask for that information; share it proactively.
This recap only scratches the surface of Agrela's insights — including candid audience Q&A on leading change through budget cuts, building buy-in without executive support, and keeping culture consistent across a 32,000-person organization. If you manage people, processes, or both, the full discussion is worth your time.
HR at the Table® is hosted monthly by Verified First, typically on the third Tuesday of the month. Visit the HR at the Table page on verifiedfirst.com to register for upcoming episodes and access SHRM/HRCI credit for past sessions.
We are proud members of the Professional Background Screening Association (PBSA)
Verified First is NIST 800-53 compliant.
© 2026 Verified First, LLC | Privacy Policy | Legal
