From HR and Payroll chaos to stable, trusted, and compliant teams

How a 5-week diagnostic became a full HR turnaround during an active 1,000+ to 400-person downsizing, and a payroll vendor transition so clean no one internally noticed

Executive Summary

A global BPO’s Bulgarian HR function looked, from the outside, like a people problem: unresponsive, disorganized, blamed for constant payroll errors, and midway through cutting headcount from over 1,000 to 400 employees. A 5-week diagnostic found it wasn’t only a people problem but also a systems-and-tools mess.

The fix: a rebuilt HR model, a hired and onboarded HR Manager, every compliance gap closed, and when the Payroll Specialist resigned unexpectedly, a personally run payroll cycle and vendor handoff so seamless that not one employee, manager, or executive noticed the change.

The Client

The Challenge

The VP of HR & Legal (based in the US and responsible for the Bulgarian HR team) had lost visibility into what was actually happening on the ground. Two very different stories were reaching her: the HR team said they were drowning in work, while employees and site management said HR was nowhere to be found. HR was unresponsive to emails, unavailable when needed, and when someone did manage to reach them, they often didn’t have an answer.

On top of that, payroll contained errors almost every month. Part of the root cause traced back to HR, which fed employee data to the Payroll department.

The timing made everything harder: the business needed to reduce headcount from roughly 1,000 to 400 employees in stages, and partway through the engagement, the HR Manager and one HR Business Partner both resigned.

The stakes

Any one of these issues, left alone through a downsizing, becomes a legal exposure, a reputational one, or both. Together, they were compounding.

The company’s Global Head of HR didn’t need a report confirming what she suspected. She needed someone who could tell her, fast, whether this was fixable, and then fix it before the next redundancy wave hit.

Approach

What a 5-week assessment actually found

To find out what was actually happening (not what people assumed was happening), we ran a structured assessment of both HR and Payroll across three lenses: People, Systems/ Process, and Tools.

The result was a scored diagnostic report (the HR and Payroll function scored 3.08 out of 5 overall, “needs improvement”) that separated genuine performance gaps from structural ones.

For example, it showed that most of the team’s poor internal reputation stemmed from a previous team’s mistakes, not the people currently in the role.

The report came with a concrete, phased action plan the client could start acting on immediately.

The client’s response wasn’t “thanks for the report.” It was an offer to stay and run the fix.

Stepping in as Fractional HR Manager to rebuild HR mid-downsizing

The client was impressed enough with the assessment to ask Maria to lead the fix themselves, on a fractional basis. 

What we changed:

The model. We recommended transitioning from a task-based distribution of responsibilities to a dedicated HR model to better align with the new team and office size. 

Under the previous HRM, HRBP, and HRA structure, over 60% of responsibilities fell under administrative and compliance tasks, which were handled by the HR Administrator (HRA), while the HRBP remains underutilized due to limited HRBP-specific duties.

We introduced a structure with two HR Generalists (HRGs). While the title change may seem minor, it provides much-needed clarity.  In the Bulgarian market, an HRBP typically oversees the entire employee lifecycle rather than handling administrative tasks such as contract management and sick leave.  The HR Generalist title more accurately reflects the blend of administrative and advisory responsibilities required at the Client.

Each HRG will be dedicated to specific teams and responsible for the full employee administration cycle, ensuring clear ownership and accountability. They will also provide backup support for one another during periods of absence.

The leadership gap. Rewrote the HR Manager job description, deliberately profiling someone strategic and hands-on, since the previous hire had been neither. Then led the search and personally onboarded the replacement.

The person everyone would have replaced. Instead of cutting the overloaded HR Administrator loose, built her a transition path into a Generalist role. 

The compliance exposure. Closed every gap the assessment had flagged: audited and corrected the maternity and paternity leave tracking, resolved the sick leave documentation backlog, and fixed the shift-schedule compliance issue an internal escalation had surfaced.

The trust problem. Ran direct workshops with Team Managers and Operations Managers to reset expectations and stop escalations from routing around HR entirely, addressing the “HR is unresponsive” perception at its actual source instead of just its symptom.

None of it paused for the downsizing. It happened inside it.

Leading Payroll through a vendor transition

Midway through the engagement, the Payroll Specialist resigned unexpectedly. As a result, the Client decided not to replace the role and instead outsourced payroll to an external vendor.

So for one month, the work became running payroll directly while preparing it for transition:

Data audit. Conducted a comprehensive payroll data audit to identify and correct historical errors that had been generating employee complaints for months.

Payroll execution: Managed the full monthly payroll cycle end-to-end.

Process mapping: Documented all payroll processes, templates, documents, and data dependencies required by the external vendor, building the transition package in parallel with day-to-day payroll operations.

Transition: Successfully handed over payroll to the external vendor with zero disruption: no delayed payslips, no missed payments, and no employee complaints. No one outside the immediate team was even aware that the transition had taken place.

Set for success

Having built the internal team’s capability and confidence, we transferred ownership and day-to-day responsibility to them.

What changed, end to end

From the people who lived it

If you’re looking at something similar

If your HR function is showing symptoms of underperformance, before you assume it’s a people problem, it’s worth finding out whether it’s actually a system or tool wearing a people problem’s face. That’s exactly what a People Impact Assessment is built to find, in weeks, not quarters.