It’s no secret that employees spend the majority of their life working. A nine to five for five days a week is draining, and it’s unrealistic for us to expect employees to shut off their personalities when they feel like a human-machine. That’s why it’s important to establish a more people-centric strategy to empower workforce members.
Today’s guest, Traci Chernoff, is an expert in people, strategy, and innovation. In this episode, she will share a few things about what we can do to help restore humanity in the Human Resource Department. Let’s hear some golden nuggets from this professional.
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Bringing the Human Back in Human Resources with Traci Chernoff
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Have you ever had a job where you felt less than human, you felt like nothing more than a cog in a machine, and had trouble finding your purpose, or why you’re really there?
My guest today, Traci Chernoff, is an HR executive, really involved in a lot of initiatives around the future of work, as well as the host of the podcast, Bringing the Human Back in Human Resources.
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Traci, welcome to the program.
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Definitely. The first thing I want to ask you — given that I suspect that a lot of my listeners have had this experience, or maybe even currently having this experience in their place of employment. We’re living in a time when a lot of people are reconsidering — whether you call it the great resignation, the great reshuffle, whatever you want to call it — their relationship with their work. What does the phrase “bringing the human back in human resources” mean to you?
It’s a great question. To me, what’s so interesting about this is that the human was already in human resources. It’s the reason why it’s the title of the department or it’s the phrase that we use when it comes to this industry. When it comes to really why I always talk about bringing the human back, it’s that we lost our way. For me, the way that I grew up, so to speak, in HR is that it was clear that there were some really, really strong foundations in the industry and in the practice.
My takeaway was that there wasn’t really enough of a focus on the people behind the problems or the people behind the solutions. One of the reasons why I started the podcast, Bringing the Human Back to Human Resources, was because I wanted to make a call to action that we had to take a look at the way that we were operating and the way that we were addressing these problems, and solve for them through a people-centric approach.
I always say that people are at the center of everything that we do. It’s the reason why our businesses today — there’s not one business I’m aware of, at least, that can operate without a human being. That’s really what it means to me.
Oh man. I’m picturing some weird, dystopian, future movie with a robot business and everything’s just robots.
There’s still going to have to be someone to help that robot. There’s still going to be someone fixing the robot. There’s not going to be a robot fixing a robot, because then, who’s going to fix that robot?
Yeah, exactly. There was a movie when I was younger. Will Smith was in it. It took place in the year 2030. iRobot. That was about robots building robots.
Yeah, but look, you couldn’t have a movie without Will Smith. See? Exactly right.
Or the writers, or any other people. Let’s start with a little context about the history of human resources. You talk about the human always being there, but then human resources losing its way at some point. How did that whole process, for people who don’t quite know what happened in the 20th century, play out?
Yeah. It’s a good question. First of all, my understanding of HR is very modern, because I started my career when it wasn’t called personnel. The HR department, so to speak, in a business, was first the personnel department, or maybe the payroll department, the benefits department. As businesses shifted, there are more demands, especially in the United States. Laws became more litigious, actually, just in general, the legal compliance around having a business that requires people to work in it and work for it. There are so many legal considerations there. From my perspective, that’s when things started to shift from personnel into HR.
There was this centralizing of the people’s side of the business. Payroll and benefits didn’t just sit with the payroll department. Now, it’s sitting with human resources, because human resources is a centralizing of the resources for the human beings in the business. All of these stigmas around HR, like HR is not super helpful, HR only cares about the 9-to-5 and doing what they have to do day in day out. That perspective of that plug-in place and not really considering the human being that they’re helping, it comes from somewhere. It comes from that transition from my perspective.
They’re really looking at how Human Resources is exactly that. It’s a resource for the people in the business.
To add on to that, HR has now taken on even more of a strategic role, which is really where I’ve typically played a role in the organizations that I’ve worked for. HR business partners, for example, directors, those titles that I’ve held — those are people in HR positions who are actually perfectly positioned — I don’t want to say wedged — between the business and the people in terms of protecting their interests, which is where some of these stigmas around HR being two-faced or only telling you what you wanted to hear to your face. Those stigmas come from this feeling that we are protecting the business, and we’re also protecting the people, and how can we do both.
The thing is, you can do both.
Service providers in general -- we haven't been trained how to price and how to sell. Share on X
When we don’t know what we’re doing, we avoid it. We’re experts, so we know what we’re doing, and we’re providing our service. All those other things feel like a distraction to us. What ends up happening then is we avoid it. We set our pricing when we start our company. We just don’t worry about it anymore, because it feels like conflict to have to change it, because then, you have to deal with objections. You have to answer questions.
All of those things keep us stuck and go back to that glass-ceiling idea that we’re almost creating it in our own companies without realizing it. It’s the same thing with selling. My clients, in general, would much rather be delivering their service than bringing in new clients. When I can help them see sales in a different way, I really help them see their whole company in a different way. That reduces their stress. They’re more receptive to working on things that make them uncomfortable, like pricing and sales.
