S3E8: People Before Process - Building Healthier Workplaces with Tanya Hewitt

A healthy workplace starts with putting people before process. Tanya Hewitt, PhD is the owner of Beyond Safety Compliance, helping organizations learn about new ideas in the world of work and safety. She worked for 18 years for a federal regulator and is known for her engaging and passionate speaking engagements.  A lifelong learner, she loves to share her knowledge to help workplaces to become healthier. Tanya brings value to organizations to help quash pervasive functional stupidity, and help organizations strive for far more than mere compliance. In this conversation, we discuss what inspired Tanya to get into HR, examples of ‘Functional Stupidity’, HR strategies, and more!

• About Tanya 2:05
• Beyond Safety Compliance 08:50
• Psychological safety 10:47
• The book that inspired her to get into HR 16:35
• Examples of ‘Functional Stupidity’ 18:43
• Net positives of COVID 23:20
• HR Strategies 28:06
• Legacy 33:33

👋 Connect with Tanya - linkedin.com/in/tanya-hewitt-55804529/

Visit Tanya’s website - www.beyondsafetycompliance.ca 

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🎙️ Hosted by Hilda Gan - ca.linkedin.com/in/hildagan 

🤗 Visit us at - peoplebrightconsulting.com

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Hilda Gan is a sought-after expert on effective HR strategies, work culture enhancement, and employee engagement. Unique among HR consultants, Hilda combines over 25 years of HR expertise with business acumen and business owner experience.

People Bright Consulting is an award-winning HR Management Consulting firm that helps leaders of companies build the foundations for successful hiring, healthy and inclusive work culture, and engaged staff. It starts with listening to our clients and finding pragmatic customized business solutions to HR problems.

Chapters

• 2:05 About Tanya
• 8:50 Beyond Safety Compliance
• 10:47 Psychological safety
• 16:35 The book that inspired her to get into HR
• 18:43 Examples of ‘Functional Stupidity’
• 23:20 Net positives of the Pandemic
• 28:06 HR Strategies
• 33:33 Legacy

Transcript

Hilda Gan  0:00  
Welcome to rev up your potential with Hilda Gan, the stories about entrepreneurs, business leaders and HR professionals and their successes and struggles along their journey. In this podcast, we also discuss the HR challenges that people face and the tips and strategies that have helped them. If you love to learn through storytelling, join us. Today, my guest is Tanya Hewitt, and she is the owner of beyond safety compliance. She is a lifelong learner, and you're in for a treat, because she loves to really join the dots together with the knowledge that she accumulates. She loves to share that knowledge. And she really has a passion for helping people create workplaces that are healthier. Welcome, Tanya.

Tanya Hewitt  0:49  
Well, thank you so much Hilda, I'm very excited to be here. So just a little bit of expansion on what you were talking about. A lot of people will say, Well, what is a healthy workplace? What does that even mean? So a lot of workplaces are dominated by the idea of sticking to the numbers and making sure that the financials are done, and the quarterly reports are made. And, and just as long as that is accomplished, then we're good.And there's so much more to a healthy organization than just the financials. Yeah, for sure. And I know, we're gonna get into that I can hear the passion of that already. And you and I both care about healthy workplaces and companies who really have that balance. You know, it's about the numbers, yes. But it's about the people. And those companies that care about the people and the numbers actually have better numbers, better profits, better sales. And this is founded in, in, in many of the statistics, and even some of the leading magazines, right about that combination. So tell us a little bit about yourself, and how you got interested in starting in the business. And a little bit about your background. So my background is probably unconventional, as is most people's background. I have these degrees in physics. And so then I started to work for an employer. And at that employer, I remember very distinctly there was a, an internship program at the time. And the internships had various courses. And you knew this, because at the central elevators, there was what you would see at what I would liken to, I guess, when you're driving, and you will come across one of these signs that have arrows pointing to different cities, and how many kilometers there were to get to those different cities. That's what I saw. So every day for months, I would be walking by this totem pole of the different courses that people could take. If you were an intern, I was hired at the age to be an intern, but I wasn't hired in that stream. And it was really jarring to be walking by this totem pole every day of all of the knowledge that I could not accrue because I was not identified in that group. So with that, I realized shortly thereafter, that if I wanted to learn things, I would have to take responsibility to do that on my own. I joined a society that was doing talks at lunch hour. And I can remember with great clarity, that there was a talk given by people from NAV Canada, so they are the privatized air traffic control people in Canada. And they were talking about runway incursions. So these are things on runways that shouldn't be aeroplanes need to take off on clear runways. And when there's something on the runway, that's a problem. So they were talking about this.

