Welcome to HR Superstars. I’m Adam Weber, former chief people officer and creator of the HR Superstars community. On this show, I interview some of the world’s top HR leaders so you can hone your strategy and learn from the best…
Wow, am I excited about my guest today. When I asked the HR Superstars community who they wanted as a guest on the podcast, the most common answer, Hebba Youssef, and I think you’ll see why. Hebba is the chief people officer of Workweek and creator of the popular I Hate it Here newsletter. And today, we’re going to dive into onboarding for an HR leader, a topic we’ve been discussing all month in the HR Superstars community, how to assess what to focus on when everything as an HR leader feels like a fire, and practical ways to enable and activate your managers. So let’s jump in.
We’re spending the month of March in the HR Superstars community talking about onboarding for the HR leader. And so often, HR leaders think about the onboarding process as a company, but then for themselves, when they start, that’s what we’re talking about. It’s like what are the most important things for an HR leader to accomplish in their first 90 days on the job?
Hebba Youssef:
I love that question so much. I oftentimes just jump right into things and I don’t actually think about what I’m trying to accomplish in the 90 days. I’ve now onboarded twice as an HR leader, and both times, I just instantly go into firefighting mode and don’t think about what I need to be successful in the job. And the first month rolls by, day 30, and I actually have to stop and ask myself a lot. Like, what did I really accomplish in 30 days? I solved some problems, but did I do all the things that I needed to do to onboard correctly? So that’s a long way of saying if I could onboard again as an HR leader, the first thing I would want to do in my 90 days is build connections with the employees. It’s at the core of everything we do. You have to understand your employee base to actually be an effective HR leader. Hopefully, you’ve learned the leadership team in the interview, but you haven’t learned the employees yet.
Adam Weber:
And so how would you go about that? Just coffee chats or small group discussions?
Hebba Youssef:
I love a good coffee chat, but then people get really scared too. It’s very interesting when you join as an HR leader and you’re like, “Hey, I want to get coffee.” The employee’s instantly like, “Oh, no. What do I do? What do I say?” And so I try to alleviate some of that pressure with the, “I just want to get to know you.” And some of the closest relationships I’ve had at companies have been those people I meet in the first few weeks of getting coffee.
Adam Weber:
That’s great. And I like that concept of you do want to build relationships with the executives as well. It’s just you’re saying also oftentimes, that’s already in motion and happening through the interview process and there’s already intentionality there, but where extra intention needs to be is with the employees themselves. I like that.
Hebba Youssef:
Yeah. They need to get to know you. Also, they need to trust you. And how can they trust you if they don’t know you?
Adam Weber:
I’m curious with the firefighting concept and also one of the things people talk a lot about is deliver a quick win. How do you weigh out what is a fire versus what is a strategic win for someone who’s early in the job?
Hebba Youssef:
Yeah, a fire is something that has to be resolved by me by the end of the week, otherwise, something really bad happens to the company. And that’s very few things. I think we all joke about the fires, but I can list maybe one or two things ever that I think have been truly urgent need to fix right away problems versus just things that other people think are fires. Urgency is a created concept. Nothing is really urgent.
Adam Weber:
I think this is one of the core challenges of the strategic HR leader who gets stuck, is knowing what is actually a fire versus what people think is a fire. And if you’re saying there’s three to five things that are actual fires, that’s very different than someone who just goes, “I just get fire to fire to fire. It’s constant, it never ends. That sort of thing.
Hebba Youssef:
You just got to… It’s like a lot of this job is also teaching people around you what is urgent and what’s detrimental to the company. And so when someone comes to me with something super urgent, the first thing I remind them is, this is urgent for you, but you’re coming to me with it. So let’s talk about how it impacts the company. And if the answer is it doesn’t actually impact the company, then I’m not going to make it my priority for the week or the next two weeks. But that is really hard for a lot of leaders to hear, that their priorities aren’t instantly your priorities.
Adam Weber:
And it’s often hard also for HR leaders who have these really full hearts who want to help to also put up those boundaries.
Hebba Youssef:
Oh, it’s so tough. I think we give a lot of ourselves in this job. I think it’s the most emotionally taxing job at any organization, is the HR job. And we don’t oftentimes advocate for ourselves and stop and say, “Hey, I can’t take that on right now.”
Adam Weber:
Yeah. So in this world that I feel like I love that you’re a practitioner and you talk about what you do, and we’ll talk more about that in a little bit. But in this world of the fires of other people constantly coming at you, I’m curious, real time in your world, how do you decide what to prioritize? How do you decide what to focus on at work right now?