You’ve talked before about uncomfortable conversations. I think a lot of people do tend to avoid uncomfortable conversations. It results in strained relationships, passive-aggressive behavior, all these other things. What role does embracing uncomfortable conversations and understanding their true context play in reducing the stress and increasing the revenue in a business?
When you are less direct, there can be a lot of misunderstandings. Just because you say it, doesn’t mean the listener gets it. We make that mistake every day. We, as humans, make that mistake every day. We think, “Well, we said it. We don’t need to say it again. Certainly, I was clear enough. Certainly, the other person gets it.” That is almost never the case. We make all these assumptions about communication. When you are very direct, very transparent, you have what I call key points, so you know what you want to communicate, and you repeat that, because people are not good listeners. They’re so distracted. They’re not tuning in to you.
As a business owner, that can be really frustrating. However, you have the opportunity to improve your communication and your listening skills through using tools. For example, I recommend, in the sales method, that you use something called a needs analysis. That is asking strategic questions of your prospect. When you do that and, of course, you’re listening to the answers, you’re also reflecting back and double-checking to make sure they got it, to make sure you got it, that you understood what the point they were trying to make. All of those communications methods are critical as you are building your business.
That reminds me of whenever people will listen to something and then repeat back what they just said, and make sure they understand the context of it. It says, “What I’m hearing from you is that this is what’s going on, this is how it’s affecting your business, and this is what you’re looking for.” Is that a way people can get more comfortable with the idea of being direct? Whatever fear comes around when someone’s afraid to be direct, so they beat around the bush. They’d be like, “Well, it’d be nice if we had something different,” as opposed to saying directly, “No, this is what I want.”
That’s called active listening, what you just described, of reflecting back. There is a whole method built around active listening. Again, it’s part of what I teach, because, to your exact point, that is the foundational aspect for everything else — that level of communication.
Yes, there are uncomfortable conversations. Absolutely. Sometimes, you’ll have them with a prospect, or with a client, sometimes with a family member. We all deal with that.
Yeah.
Those misunderstandings — there’s a big difference and there’s a big gap between knowing what you want and getting what you want. It’s very pronounced for women in particular, partially, because of the broken-cookie effect. We’re always putting others first. We may not even recognize what we need, what we want. Once we do, then we may not be comfortable to speak up, and to ask for that thing, including appropriate compensation for the results that you’re bringing to your clients.
What are the mechanics? What are the calculations? How do you develop these or customize the tools so that you can move things forward in a way that’s authentic for you, brings in more revenue, and doesn’t cause more stress?
A lot of these women that you’re working with are trying to overcome what you refer to as the broken-cookie method, or believing that others need to be taken care of first, or that their value is lower than what it really is in this compensation. One of the things I’m wondering is, I’ve heard some competing schools of thought as far as how people go about making changes within themselves. Of course, those changes reflect in their environment. Some people often talk about this idea of changing by doing. A clear example of that would be, you could be happier by simply smiling. Even if it’s a phony smile, it’ll release the endorphins in your brain, and therefore, just make you happy.
Other people believe that you need to do the work internally before it reflects outward. You can’t really expect people to treat you with the proper amount of respect until you go inside and determine that you have this level of respect. you deserve this level of compensation, you deserve this life even which is what really the end result or the ultimate goal is — the life of being less stressed and still spending most of their time doing the thing that they love doing. My question is, as you’re working with these women to overcome the broken-cookie effect, which of these two schools of thought do you feel like you lean a little bit more towards?
Like most things in life, I think it’s a combination. I think you do have to do the internal work. I founded my company in 2006. I’ve been working with women business owners for a very long time. Like all experts, I thought, “Oh, I get this. I understand all the challenges women are dealing with. I am a woman business owner.” I fell into that trap of “I know better”.
I went out and did some market research. I found what every expert finds if they are brave enough to ask the questions, I don’t know all the challenges. I’ve made assumptions, so I needed to change my mindset. That was the first thing. I need to be listening closer to my audience. When I started asking, sometimes, difficult questions, but certainly, strategic questions about the challenges that women business owners are facing, I got answers that surprised me. I will also say I was thrilled.
This goes to changing your mind by doing. I’m going through market research. I’m interviewing people. I’m recording that. I’m processing the information I’m getting where I thought the issue was going to be about juggling a million things. I thought that was the number one issue for women business owners. That wasn’t. What I realized is, it’s a symptom. What I kept hearing was revenues go up and down. How do I get steady revenue? How do I build on what I’ve already built? That’s what I kept hearing and that’s how I narrowed the message to really understanding how women price, how we do it now, and how it would be more effective for us as people and us as business owners.
That shifting my mind by doing is part of what I did. I also teach people how to shift your mindset. For example, I have an exercise about how you attach value, how you change your mindset. I have a four-step process for how you can start shifting how you think, bringing to people’s awareness these limiting beliefs, and believing that you have to price based on what the market can bear — it’s a huge limiting belief — and understanding your own value, and how to talk about it, because it feels like bragging. We avoid that.