Unknown Speaker  4:34  
And they they had talked about some of the issues that they had with runway incursions, which got into issues like leadership and communication and trust and things like this. Bots. They didn't really want to talk about that. They wanted to talk about the laser systems and To all of the precision of their laser systems, and I thought, isn't this amazing? They know that the problems are in the humans, you know, the interpersonal relationships with people. But their comfort zone was talking about the technical. And so they ran the talk about talking about the technical. And when I think I had asked a question about some of this, these other issues, they said, Well, we're not here really to talk about that we're talking about the technical. And it was fascinating to me that they were so much more driven to go over and over the lines of code that drove drove the the lasers and the tolerances on the lasers, when they had hinted at all sorts of organizational problems that were at the interpersonal level, but didn't want to go there, when they were, even when they were asked about it. So that, that then got me to study more about that human side of things, when I got my doctorate. 

Hilda Gan  6:18  
So that's interesting, because I think a lot of people, that's where their comfort zone isn't about talking about those aspects. And yet, you who have two degrees in physics, could gravitate to their way of thinking or to say, Hmm, this is really interesting. This is where I need to focus on. And that's sort of what I like to do in terms of my passion and interest in helping others is that so many people rise and become leaders, because of their technical abilities and their ability to to manage the time and the projects efficiently. But the human side of communicating effectively of motivating others and building teams is something they push aside. So that's interesting. So that's how you got involved in human resources, so to speak, or work culture leadership? 

Tanya Hewitt  7:18  
Absolutely, yes, I was fascinated that this seemed to be a place where a lot of more technically oriented people felt very uncomfortable with, and yet tacitly recognized its importance, but felt kind of just lost in knowing how to handle it. 

Hilda Gan  7:38  
So it's very interesting it brings to mind I was, I was a manager in the intensive care. At one point in my career before HR, it was it was it was nursing. And I would find nurses so gravitated to the technology aspect of it, that that's probably and the excitement of being you know, in an ICU, and doing care for patients who are very critically ill. And then yet, when when a family member would say I don't, you know, I can't live without my dad, is it? Is it going to be okay, they're staring still at the technology and say something to words, and then they move on to the technical aspects again, of their care. So I thought, okay, fine, I am going to, I am going to be in a place where I get to hire women and men who are going to be high touch and high tech, so that they can see beyond the person and the machinery that they can see that there's that person is a member of a family, and that that family is also suffering. You You named it beyond the safety compliance, which is really interesting. How did that come to be? Because it sounds like there's a connection between this story that you told about in terms of your internship and the word safety is there.

Tanya Hewitt  9:11  
I have been following the paths that the whole safety world has been on for the last or I would say 25 years. I haven't been following it for 25 years. But I have been fascinated on just it's evolution. A lot of people believe that. Safety is obvious. And we all know we all are talking about the same thing when we say safety. But I have been in front of audiences before saying that if we were to ask you to write down what safety means.There would be as many different answers as there are people in the room. And having said that, there might be a few answers that are along the technical side having steel toed boots and hard hats. But there will be others who have been more on this different view of safety. Who would be looking at psychological safety, and having a welcoming environment and having respecting other people's views, which doesn't typically get into a definition of safety, when people first encounter it. 

Hilda Gan  10:47  
Tell me more about what you define as psychological safety and how you would help organizations build a psychological safety environment.

Tanya Hewitt  11:01  
That's a loaded question in Hilda. So psychological safety, as far as I guess I can attribute it comes down to a book that was written by Amy Edmondson in I think, the late 90s, or maybe a little later, it's called the fearless organization. There are other organizations out there leader factor being one of the a company that I've been following throughout the pandemic, who has held wonderful webinars talking about this topic. And it it ranges everything from how people show up in the world, and how they feel in terms of being accepted. Through to do they feel confident enough to raise concerns, when everybody else around them thinks, Oh, why bother or that's not, that's not important, that kind of a thing. So it's, it's not a one size fits all kind of prescription. It's not a checklist kind of implementation, because it really does play on a lot of emotional awareness that people have of how they are impacting others and how others are impacting them. And being able to adjust to circumstances as they evolve.

