Are you working in human resources and feeling misunderstood, frustrated or disengaged these days? We’re not surprised. In the past four years, HR professionals have encountered a host of challenges, including seismic work shifts due to the COVID-19 pandemic, DEI defunding, The Great Resignation and the rise of “quiet quitting.”
The nature of your role often puts you in the middle of senior management lobbing dictates for HR to communicate and enforce and employees on the receiving end who are not pleased. “So, Human Resources Is Making You Miserable,” an article published in The New York Times on August 3, 2024, points out that plenty of employees complain about HR — “the endless flow of memos and forms… many of which have to be filled out, pronto,” “new initiatives,” “rules about remote work” — as well as assume you are aligned with management and not advocating enough for employees.
You often bear the brunt of how employees are feeling. Does anyone stop to think about how you are feeling, and consider you may secretly share some of their frustrations as a fellow employee? You didn’t get into HR to be mistrusted or hated by your colleagues. The article noted that in 2022 LinkedIn found HR had the highest turnover rate among the jobs it tracked.
These are all signs of high-stress work cultures that are low in what we call human connection. What’s going on? And for the sake of your health and happiness, what can be done?
Cultivate connection
Most people have limited ability to remove or greatly reduce stressors in their workplace. But they can work to counteract the effects of stressors by being intentional about boosting the kind of connection that will make them smarter, happier, more productive and more resilient to cope with stress.
The first step: cultivate a culture of connection within HR so that you and the entire HR team can perform at the top of your game, individually and collectively. Just like airplane passengers are instructed to put on their oxygen masks before assisting others, start with you. You cannot effectively model connection and advocate for it if you are connection-deprived.
The next step is to help managers and leaders throughout your organization understand the need for cultures of connection and how to create and maintain them. We make the case in our book Connection Culture: The Competitive Advantage of Shared Identity, Empathy, and Understanding at Work.
Find ways to boost engagement
Getting leaders to improve workplace culture and address chronically low employee engagement levels has been challenging during a time in history when shareholder capitalism has been embraced, and employees are viewed as a tool. Even the term “Human Resources” alludes to this shift. The reality is that human beings have needs in the workplace for respect, recognition, belonging, autonomy, personal growth, meaning and progress. When these needs are consistently unmet, disengagement takes root.
Fortunately, we are seeing more leaders move from shareholder capitalism to a mindset of stakeholder capitalism. In this approach, employees are valued as human beings rather than thought of or treated as mere means to an end. Senior leaders driven by shareholder capitalism focus primarily on pleasing shareholders, raising the stock price and improving the bottom line; stakeholder-minded leaders consider all the players, including employees, customers, vendors, communities and shareholders.
The Nadella way
An excellent example of a stakeholder-minded leader who acts in a way that reinforces the importance of connection is Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella. We’ve written about ways in which Nadella has cultivated a culture of connection since becoming CEO in 2014 that has boosted Microsoft’s employee engagement, strategic alignment, rate of innovation and agility to pursue opportunities and cope with threats. Under Nadella and his senior leadership team, Microsoft’s annual revenue has soared from $86 billion to $236.6 billion, and its stock price has increased 12-fold. Earlier in 2024, Nadella was recognized as the CEO most admired by fellow Fortune 500 CEOs.
We believe that cultures of connection will be essential to navigate the rapid changes as humankind moves into the Fourth Industrial Revolution. HR professionals can make an enormous contribution to organizations by helping leaders and managers make that transition.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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