The business interest should be the interest of the people. Share on X
That’s really, to me, what that shift has called for. Now, we’re in the middle of another shift where, to your point, the great resignation and great realignment, all of those things — now, HR people are in a position of needing to be even more strategic, super agile, experts in compliance. Now, we’ve added DE&I, CSR, and different initiatives that have taken what existed in HR in a very small fraction of the day-to-day.
In my experience, I’ve even had people who have owned those things outside of HR. Now, HR has become this huge conglomerate and huge part of the day-to-day for a business, and actually something that all of us HR professionals have been trying to move to, which is, you can’t run a business without HR.
The importance of the people that run your company is something that, it seems like even before COVID, was starting to get a little bit more attention over the course of the 2010s. For a little while, particularly, I feel like in the 90s and the 2000s, it wasn’t really getting that much attention at all. You’re saying that the reason why it got to be where it was, at the turn of the century, was that these personnel and payroll departments merged together and became these bigger conglomerate-type departments.
The stereotypes that I’ve heard — I’ve heard a lot of people say, at least, back 10-12 years ago, “HR is not for you.” HR is for the company. HR is for the company to cover their ass and enforce their policies.
Yeah, or HR is only responsible for hiring. That’s also a super common stereotype. Even my grandma still has no idea what I do. I talked about this in the very first episode of my podcast. Sometimes, it’s really hard to explain what I do. It’s like, “No, grandma. There’s so much more to my job than hiring and firing people.”
I think the biggest takeaway for me, even in the experience and working through COVID, is that major life moments around the world change the way that businesses operate. COVID changed everything about the workplace, and work, and the future of work. We know this to be true. I can only think about in the early 2000s with 9/11, even some of the wars that we were involved with, those things play a huge role in the way businesses operate even on a smaller scale.
I’ve always been in retail, but I can imagine that, at that time — because I wasn’t working in HR in the early 2000s. I was still basically growing up. I remember the shift, for example, when 9/11 happened. I vividly remember the change in society. People were really trying to band together more closely. I can only presume that businesses did change the way they operated, because they had to care for people differently. They had to provide different benefits. I don’t know when EAP started. This is probably something that I have to look into. EAP is employee assistance program.
Thank you.
Yeah. Many, many businesses have EAPs. I can only imagine that employee assistance programs were elevated. Maybe they existed before the 2000s, but I can only imagine that they were elevated from these points of really traumatic and life-altering moments in the world.
It’s interesting, because I had a previous podcast guest discuss having gone into corporate boardrooms in the 1990s. This was an older gentleman that had been at it for a little bit longer. When he discussed trying to make employees happy, satisfied, fulfilled, whatever your favorite term is for a positive employee experience, being laughed out of boardrooms in the 1990s. It sounds like you’re saying that 9/11 was the first in the series of events that has been gradually moving us more in the direction of having to have what you describe as the human component to human resources.
Yeah. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Technically, I’m a millennial although I don’t know that I necessarily feel that way. I was born in the 90s, and I vividly remember the difference between pre-9/11 life and post 9/11 life. Also, being from New Jersey, there were so many things that impacted you differently.
Yeah. You’re right there.
Yeah, my family, and their work, and all of these things that were so closely connected to that moment. As an adult, living through COVID, I started to think about — wow, these changes and the way that people demand and expect more from their employers. Our lives are way more than just work. Those life moments result in people saying, “Gosh, what am I doing with my life? What really matters?” People were either super happy with what they were doing at work, or were like, “Wow. I do not enjoy what I’m doing, and I must leave.” That is what we’re seeing with the great resignation.
To me, all of it is related.
We’re even seeing that now with Ukraine and everything that’s going on there. I think it’s all totally, totally related. I’m not an expert. These are just my thoughts.
Yeah. It’s great to have all those perspectives on it, because I have actually heard other people say the same thing about the great resignation/reshuffle, whatever it is. During COVID, there was at least a short period for a lot of people’s lives where people are worried about the end of their lives. They’re worried about whether this sickness was going to engulf us all and said to themselves, “Okay. If this is really the end, why did I spend so much time at the office? Why did they put in those long hours?” People who are on their deathbed rarely expressed their regret that “I wish I had worked longer hours.” You know what I mean? For a while, it seems like in our work culture, at least in the second half of the 20th century, long hours were seen as some sort of a virtue in work.
Yeah. This is exactly it. When I think about, to all of your points — because they are so right — why people have decided to leave their jobs and try something else, it’s really because we are human beings. We can’t separate who we are in real life and who we are at work. It’s like in real life, but it’s like you’re still you. You might put on a different face or use a different voice at work, but really, you’re you. I think about my colleagues who were really very, very, very focused on working for organizations that have had extremely built out DE&I initiatives and all of that. That was a huge life-altering moment for them, whether they’re people of color or people directly impacted by companies that aren’t saying something in terms of what their DE&I initiatives are and really standing behind what they say they’re going to do.