Hilda Gan  12:49  
Yeah, I, I agree that it can be, you know, different perceptions, I just feel that a lot of people are not as comfortable thinking about undoing and creating this workplace that is psychologically safe. And, you know, I think they barely touch the tip of the iceberg with it. It's like that analogy, I talked about the nurse who was so uncomfortable talking about, you know, an anxious, awkward conversation that she brought up rather deal with the technical issues, rather than the psychosocial aspect of the thing. So so it's, I think it's particularly difficult during during pandemic times, for people to really grasp that and, and to get comfortable creating working relationships that help foster that healthier workplace, keeping in mind the psychological impacts that that COVID has given to us

Tanya Hewitt  13:54  
I might just offer a bit of an anecdote on that I remember going to a conference so this has nothing to do with COVID. whereby a conference attendee she wasn't even presenting this was just something she had said as, as an attendee, she was currently pursuing her doctorate and was doing qualitative interviews of military sharpshooters. So, these are very highly trained people, they have to be able to react in an instance they have to be very mindful of where they are pointing any kind of weapon because they can they are designed to to kill people who are interfering with high profile events. So when when, you know, a very significant figure does a public announcement, especially if it's outside, it is likely if you look around that tall Buildings, you will see some of these people hidden on roofs of buildings because they are at an instant, if somebody were to jump, you know, a president or a prime minister, are designed to kill. And she said that she talked to these people outside, like she wasn't up on the roof with them. But she talked to them when they were off duty. And she got hours of transcripts from them, because they were so tensed up in their work life, because they work on constant high alert, that when they were given a chance to offload that, they took advantage of that in huge, like a, you know, she, she had to cut off their interviews after four hours, some of them, because they were just so thankful that somebody was giving them an outlet to be able to unload all of this stuff that they otherwise are assumed to just handle just fine. Because, you know, they 

Hilda Gan  16:08  
have a trade that we assume people to handle things fine. And sometimes when people ask, they meet with, like, no comment kind of thing. And it ends the conversation. And then some people are afraid to share because they're afraid of what people will think of them, that they don't have enough stamina or they can't, you know, they can't manage to be all together in terms of the way they think So wow, what an interesting anecdote. I know when we talked earlier, you talked about a book that inspired you to to really get into kind of the HR perspective of life. Share that book with us.

Unknown Speaker  16:53  
The stupidity paradox by Matt's Alvaston and Andre Spicer outlines the perils and pitfalls of functional stupidity. They, under their management professors, from the UK and Sweden or Norway, and they collaborated to undertake a 10 year approximate study, to look at workplaces. And they looked at all workplaces they could think of from their own departments in academia, through to hospitals through to garment sales, through lawyers through it, they went through almost everything that we would encounter in workplaces. And we're able to find traces of functional stupidity almost everywhere. They break it down into different ways of functional stupidity. They, I mean, there are other people who talk about this, too, Margaret Heffernan talks about willful blindness. In a lot of her work, where people know there's a problem bots for various factors, choose not to do anything about it. And that is that sums up functional stupidity kind of as as a whole. 

Hilda Gan  18:29  
So can you give us some examples? Because I read the summary of the of the book, and my concept of what functional stupidity was, was different than what the book is. So if you could give a couple of anecdotes that will help people who are listening today.

Tanya Hewitt  18:48  
Okay, so I'll give you just a few few examples that I remember from the, from the book, because I do have a talk that I do on this that tries to present the same information but in a different way. Sometimes, organizations have vision and mission statements that are well known and everybody who works there was able to to talk about these things freely, possibly because it's on their login screens when they get to work or it's on posters that they pass by frequently. They claim that sometimes, well, more than sometimes, you can cast organizations who will get involved in activities that really challenge you to understand their mission and vision. The example that they gave that I played on in the talk that I have given is educated So a school board, you know, whose mission was to teach children give them the best education, they can guess kind of thing. And they went to a meeting that they were holding, where they were serving lunch, where they had a keynote speaker. So this was probably on a professional development day. And the attention to ceremony, they said, was extraordinary. I mean, you saw the person who was in charge, being concerned about who was sitting where and having all of the the right plates put out and having the right color of tablecloths and having the right, you know, what, and having the lighting in the room at a certain level and having, making sure that the keynote speaker can be heard, make sure that we test the sound and make sure that we have all of the Can we see the slides, can you really project the slides, oh, they're not bright enough, we have to. They, they watch this whole thing, and said, you know, if I would be hard pressed to know that their mission is to educate children, the attention to ceremony was so extreme, that you lost the whole point of the organization in the first place. So that's one example.