Hebba Youssef:
I am very much like… I love the agile methodology of every two weeks, you’re running a sprint. I like to put my head around that when you’re developing technology, kind of the same way I think of how I develop my work day-to-day. And so it’s really looking at, is this thing going to be super impactful to the company? Always thinking in terms of impact is how I look at priorities and fires. So if it’s something that is going to impact everyone across the company, it’s probably something I need to deal with in a timely manner. Timely to me is a two-week window. And so if it’s something that is not going to impact the entire company, maybe a team, then that horizon is further out. And if it’s something that just impacts an individual and that is not time sensitive, then usually, that can be within the next month.
So it’s kind of thinking across how many people is this going to impact and how big of an impact is it going to have on the company in determining what projects we take on. Also, you write your goals, but every time I write a goal, without a doubt, every time, something comes up during the quarter that I never thought about in my goals and I have to-
Adam Weber:
That you couldn’t have thought about. Right? It’s like you didn’t have the information at the time that… Yeah.
Hebba Youssef:
It never ceases to surprise me anymore. I’m like, “Oh, I wrote these beautiful goals and I’m over here working on something else because I totally didn’t know that this was going to come up this quarter.
Adam Weber:
Right. I always dreamed of being a person who, when I write my quarterly goals, I allocate 20% of open bandwidth for problems that need to be solved that I don’t know about yet. And who I actually am is a person who sets goals for 120% and then halfway through, goes, “I’ve been doing this for 20 years. How did I do this again?”
Hebba Youssef:
How did I get to this spot? We all have high expectations. I think especially when you’re in an HR role, you’re already really empathetic to everyone else around you and then you’re driven by the fact that you want to do good work. And so then you tend to overcommit yourself so often. I need to learn boundaries. It’s on my list every year. I’ve yet to learn them.
Adam Weber:
I would like to just dig in a little on those near-term versus long-term priorities. What’s risen to the top. In your world right now, what’s top of mind that you’re focused on and prioritizing?
Hebba Youssef:
Well, Workweek is rapidly growing. So we were a smaller company. The company is about a year maybe and a half old and they didn’t have a true people professional until I joined. And so a lot of my day-to-day is really setting the infrastructure up for the company. What policies do we have? How do we talk about things? What is a goal and how do we roll it out? They had done a lot of great work in the beginning. I’m really lucky with my current co-founders that one of the first things they did was write down the values and the culture they wanted to have at the company. But then when I got there, it’s like, great, we have this value in this culture, but we need to operationalize a lot of this. And they didn’t know how to do that.
And so it’s day-to-day, I’m just thinking, how do we teach the employees about how to be employees? How are we helping them? And one of my biggest focuses has been feedback, and it’s kind of interesting that it’s become a huge focus for me at an early stage of the company. But my philosophy is that if we can teach everyone to be really good at giving feedback, we can build one of the best environments out there.
Adam Weber:
What’s one tip on how to actually give feedback in a way that it’s heard or it’s valuable or helps the person grow as opposed to creating a defensive posture?
Hebba Youssef:
Asking the person how they want to receive feedback. I will never get off the soapbox. We never ask people how they want to receive feedback. And then when we do ask them, I guarantee you everyone will say, “I want it in the moment and I want it direct.” And they are lying. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants to be taken off guard with hard feedback. They want to see it in writing probably ahead of time and they want to know that you’re going to give them the feedback. So I just think asking people how you prefer to receive feedback is a super powerful question that we forget about.
Adam Weber:
I love that so much and I know, I’m confident that the way that feedback is usually given is when someone is both frustrated and it is unexpected. And of all the ways to give it while the most common, I’m also quite confident it is the least productive.
Hebba Youssef:
It’s not great. My theory is everyone is bad at feedback. And I think it’s what holds companies back from truly being a special place where people learn and grow. The root of that is giving feedback.
Adam Weber:
So when you talk about… You’re talking about this… There’s this really solid organic culture, which is amazing foundation for an HR leader to come in and you have to turn, basically, the organic and make it still feel authentic but add process to it. And you used this comment that was how to teach employees to be employees. Is feedback one of those things where you’re going, “Hey, this is one of the ways to be an employee here.”? Are there other examples of how you’re teaching employees to be employees?