That’s one example of how people don’t want to be different inside of work and outside of work. There’s this expectation that businesses and employers are not only responding appropriately, but also, they’re physically and emotionally supporting their employees. This is where psychological safety really comes into. Honestly, this is why HR had the highest growth in the sense of the most openings last year in 2021, or hiring.
Wow. I did not see that.
Yeah. I’ll have to find the statistics for you. This is a reputable source. All of this, to me, is because the balance of power has shifted. Businesses are no longer in the driver’s seat. It’s the employee in the driver’s seat, the candidate in the driver’s seat saying, “I expect you to have well-developed DE&I initiatives, well-developed social responsibility approaches.” People want to work for companies that they feel they are represented by.
This was my point on psychological safety. Even I can think about a time for myself where I felt like I didn’t necessarily have psychological safety. Basically, for anyone who doesn’t know what psychological safety is, it really, in summation, is being in an environment, in a place of work, or really anywhere, where you feel comfortable enough to share thoughts, perspectives, concerns, fears, openly in a safe place. You’re not going to be chastised for the things that you bring up.
Psychological safety doesn’t mean that you’re always going to be agreed with or that you’re always going to get what you want. Rather, it’s that you don’t have this fear of an adverse reaction. I always say, on my podcast, that life is not without adversity. There are always going to be people against you. There are always going to be opinions that don’t align with yours. There are always going to be people that you work with that you don’t get along with, and that’s okay. You have to have adversity in life.
Psychological safety to me is about being able to have the conversation. If you don’t respect someone, you don’t have psychological safety. If there’s mutual respect, you can have conversations that are sometimes super polarizing or upsetting, but at the end of the day, you respect one another. You can have that conversation in a mature and open way.
That’s interesting, because I’ve been reading quite a bit about psychological safety and its relation to innovation, something that, as the world and technology moves faster and faster, changes faster and faster. In order to survive, a company needs to foster that environment of creativity and innovation. If people don’t feel psychologically safe, they won’t bring up their ideas. They won’t even say, “I have this idea.” You won’t be tapping into the old fashioned idea of an organization where all the innovation, and all the ideas, and all the commands come from the top or come from the center, however you want to describe those particular diagrams.
I feel like, as you alluded to, there are some misconceptions around psychological safety. Psychological safety does not mean that you’re not going to hear something that upsets you even. You have to be ready to hear that. What do you think a person who’s listening now can do individually in wherever they’re going in life, whether it be in their organizations and their work, or even their social circles, their families, and everything like that, to foster an environment of psychological safety so that more people can just be out and open with whoever they are or whatever ideas they have that potentially make things better?
This is such a good question. My first instinct is — this might sound counterintuitive — but to encourage critical thinking. Actually, I think, especially with social media, there is an absence of that. I think that people are looking — people is such a general term. I can even say for myself, we consume content in swipes. We look at things. We formulate opinions after a five-second video or 30-second video. That actually, to me, prevents not only critical thinking, but it also prevents us from having conversations with one another, because we’ve always already formulated an opinion on something we might not even have any context, or information, or experience on.
I think the first thing is to really encourage critical thinking. That, honestly, is part of the values of a company.
That is, to me, something that prevents psychological safety — when people just say things to say them rather than really thinking about their audience, really thinking about how what they’re going to say could impact someone else. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is, I would say, it probably is more simple than we make it out to be. That’s to just allow the conversation. I think a lot of organizations are afraid of having this open format, open dialogue, because they don’t know what they’re going to get. They don’t know if the person who’s really disgruntled is going to poison the well. That person is disgruntled. They’re going to poison the well regardless. If you allow the opportunity for people to have an open and candid dialogue with one another, actually those people who are really engaged become more engaged. The people who maybe are on the precipice of being engaged or being disengaged, they might become more engaged. It’s like, you walk away thinking, “Wow, my employer trusts us enough to have a mature and respectful conversation.”
Not every conversation is going to be happy. It’s not going to be agreeable. That’s okay. I think my perspective has always been, if you can at least open the floor for people to share their thoughts and opinions, then yes, it might be scary. Actually, it will be scary. I remember sweating profusely when I opened up the floor for different conversations that I had no idea what to expect the conversation to be. The reality is you walk away getting that feeling of, “Wow, I think I did something really good.” I think those people who decided to speak up feel really good.
It’s not easy to actually speak up. I have been the person to, like I said, not only open the floor, but I’ve also been the person in various companies to speak about something that was deeply personal to me but really hard to talk about, because it’s vulnerable. You have to be vulnerable, and you have to be open to people not agreeing with you. That feeling of knowing, “Okay, well. I just spoke about it. I didn’t get fired. People don’t hate me. I didn’t have any negative repercussions. That is such a wonderful feeling to talk about something that’s really maybe weighing heavily on you or really impactful on your experience as an individual. To be able to just talk about it, makes it feel less of a burden or like less of a burden.
