People are the Purpose — You Can’t Love HR Without a Heart for PEOPLE

Note: I wrote this October 24, 2019, and the blogging equivalent of leaving an email in the draft folder happened…

I attended a workshop yesterday on mental health in the workplace. It was helpful, informative, and I feel more prepared when a situation arises as a result. The focus was on identifying and responding to possible signs of struggle in the workplace, including but not limited to: anxiety, depression, psychosis, suicide, and substance use disorder.

At one point in time, when the instructor was teaching us techniques and questions to ask to gain understanding of the situation, one of the attendees expressed that she was not comfortable asking an employee if they were thinking of committing suicide — that this person wasn’t their close friend or family member, and that they would prefer to get someone else to talk to them.

Despite my best efforts to be objective and listen non-judgmentally – a skill we had literally just gone over, I had a visceral reaction to this statement, and I said out loud that we don’t always get a choice to be comfortable in our conversations. The purpose of the workshop is to be better prepared when these situations happen. We don’t get to filter out the uncomfortable conversations. Our people need us when they need us. We can’t just tap out or tag in someone else.

We don’t get to filter out the uncomfortable conversations. Our people need us when they need us. We can’t just tap out or tag in someone else.

Pretending that this isn’t an epidemic doesn’t prepare us to help our people when they need it. I highly recommend for anyone to attend this training. There have been times in my career when I felt that I wasn’t the most prepared for the direction the conversation turned, and I’m encouraged to see that we have identified this skills gap and are providing these programs.

During lunch, I overheard a conversation where someone was referring to their soda fountain at work having 2 specific types of pop because it was what she preferred. The “perks” of being in charge of the project, she said. I was so disappointed that a peer, representing HR to her organization, completely missed an opportunity to love on her people and get what they might have preferred. It’s a little thing, but the focus was way off the mark.

My faith in humanity was restored attending #DisruptHR last night. These are my people. No one talked about how to make their job better for them or how to use the system to benefit themselves. In fact, there were discussions of enlisting the help of non-HR people to be grassroots culture ambassadors and appeal to various pockets of the population – not just the typical ideas. You can learn more about DisruptHR here: https://disrupthr.co/.