Hebba Youssef:
Yeah, feedback is definitely one of the big ones. I think doubling down on how we teach things has been really interesting. So I’ve done two manager trainings already this year, just around how to give feedback and how to hire, and those are very interesting interactive discussions, but it’s really teaching the employees, rethinking how they learn how to be employees. So a lot of us learn our bad behaviors in the workplace from the people around us. And so my dream with Workweek is what if we taught all the good behaviors to everybody and we all just learned from each other in that way and built upon it in that way? So feedback has been a big one. Training our employees on just how to do things. We have very little process, so it’s just teaching them this is how you submit an expense, this is how you ask for headcount, this is how you ask for part-time or contractor work. No one really knows how to do any of these things until you teach them. It’s very tactical.
Adam Weber:
And that taps into… Yeah, it is. It’s tactical, but it also taps into all sorts of things like role clarity. It taps into productivity. The amount of times people move slow because they just don’t know what to do, it’s like, I could have solved this in 20 minutes if I just knew where to go or how to do it.
Hebba Youssef:
And teaching folks around levels too. Levels is a fascinating one. We’ve been leveling a lot of our roles that we’re hiring for externally, and I’ve been trying to explain to people what a level is, the scope and impact of a role. Because I have this other theory. I’m just full of theories today. I have this other theory that a lot of the problems that come up in someone’s employee journey at a company is because they have not been given expectations about how to perform at their level. And if we as managers and HR leaders can be upfront with, here’s how we leveled this role, here’s the impact we’re thinking this role is going to have, and here’s how it shows up in our ecosystem and our environment, then I think a lot of the problems that you get further down the line where people are asking, “Oh, I want a promotion.” or “Oh, I think I’m ready for a promotion or I deserve a raise.” or “I want this.” A lot of those problems could have been solved had you set the right expectations for them when they join the company.
Adam Weber:
And if you tie that in with feedback too, upfront, we set the expectations on what was expected from the role and then we’re giving consistent, steady feedback, that is the essence of a healthy culture. Those two things together, I feel like, really can [inaudible 00:13:30].
Hebba Youssef:
And onboarding people correctly. Onboarding is… We forget about it, but it honestly, I think it’s the most important thing you do as an HR team. I think everything else you do, nothing comes close to how you onboard an employee correctly because you are setting the stage for their future success, their growth and their development, their relationship with their team, their manager, the company, and especially in this hybrid world, you’re connecting them to something that they didn’t know that they were going to be connected to.
Adam Weber:
I’ve seen this amazing visual before that is of the impact of HR itself, where HR’s impact directly on an employee is really culminates in those first 90 days. And then there’s a bit of, and this will be a good segue in our conversation anyways, but then it really transitions to HR’s relationship with managers and how those managers intersect with employees really then determines that employee experience. And so since we do, so let’s say we do… We talk about onboarding, then we’re kind of into the manager relationship with HR. For you, how do you define a good manager at Workweek?
Hebba Youssef:
Two things. From the business perspective, it’s somebody who can connect the goals of the organization to the work that their team is doing. That’s the business angle, if I were to define a good manager. Now, if I were to define it from a different standpoint, it’s like the human standpoint, it’s a great manager, somebody who is empathetic. They understand the experiences their team is having. And with that understanding, they try to make their situation better and help them. But it’s really having those two. There’s like a million lists of all the characteristics of a good manager, but I think it distills down to do you care for your team and care for their wellbeing? And that’s being empathetic.
Adam Weber:
Hey, everyone. I’d like to invite you to our third annual HR Superstars Virtual Summit on March 23rd. We’ve got an incredible event with some of the industry’s best people ops leaders, discussing the topics that matter the most to you. Things like activating your managers and the relationship of HR and management and how to manage burnout as an HR leader. And most importantly, what are you going to say no to in 2023? So it’s at noon on March 23rd. Go to 15five.com to register. I hope to see you there. This is a topic actually in the HR Superstars community we talk about a lot, which is balancing high care with high expectations. How do you think about empathy and feedback or expectation setting or goal setting, that sort of thing?
Hebba Youssef:
That they’re all forms of care. If I care about you and care about your opportunity to do great work, your career and your development, your learning, then I care about things like setting the right expectations for you, telling you how you’re going to be successful and supporting you on that journey. And so if a great manager can do that and wrap their heads around the fact that when you care for your employees, you want to do those things, you want to give them feedback, you want to invest in their growth and you want to onboard them correctly and set them up for success.
Adam Weber:
Okay. So that’s a good manager. Let’s talk about a bad manager. Just for fun. What are the traits of a bad manager?