When I think about my colleagues, my friends who are people of color and have talked about their experience as Americans, for example, and the different takeaways that they’ve had. Having the ability to talk about it has allowed them to feel like they’re a little bit more understood. Maybe it’s not their responsibility to teach anyone, but that feeling of being understood and being heard is really, really valuable to people.
Organizations can often have a problem, but since no one feels comfortable speaking up about it, it goes unspoken, undiscussed. All of a sudden, the ship’s going down, and you have no idea why. All of a sudden, the ship’s going down, because no one felt comfortable feeling that way.
2020 was the year that there was the most upheaval. COVID came. There was George Floyd and all the protests. One of the things, when I thought through that whole year, was the idea that maybe if there’s a larger, spiritual message behind it, it is that we need to stop avoiding these uncomfortable conversations. We need to start being ready to hear stuff that we don’t like hearing but also be ready, be open to say, “Okay, this person had a different experience.”
How people exercise this brain muscle of avoiding, instantly reacting, or instantly taking offense to something that they might not like hearing. With some of these discussions around whether it be DE&I or anything else, there could be some things on both ends that people don’t like hearing. It’s often more than two sides, so I don’t want to simplify it, but on either side of the issue there are going to be different experiences and people expressing things in ways that don’t sound natural to people who’ve had different experiences.
Yeah, it’s true. Exposing problems, this is so true for even operational things. When employees feel comfortable saying, “Hey, so and so leader. I think we could be doing this way more efficiently.” If they can’t say that, the business is not going to progress, or it’s just going to take a really long time. It’s true that whether it’s something super small and detailed, or something super big like DE&I and corporate social responsibility, people need to be able to express those challenging or disagreeable perspectives. I say disagreeable, meaning, to go against the grain of what was the standard at that time. Let’s say the standard is set at X, and someone is saying, “Okay. I think we need to do things differently.” If people feel comfortable challenging the status quo, that you’ve already established quite a bit of psychological safety there.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah. That is critical thinking. Challenging the status quo is innately that. Psychological safety can feel like a bit of a double-edged sword, because I think there’s this feeling of, “Okay. We’re going to talk about things that are uncomfortable.” Those moments and feeling like, “Okay. I’m talking about something that’s important to me, but I might offend someone that disagrees with me.” That can work against the psychological safety that’s been established. It can feel like, “I feel comfortable talking about it, but I also don’t feel comfortable talking about it, because I don’t want to offend someone else,” or someone talks about something that’s really important to them, and they’re not thinking about the other person, and there’s another person who’s offended.
This is not a comment on DE&I. This is just generally speaking. Having differences in opinion can feel uncomfortable.
To me, when you're uncomfortable, that's growth. Share on X
I was an athlete growing up. It’s in those moments of feeling challenged or your muscles are sore, and you’re huffing and puffing. That’s where you find growth. I think that there is so much opportunity in creating that openness. What comes to mind with realizing that not everyone’s going to agree with you and that’s okay, it comes to mind for me with social media, because I have such a love-hate relationship with social media.
So does every millennial.
Every millennial. I feel like I was totally born 10 years too late. I could have had a little bit more time without social media. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just too nostalgic on the dial-up days, where not everything was at your fingertips.
Yeah. You have to go into AOL and wait for that “ting-ting-ting.”
Yeah. I had to tell my parents to get off the phone. Yeah, exactly. “Get off the phone. I need some internet.” It wasn’t called WiFi. I think we called it like the internet
Yeah, it was AOL, or Prodigy, or whatever.
Yeah, oh my gosh. Anyway, that’s a story for another time. I think with social media, we are consuming so many opinions. I know, for me, the hate part of the love-hate relationship is that I feel totally overwhelmed by all of the opinions that are aligned with mine and the opinions that are not aligned with mine. I think that the heaviness that we all experienced, probably most of us experienced in 2020 between the pandemic and everything from a DE&I perspective too, was heavy. It was a lot to take in. It was a lot to deal with.
On top of that, you are consuming this content outside of work too. There’s no break from the discussion that really is super, super important and really impactful. I just think about this concept of — I think it’s the Dunbar number where humans are designed not to have–
150 people.
Yes.
Humans are designed to have up to 150 close relationships. Social media really challenges this concept. Share on XEven though you might not know someone who’s the influencer that stands for all the things that you believe in, and then they express something that goes against who you are and what you believe in, it’s like, “Oh my gosh. My world is coming to an end.” That intensity in our relationships inside of work, outside of work, can really have an impact on businesses. Gone are the days where you check your “baggage”. This concept of all-consuming content, it’s pervasive in your every second of every day.
I think it’s probably fairly unhealthy for psychological safety. Businesses are much more connected because of social media. They’re much more under a microscope, so to speak. People are expecting a certain standard, a certain level of involvement in different things that they didn’t necessarily have the responsibility of before.