Hilda Gan  21:31  
Okay, okay. So that, that that that helps, that helps for sure. 

Tanya Hewitt  21:36  
Because if you are truly a mission, vision driven organization, that should be evidence in everything you do, in the decisions you make, in how you show up in the world, in how in how you treat people, it should be evident. 

Hilda Gan  22:01  
It sounds so basic, and it's certainly something that I talk about having the mission vision value as the foundation for the growth, because having that then it kind of guides the way you do your business operations. So if you're a quality driven company, you know, like a security based company, that's going to be a different set of operations, checks and balances. Whereas if you're a hospitality industry, they're the checks and balances are not as important as the client service that the you know, making people have a great experience. And those will guide those processes. And the same with human resources that people you hire will be more in line with the alert mode type people for the quality driven versus the the customer friendly, passionate type people for the the hospitality industry, and then the types of clients that you serve. So all of that, as you say, it's based on mission, vision and values. And I think sometimes people lose sight of it, because they just kind of go onto autopilot, and then they forget. And sometimes that's what drives people strategically back and say, Is this in line with what we're trying to accomplish it as you say,

During COVID, I know that you said that. There's been some really good things that happened for you personally and professionally. Do you want to share some of those

Unknown Speaker  23:33  
COVID has been a unexpected to most not all, to most, and has has wreaked havoc in many people's lives. So I don't want to diminish the people who, you know, there have been a lot of deaths because of this virus, there have been a lot of changes to lifestyle because of this virus. Long COVID Is is a real thing. And I think that doesn't get enough airplay. So I don't want to I don't want to diminish any of that because that is real and that has to be acknowledged. The work from home eat it to that most of the world was placed under was amazing for me. Because that meant I had to depend more than I ever have on an online kind of interaction with others. And that opened my world to something I don't think I would ever have experienced had the pandemic and the edict to work from home not happened. So I was the very first week of the pandemic Because I follow somebody named Susan David, who is very strong on emotional agility and saying no to toxic positivity, a message that I absolutely love. She, and I was on her mailing list, she emailed me saying that she was on a live Ted stream that was happening at the very first week of the pandemic. I couldn't have planned a better experience had I sat down to do it. I mean, that was just Oh, my God, alive Ted stream. This is incredible. So I was totally in heaven, at noon, during that very first week of the pandemic, because I was exposed to TED Talk, caliber people live. You know, for a couple of weeks, shortly thereafter, one of the people that I follow who lives nowhere close to me, had started these zoom calls, he did them twice a day. And I couldn't believe my luck. He. I mean, I think, during his zoom calls, I learned more than university courses that I've taken, perhaps degrees that I've earned. I mean, it was incredible. He brought in, he brought in speakers, he offered papers for us to read and reflect upon. I mean, I can remember being assigned Descartes, and I've never read Descartes before, and having been having pronounced negatively on Descartes, and some of the talks that I've given, given a source that I was trusting. When I actually read Descartes, for the very first time, I realized, oh, man, like I didn't know what I was saying before, like it was it helped to really reframe a whole lot of the way that I had been thinking. Up until then, and I, you know, there were communities that I was, I was joining from all over the world and meeting all sorts of people. It really, really made a profound difference to the way I saw things. 

Hilda Gan  27:44  
I think that's what COVID has done for all of us is, it's being able to discover your passion, or to embrace your passion or, or just to get your fill of it really, it's been enjoyable. And I see your eyes light up when, when you when you talk about that. Let's spend the last few minutes talking about human resources. What would you say is, is probably the key thing, that message that you want to send to people in terms of HR to help them be better at what they do for for their organizations?

Tanya Hewitt  28:28  
How about I give you a story on that one? So I spent my PhD studying interpersonal relationships studying well, specifically incident reporting systems and how how they're used and how interpersonal relationships really impact how peer organizations get information. So I was ideally suited for a certain part in my previous organization. I can remember talking to some to an HR professional, when I was going back to my previous employer, and being told, Oh, well, we have vacancies here. So you know, I will set up a vacancy for you, you know, they have vacancies on their org charts. So I'll set up an offer letter for you hear. And I said, Well hold on a second. Just because there's a vacancy somewhere, doesn't mean that the person you have in front of you is a good fit for that vacancy. The vacancy that was offered to me, was in environmental protection. And I remember telling this HR individual, that it's free I find that they have a vacancy, and it's fine that they want to be hiring somebody.