Hebba Youssef:
I think everyone would say micromanaging, but I don’t really think that’s the worst trait ever. I think that micromanaging comes from being inexperienced and not knowing how to delegate tasks, which is a learned skill. But I think a bad manager is one that doesn’t advocate for you.
Adam Weber:
And can I add to that? I think I might even add to that. A bad manager commiserates and doesn’t advocate. So they not only don’t go to bat for you, they’ll come down with you, not explain the business context, not kind of resolve things, but actually escalate by becoming a buddy versus being a true leader to that person.
Hebba Youssef:
Yeah. Managers need to be the champions. By advocating for you, they’re also removing your roadblocks, setting you up for success. They’re giving you a path by being that advocate. And when they don’t do it, it feels selfish sometimes. Managing is a selfless job. You shouldn’t go into managing if you don’t care about others and you only care about yourself, because it doesn’t work like that.
Adam Weber:
I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience, but I will say one of the hardest things about being a manager is when there’s a decision from the company where maybe you as a manager disagree with it and then you have to implement it. And it really puts that… I have a lot of empathy for a manager in that situation.
Hebba Youssef:
All the managers that are demanding that are having to tell their employees they have to return to the office, but that they don’t agree with that take, that… Middle managers during COVID, I truly feel for them. I think they’re the most unsupported group at any company, and I think they don’t give the resources and the training they need to actually be successful, but then are forced to be the bearers of all the bad news.
Adam Weber:
Right. What does training look like in your world? How are you equipping managers and training them right now?
Hebba Youssef:
We’re doing monthly sessions, which is I think all I can handle. I would love to do every two weeks, honestly. But our sessions are more around conversations on why we’re doing the things we’re doing and how we as managers carry that responsibility. So every training has a slide that talks about the role and responsibility of the thing that we are talking about for the manager. So I’m setting that expectation with them every month on this is what’s expected from you as a manager, and then here’s how you do it. I’m going to help you do it. And so I teach them how to do it. And our topics have been very straightforward recently. They’ve just been how we hire, how to give feedback, the different types of coaching conversations managers have. I’m trying to double down on the things that I think are the most impactful. And that’s feedback to your team and how you hire in a growing startup.
Adam Weber:
Yeah, I like that you’re just having the conversations. I don’t know if there is a perfect answer, but I think the answer is really just put yourself out there, say what it means to be a manager, create safe spaces for people to have conversations. And then that alone… We just ran a survey of 1,000 managers and 500 of them, 500 of them, half said, “We have gotten no training in any of… Not in one of these. In how to give feedback, how to do reviews, how to assess performance, how to set goals. All of those. How to run a one-on-one.” They didn’t get feedback on any of those things. And so I think it’s like this is where that progress over perfect mantra that I push a lot is put something out there that you stand for and just create safe space to have the conversation. I love that you’re doing that.
Hebba Youssef:
Yeah, we have an internal manager Slack channel where I also put everything in writing, where you just can’t teach everyone everything. People are visual learners. They need to read something versus being in the moment and an experiential learner. And so I’m also trying to solve for how do we teach everybody in the ways that they want to be taught? And so really training them. Managers are the most ignored group in corporate America. I really feel for them. Every week in my newsletter I’m like, “Train your managers. Train your managers.” And I feel really bad doing it, but at the same time, I’m like, “We can solve a lot of problems at every company if we just train our managers.” Did you read that article that said your manager has a bigger impact on your mental health than your partner?
Adam Weber:
Oh, man.
Hebba Youssef:
Because I read that and I was like, “Oh, boy. Oh, no.” was a thought I really had.
Adam Weber:
It’s hard to not read that and resonate, right? If you’ve experienced the weight of a psychologically unsafe manager and the turmoil that it gets into, the inability to sleep at night, the… It just wreaks havoc on your life.
Hebba Youssef:
Absolutely. And it’s really interesting because lately, I’ve been trying to say, if you’re going to blame somebody, if we have to play a blame game, I don’t necessarily know if I would blame the manager at any company. I would actually blame the company for not setting the manager up for success. It’s easy to blame your manager because that’s the person you’re interacting day-to-day with. But when you pause and think about it, it’s the company that’s enabling the bad managers or letting them get away with bad behavior. They’re not training them. And so I just think you’re right. You and I could probably talk about this for hours. Managers need help though.