I personally have to admit that I sometimes long for a world without social media. I think it’s been a big experiment in the human condition that we’re still trying to figure out how to operate with. We have seen the depression, violence, and suicide, and drug abuse rates skyrocket because of certain things about it.
I have this really weird theory that one of the driving forces behind this renewed explosion and interest in meditation is exactly that, like what you’re saying, the mind needing time, that it’s not ingesting more data. You need to consume data, but then you need to actually think it through and decide what you’re thinking, which is where this critical thinking comes from, because it’s the same thing. Just because someone says something on Twitter, just because you watch a YouTube video, doesn’t mean you have to agree with what they’re saying. You investigate yourself. You let it chew through your logic, your reasoning, practices, and figure out, “Okay, do I agree with this? What does this mean to me?”
Yeah, exactly. I sit in the sauna after the gym in the mornings, and I keep my phone in the locker. I just sit there, and I breathe. I try to turn off my thoughts and my mind, because it’s just so insane and intense. It’s like your mind is constantly going. Maybe it’s just me; I don’t know. If I have a problem, let me know, but I need that time where I’m not consuming something. I think we take for granted those moments of quiet. Those quiet moments are really worth a lot. I think about social media — even at work, how many people are not scrolling on Instagram, or looking at TikTok in between meetings? We all do it.
Sometimes, during meetings even.
Right, exactly. I’m not a scientist, but I can only imagine that our brains are not wired to take in all of that information. For me, most of my newsfeed are dogs and really happy stories, because that’s just what I love to interact with, but then you get something really heavy, and really sad, or really intense. It really messes with you, because it disrupts your day.
I think, most of the time, before consuming social media 24/7, you have an opportunity to reflect and to process. There is no processing in social media. It’s instant processing. This is where critical thinking comes in for me. We don’t have to critical think anymore, because we’re just being given information and 15-second reels, and that’s that. I think that has a huge impact on how people perform and come to work.
One of the things I wanted to make sure I talk to you about is that you have a lot of engagements that are around the future of work and employee engagement. I’ve talked about this in previous podcasts. A lot of people have seen the surveys that show roughly 1/3 of our workforce here in the US are actually engaged.
What do you see as being the key to all these changes, everything we’re seeing, making it happen in a way that will improve employee engagement going forward and make more people happy and productive at their jobs in general? Obviously, you’re going to have those bad days. You’ve got a fight with your spouse. You’ve got a bad fight with your dog, and you’re just not yourself today. In general — happy and engaged on most days.
This is the problem everyone’s trying to solve. I think the first thing is to realize that engagement is way more than just pay and benefits. I think for a long time, companies and HR professionals thought that engagement was only related to pay and benefits. We saw that at the beginning of the great resignation. Everyone’s like, “Okay. We’re going to increase pay. We’re going to increase pay, and everything’s going to be fine.” What happened? They increased pay, and people still left their jobs. They still were unhappy. It’s not about pay. It’s everything. It’s pay. Its benefits. It’s coworkers. It’s the flexibility in work. It’s predictability in work. It’s time-off. It’s who we are outside of work. It’s the work that we’re doing. It’s the company we work for. The list goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on.
So much of that is a problem that will probably always exist. Not every business is going to have the budget that employees expect or want them to have. They might not always be the most competitive from salary. For me, if you’re not competitive in salary, you have to have everything else. You have to make everything else so amazing — all of the benefits, all of the experiences, everything, the flexibility. Everything else has to be right, because pay is a huge part of engagement, but it’s not everything.
The other thing too is that human beings want flexibility. They want to have self-determination. I can only speak from my own experience. I wasn’t a great student growing up, but I knew what I wanted and what I needed. If a teacher told me that I had to read a book a certain way, but that wasn’t the right way for me, I would say, “No. I’m going to read it the way I want to read it..” I had great relationships with my teachers, but I also really challenged the status quo. It’s totally the way that I am today. I’m using that example, because I think about remote work. People don’t want to be told where and when they’re going to do their best work. They want to be trusted to do their best work when it makes sense for them. Not every industry has this privilege. I worked at Target, and I wouldn’t have been able to work remotely.
You mean shifts at target?
Yeah. This is why I’m at the company that I’m at today, Legion Technologies. We’re an A-powered workforce management company. Our mission is to turn hourly jobs into good jobs. All of this comes down to hourly employees making up 58% of the United States workforce.
Interesting.
The majority of Americans are working on an hourly basis. It’s a fact that most people probably do not know. I think most people probably think that the majority of Americans are salaried earners, but they’re not.
Especially salaried workers probably, but yes.
Yeah, exactly. The whole premise of driving this mission is that people, whether they’re hourly, salary, earning $10 an hour or $100 an hour, they want flexibility, and they want predictability in their lives. They want to be able to say, “Okay. I have a baby shower on Friday, and I don’t want to work that shift.” It’s a matter of trusting our employees to own their schedules and own how they perform and do the work. Obviously, that’s a super specific example of a retail employee.