Adam Weber:
And yeah, you can’t blame a manager when they have 16… I think on that report said the average manager has 16 direct reports, which is two times more than they should have. They’re not getting any training. And then they also were facing the brunt of this critical feedback themselves. Okay. So let’s transition. And this is a topic I’m super excited to talk to you about because here’s a vulnerable moment. One of the unique things about your story that I was so compelled by is that you both are a practitioner and you share publicly about what you do. And in my past job as chief people officer of Emplify, we were an engagement measurement company, and I both did talks and would talk about best practices and talk about how to measure and assess cultures. And there was this high bar where anytime we did anything that didn’t achieve to that bar, it had a compounding impact.
And I took that seriously. I said, that is what I chose. This is why I chose this industry. But we had a moment during that journey where our employees knew how to change the score because they created it. And there was a moment where they kind of adjusted the score to get our attention. And it was such a humbling moment to be like, if you’re going to get in front of people, you have to live it behind the scenes too. I mean, I just grew so much from that experience and I’m following… I mean, I read your newsletter, I love the content that you create. And I also though knowing that I was just in that world, I have so much empathy for where you are. And so I wanted to just hear how you balance those two things of sharing about the way that the world of HR should be and then actually having to live in the messy real world as well.
Hebba Youssef:
It is the hardest and most rewarding job probably of my life to get to do what I do every day, which is operate and then write a newsletter about what I would change about HR. And I think the reason I feel safe enough to do that is that when I met the co-founders of Workweek, I really told them my philosophy on HR. I was like, “Here are all the things that I think are wrong about HR. Here are the things you will never find me doing. I do not stand for X, Y, and Z.” I kind of laid out my whole moral compass, everything I believe in on the line when I talked to them at first. And I vetted how they felt about that and they were aligned with me on a lot of the things that I was saying, believed in a lot of the things.
So I’m able to content create every week because they also believed in the things that I believed in. So I find myself very lucky in that regard. But it’s interesting because I think to myself every week before I hit send, is there anything I am writing in here that someone at Workweek would read and say, “You’re lying.”? And the good thing is honesty is one of my core values. And so I can’t lie about a lot of the things at all ever. And a lot of the things I write about are things that we believe and are trying to practice at Workweek. This past week is a great example I wrote about returning to the office and why companies are demanding it. I will never demand our employees return to an office.
We have office spaces, they’re there for people to go to them. We never tell anybody they have to be there and we hire all our employees remotely. And so I feel really lucky, but at the beginning, when I started writing my newsletter, every week, someone at Workweek would chat me and say, “So are we going to do that here? So when are you implementing that here? How long do I have to wait for that?” And the pressure of that, it really weighs on your shoulders because you’re like, “I can’t write anything if we don’t believe it also internally and are going to practice that thing that we’re preaching.”
Adam Weber:
What I appreciate and respect so much about that is that there’s a sense of duty with that too. It’s like I have a high bar and I hold myself to it. I am so curious about your conversation with the founders though. Now I want to get into it. You said, “I do not stand for X, Y, and Z.” I want to know what X, Y, and Z are. Tell me a couple of the letters.
Hebba Youssef:
I said, “I do not believe in most performance management systems and I do not want to hold a traditional performance management process.” That was the first thing. I said, “If you think I’m going to come to Workweek and do annual reviews or yearly reviews and we’re not going to rethink how we do and think about performance, I can’t come work here.” And they were like, “Okay, well, what would you do?” And I said, “Performance management is a very interesting construct that’s based in power. And historically, in corporate America, employees don’t have that power and your reviews are written by your manager about you and they dictate your future at a company. And so my problem with a lot of performance management systems is they give the power to the managers and they don’t focus on the employees and what the employees need to be successful.” So that was the first thing I told them I absolutely was not going to do.
The second thing was I didn’t want to come somewhere where people didn’t want to learn and grow. And so that is the basis of everything I believe in life. I’m insanely curious about everything, and it’s shaped me in so many ways. My brother and my father were both professors, and so that was a huge part of my life. And so I said I couldn’t come somewhere if I wasn’t going to be able to roll out any sort of learning program where people get to learn from each other. And that’s not that radical. They were like, “Yes, absolutely. We want that too.” And then the last thing is so funny. I had just come back from HR Transform and I was talking to my founders last year and one of the events I went to was psychedelics as the next employee benefit. And I was like, “I want to work somewhere where we are thinking thoughtfully and creatively about the things that we offer to our employees. How do you feel about this topic?” And it’s kind of wild to bring up…
Adam Weber:
Pretty edgy. Right. Exactly. Yeah.