I even think about my own role. I work fully remotely. I honestly have never been more engaged in the work that I’m doing, because I feel like I can start my day at 7:00 in order to get the work done before the West Coast team is up and Adam, or I could start my day at 9:30, because I have a meeting that’s running later, because it’s on Pacific time.
I think that is also a huge part of engagement -- that self-determination. Share on X
Finally, one of the other major pillars for me is the recognition that human beings are way more than the work that they do, and creating that environment for them to get involved beyond their work, have the opportunity to take time-off. It’s not just about the opportunity, but to really unplug when they’re on that paid time-off. I know that I’ve had PTO that I’ve worked through in the past, and that is the worst PTO. I’d rather not take PTO.
Is there a place in the system that you’re noticing that prevents a lot of organizations from having enough employees where people can work a normal amount of hours and people can take off and really be disconnected, because there’s someone else handling it? It seems like there’s a lot of organizations where there’s just a lot of pressure, and there’s just too much pressure to give them that work-life balance or work-life integration, however you want to describe it.
It’s a really good question, good point. I think it depends on the industry. Let’s say it’s a sales industry, or even in my own company, where we’re really very customer-facing, because we’re providing software as a system. There has to be, at some level, also setting of expectations for the customer.
Thank you to Jeff Bezos, because this is why we are a 24/7 operation in terms of a population, not my company, but 24/7 human beings. We now expect packages to be delivered within either that day or within two days. I don’t know how Amazon even does it to be honest, because it’s almost seemingly impossible. My point here is that when you don’t set the expectation, and there’s this assumption that every business can operate at lightning speed like that, then there’s going to be a pressure on the employees that make it happen.
Similarly, in retail, I think about Costco. Actually, Costco is a really good example. They were the first company that I am aware of that said, “We’re not opening on Thanksgiving.”
Yeah. When Black Friday started creeping back into Thanksgiving.
Yeah. It’s like Black Friday starts at 2:00 PM on Thanksgiving. It’s like what? Costco was like, “No, we’re not opening on Thanksgiving.” I remember when I was working at Target at the time. This was 2014 through 2017, I was at Target. At that time, the Target employees were like, “We need that.” I don’t want to work on Thanksgiving either. Some of the customers were like, “Why are you not open on Thanksgiving? What happened?” Customers always take time to adapt. People take time to adapt. There are going to be early adopters, but most people are not early adopters. Eventually, the consumer was like, “Oh, that is a great idea, Costco. That’s so fabulous that you’re giving your employees off to spend time with their families like me.”
That setting of expectations, I think, does relieve the pressure on the business. Unless you say, “Whoa, pause. We can actually physically do that, but don’t worry, we’re still going to apply the same level of quality to this solution that we’re providing you.” You’re always going to have that increase in pressure. When it comes to manager and employee relations, that is also a huge part of it. It’s like setting the expectation, setting the standard. Do you remember credit cards before they were the chip and you had to swipe?
Yeah. We would always take a little bit, yeah.
Sometimes, you have to swipe it a few times. I remember — I was working at Target at the time — that Target stopped accepting the swipe, and they were only accepting the chip.
Oh wow.
Oh my gosh, yeah. I remember this vividly, because people either loved it, or they hated it. When they hated it, they hated you. It’s really hard to be in a people-facing role. When I was at Target, I was in-store as an HR generalist, basically. There was a huge change management concept there that we had to teach and train the customer to adapt to this new technology. This is, to me, what relieves pressure from businesses — again, setting the expectation, but also going through it, expecting that there’s going to be a labor of love there and time to get to the ideal solution.
It’s not going to be an overnight thing where all of a sudden, all of your employees are able to turn off their phones and take time-off. Maybe in six months, when they’ve executed the strategy of hiring two consultants who work certain hours, or certain days, or to help with certain things, then in six months, you can see the solution panning out that your full-time employees are now unplugging and more engaged, because they’re able to take the time.
I know I shared a couple of very specific examples there, but that’s how it makes sense to me.
Those are really good examples. It always reminds you of a company near and dear to me as a Colorado outdoorsy person. It’s REI who doesn’t even open on Black Friday. They urge people to do the #optoutside. Of course, it’s the shittiest time of the year, so I rarely have a really good activity. Ski slopes might have three runs open by then, and everything else is already muddy and snow packed. It’s not a great time to go out, but it is fantastic.
One of the things I feel connects these ideas, whether it’s on the customer or on the workforce, is this idea of the culture of immediacy — the expectation that your question is going to be answered immediately, your package is going to be delivered pretty much immediately. The biggest part of the great resignation has been people working at places like Target, people working these shift jobs that are getting paid quite crappy for a long time.