Hebba Youssef:
Yes, yes, yes. And they were like, “Wow, tell us more.” And I explained the benefits, why I thought it could be really great, something to think about. And they were so receptive and open to it. And I know in that moment, I was like, “Wow, if they’re this forward-thinking about benefits that we can offer our employees, they must be forward-thinking about a lot of other things too.”
Adam Weber:
And even their posture of tell us more, when you’re really pushing the boundaries… And to our listeners, if you’re a regular listener, you probably already know this, but if you’re not and you just came here for the Hebba podcast, if you just scroll up, there’s one on Mindbloom on this exact topic where we were one of the first companies to roll out this psychedelic therapy. So it’s a great podcast I highly recommend. The part that I’m also struck by with your, “Here are the things I won’t stand for.” is every human being with a job, everybody wants to have a dream job and everybody also has a real life with real bills and finances and worries and concerns about their future and all of those things. And sometimes, there are those moments where you intersect with, I’m so miserable where I am, I just want something different, and they take something different without being able to truly verify, am I values aligned with this company?
Only to end up in this perpetual cycle. I call it the 18-month cycle where basically, you start, you know three months in it’s not going to work, you stay for 12 to 18 months so it’s not awkward on your resume. And it’s just this endless loop. And I think you did such an amazing job of sharing who you are and being transparent and owning that in the early stages to help you find that values fit.
Hebba Youssef:
I felt really privileged that I was at the point of my career where I could do that. But in the last few years, I’ve been really thinking about what motivates me and how I show up best and moments that really upset me in the workplace, why they upset me so much. And I’ve kind of distilled it down to I am honesty, curiosity, and gratitude are my three values. I want to be honest and share my opinion on everything. I’m curious. I’m going to ask a million questions and I need to be somewhere that wants me to do that and is open to me questioning everything.
And I also gratitude. People who show gratitude are actually happier. And I’m just so grateful for every opportunity I’ve had in my life, every moment I share with my friends and my family and my loved ones, and I wanted to work somewhere that the founders also felt the same way. And so the beautiful thing about Workweek is we have a channel called Workweek Wins, where we celebrate our employees for the great work they’re doing. And then every week in our all-hands, we also verbally read all of those appreciation pieces.
Adam Weber:
Oh, so great.
Hebba Youssef:
And I hope that never changes. I hope when we grow to be as big of a company as we’re going to be, that we still, every week, are showing appreciation for our employees. It feels so good.
Adam Weber:
We have an integrated part of our weekly check-in, right? Continuous feedback instead of that kind of big, heavy thing. It’s like every week, we’re working on improving that relationship between the employee and manager. And at the end of it, you give a high five. And so you’re sharing these… And it just creates this kind of wall of positivity where you’re sharing really specifically and even better when it’s tied to company values, where people are actually sharing stories of people living out the values real time. Okay, I want to close with this because I meant to mention it earlier anyways, so if you’re listening and you’re not subscribed to Hebba’s I Hate it Here newsletter, she’s got 100,000 subscribers right now. There’s a reason. It’s really great content. And I was just curious for you, when you look back on this time of what you’re doing, where you have this audience and this platform, how are you hoping to impact the world of HR?
Hebba Youssef:
It’s so aspirational and wild to think this, but I just want to change the way we do things. There’s so much power in rethinking how we do everything as an industry, and I think there’s so much opportunity for HR teams to impact great positive change. And so every week, I try to give three tips for people to go and change something that week. If they could walk out tomorrow and do something like they can do that, read the newsletter and go do that. I have heard so many stories about HR teams that treat employees poorly, and a lot of the times, the HR team is blamed for that experience. And I don’t necessarily think that’s fair because I think a lot of it is executive leadership and company culture and founders and those people really impacting what HR can do.
But I think the second piece of it is a lot of the HR people I know want to do things differently because they don’t want that reputation of, well, in my HR team, “HR is not your friend. They’re awful. They only care about the business.” We truly can’t be your friend, really, if you think about it. We’re all employed by the company. But it’s tough, but we want… I think there’s a really interesting change happening as well with the demographics of the workforce. Baby boomers are leaving the workforce and Gen Z is coming into the workforce and really making a lot of us question why we do work the way we do work.
And it’s really exciting for me because I’m like, “Yes, all these things that Gen Z is saying, hustle culture is toxic.” It is, but that is what I was taught when I was coming up. And so they’re going to change, hopefully, how we do work. But part of my motivation for writing, I Hate it Here every week is I also want to change the way we do HR. I too have been treated badly by HR teams, and I’ve asked myself the question, “Who’s really the villain in this story?”