Understand that the server at the restaurant, the person at Target, they’re all human beings. They’re not just this amorphous, whatever, blob of animal parts that magically brings everything together for you. Therefore, sometimes, things are going to take time. Sometimes, there’s going to be some variance in how quickly you get your soda refill at the restaurant. As a result, once we get rid of that culture of immediacy, it sounds like, then we’ll all be able to live life with more balance and more flexibility.
We need to be better consumers. When we go into a retail store or we go into a restaurant, and we get frustrated, because the host or the sales associate is not giving us the level of urgency or doesn’t have the sense of urgency that we’re expecting, because we’ve created this crazy expectation that everything happens immediately and to our standard every time, we’re going to set ourselves up for failure. Every time, we’re going to be disappointed. That pressure put on the hospitality industry, the pressure put on the retail industry, it makes those jobs less desirable.
We created this sense of misery when it comes to what sales associates in a retail store have to experience. We, as consumers, expect retail sales associates, hospitality workers, to always be their best selves, to have a smile on every second of the day, to leave their baggage at the door, and to be these perfect, robotic human beings that give us exactly what we want every single time. When we don’t get that, we say, “We’re not shopping anymore.” We’re horrible human beings.
Two stars on Yelp or whatever it is.
Two stars on Yelp. We go to try and shut down the small business that doesn’t give us free shipping that we want. It’s literally cancel culture every time you walk into this type of environment with these types of expectations. For me, because I’ve worked in retail my entire life with the exception of my current position, I really think about that so actively as a consumer. If we want to be happier employees, and we want to have more engagement, and we want more from our workday, we have to treat people who are working their jobs and servicing us. We have to treat them better, because they’ll be happier, and they’ll enjoy their jobs a lot more.
Yeah. It sounds like, to have a better experience at our own workplaces wherever we’re working, we need to all think about how to be better customers.
This is a huge perspective for me in the HR space. I always say this. HR professionals or customer service representatives – we are here to service the business. We’re here to service the people. We can’t have our own perspectives in the sense that our opinion comes first. We challenge opinions. We challenge the status quo. We challenge strategy. We come up with strategies, but they can’t be for our own benefit. It has to benefit the business, the employees.
The employees.
Exactly. We’re doing, sometimes, thankless work. It’s thankless because it’s not fulfilling your own agenda. It’s to support the people, or the business, or both. If you are not making the customer happy, the business happy, or the people — and to me, the business and the people are one in the same — then you are not effectively servicing the customer. I’ve always lived this way in my HR career, because I really believed that, especially in retail, the customer that I was servicing was the employee. Even though I’m also an employee, and so in some ways, I’m also servicing myself, this is why there needs to be an HR for HR. I had the employees and then I had the business objectives.
For me, I had to realize — and I always made this part of my ethos — that if I’m servicing the people, I never have to think about the business objective, because those people are going to deliver on the business objective if I’m servicing the people and supporting them appropriately, adequately, and up to the standard that I believe is achievable and admirable too, because we always want to elevate people.
If an HR professional today does not see themselves as that customer service person servicing those people to deliver and drive the business objectives, then they’re not actually doing their jobs as far as I’m concerned. I talk a lot about this on my podcast, too. You have to focus on the people in order to achieve the business objectives. Yes, we have to treat people better. We have to realize that we have to be better customers. As HR people, as managers, as business leaders, we have to also deliver to our customers.
That’s a good way to wrap up to give anyone listening a chance to check out your podcast, Bringing the Human Back to Human Resources.
Yes, Bringing the Human Back to Human Resources.
Bringing it back. It’s good to understand the history. I would like to thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes. I would like to thank all the listeners out there for listening, taking some cues from this discussion. I hope we all can just be better customers, better people, to the people around us, and also understand that sometimes, not everything is going to be 100% pleasant. Life is not Disney World. Even Disney Worlds have hour-long lines, so that’s not even a great example.
That’s a perfect analogy for what life is. Sometimes, you’re just going to have a miserable time waiting in line for the Star Wars ride.
Yeah. It’s been a while since I’ve been to Disney World. I don’t even remember which ones are the longest ones. I just assumed they all had long lines or something like that.
They all have long lines.
Yeah. I would like to encourage everyone out there to tune in to Action’s Antidotes again, where we continue to interview people who have followed their passions and have some great insights about how we can create a better world and how you can take some of these insights that we’ve discussed into your own lives as we are going to do when we discuss things and have our discussions with the people around us and interact with our co-workers.
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About Traci Chernoff
Traci Chernoff is the Director of Employee Engagement at Legion Technologies and an experienced HR leader. Prior to joining Legion, Traci spent nearly a decade in key HR leadership roles for both Big-Box and Luxury retailers directly supporting retail management and hourly teams across North America; most recently, Traci worked as a Director of Human Resources for a Global Luxury Retailer. Traci is the Host and Creator of the podcast, “Bringing the Human back to Human Resources” where she destigmatizes HR by uniting employee demands and business needs while simultaneously challenging the perceptions and stigmas surrounding HR.