43: {Interview} Why Human Resources is so Important with Michelle Aronson

Have you ever wondered, what does human resources actually do? Most people have no clue the scope of work that falls within the realm of Human Resources. Typically it includes areas such as recruiting, hiring, employee relations, company culture, leadership and development training, benefits and sometimes even payroll. Today Michelle Aronson discuss all of the things and why exactly Human Resources plays such a crucial role to a company, no matter the size. 


Michelle spent two decades on a career journey through strategic Human Resources, growing from a recruiter to a People Experience Officer, executive coach, graduate school professor, small business owner, and podcast host of True Stories at Work. In her pivotal role as People Experience Officer, her teams successfully designed strategies to improve employee and customer metrics year over year. Her unique approach aligns people with business strategy, emphasizing innovation, impact, and outcomes.

 
Michelle learned a lot about shaping company culture, including that leading and learning were more impactful when they were collaborative and fun. She even took improv and standup comedy classes to enhance her skills.

 
As the host of True Stories at Work podcast, Michelle shares the best things about working in Human Resources: the people, the stories, and the real things that happen at work that no one knew about …workplace confessions!

 Now, Michelle runs the Culture and Strategy Lab, helping companies achieve business results by connecting business strategy and workforce experience. The lab is a space where employees and leaders co-create measurable and actionable strategies to achieve business results, while remaining aligned to the company culture, mission and values.

The Culture and Strategy Lab builds a unique approach tailored to your company. Visit physicsatwork.com or connect with Michelle on LinkedIn if you want to improve your workplace!

Follow her on LinkedIn HERE or reach out to her at The Culture and Strategy Lab.

This is an episode you do not want to miss!

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Transcript

Caroline (00:01.45)
Welcome to Feminine Founder, where we talk all things recruiting, hiring, business, and entrepreneurship. I'm Carolyn Pennington, your host. Today I have Michelle Aaronson with me. Michelle is the principal and owner of Physics at Work. She teaches at several local Chicago universities. She's a chief member and the podcast host of True Stories at Work. So welcome, Michelle.

michelle (00:25.837)
Thanks for having me.

Caroline (00:28.462)
So I'd love to hear your story of how you got into the HR space.

michelle (00:34.037)
I went through college taking a lot of great classes, but with zero career aspirations. I had no idea what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. About probably approaching the last month of college, I went and spoke to a career advisor, and she asked me a really good question. She said, what problem do you want to solve in the world? I thought, oh my gosh.

That's such a good question. And I had just been in the hospital with a broken ankle for a week. And I said, you know what? Healthcare. It is. And she said, what do you want to do in healthcare? Like clean the floors or be a doctor? I said, mean people take care of sick people. And I honestly can't even believe it. She said, so what do you want to do? And I said, I want to hire better. Make sure that people are.

good and caring and kind and she said, that's called a recruiter. And I wrote it down on a piece of paper and walked out into the world to try to figure out A. what a recruiter was and B. how to become one. So that's the truth.

Caroline (01:49.282)
So you started in your career in recruiting and then transitioned into more of a traditional corporate HR position.

michelle (01:57.245)
I started out as a recruiter and my boss seemed to see things in me and wanted me to fix problems. I really am good at noticing and solving problems. And so he first gave me benefits and comp, and then I moved into a leadership role. And then I took over the whole team. And then I took over employee well-being. And then I took over leadership development. And then I took over.

customer experience. And by the end of my career, I was over 50% of our leadership incentive program. So employee experience and customer experience were two of the KPIs for our company. And the other two were quality and finance. And guess what? I have very little control over the journey of every employee and every customer, but I had to find ways to

meet ever increasing benchmarks every single year. And so I hired a great team and we did some really cool things.

Caroline (03:06.958)
So I'd love to dig into that deeper. I did not realize that you were in charge of the candidate experience, and I'm a huge advocate and fan of that because I think it really matters when it comes to recruiting and hiring top talent. So what are some things that companies can be doing to enhance their candidate experience?

michelle (03:28.653)
So many. Everything big and small, I guess. I want to give you a drop list of things. I want to say like journey mapping and get feedback from your employees and constantly be in contact with them. But I want to start even sooner than that by saying, ground yourself in your values. What kind of company are you? Get very clear on the behaviors and the

expectations that you're going to have of the people that you recruit. Put it in your job description, make it compelling. The candidate journey begins before that person even sees your job. And, you know, so you have to really map out the touch points, but also from the moment they apply till the moment they retire, it's

Everything. Is that overwhelming enough?

Caroline (04:28.766)
No, I love that you dug into that too, because a lot of times companies don't realize the importance of having their mission and values on their website. How are they showing up online? What are their Glassdoor reviews? What is in there? Because the candidates, you're right, the prospective candidates are looking at all the things before they even press the apply button.

michelle (04:50.942)
Mm-hmm. And they're also hesitant. It's so easy to apply for jobs today. You can very easily click a button on LinkedIn, apply for a job. There are hundreds of thousands of people who are doing that every single day. And yet, once they get the interview, you're not done. Once you make the job offer, you're not done. Every single...

action or inaction a lot of times between them having the interview and them being there for the first 90 days is convincing them if they're moving in the right direction or the wrong direction. And it's very easy for them to drop out at any point. And it's also very expensive if you do it wrong, if you do it poorly, if you ignore them, if you just expect that they're going to show up without.

any touching base between the interview. Imagine you're recruiting them for their whole employment life cycle. Like it's all about engaging them and getting their ideas and challenging them and helping them grow.

Caroline (05:59.154)
communication is so key and that and even over communicating is more beneficial because the worst thing and even as a recruiter I hear about all the time is candidates apply to jobs or companies and they just get ghosted.

michelle (06:13.889)
Yeah, this morning we, a friend and I did a program for an accelerator here in Chicago through the University of Chicago, and it is for energy startups. So it's like a little incubator for people that need to save the planet. And they all are different. Some are nuclear, some are...

cleaning up the oceans, like all of them have a different strategy for how they're going to use their energy tech. But what we focused on was communication today, how important it is even as a team of one or two or three to define who you are, ground yourself in your values, and then also just get in the habit of sharing that information, whether you're choosing your channel.

through email and why you would choose an email channel versus a phone call channel. What's high touch? What does that look like? So when you're looking at the employee journey, I would also invite you to consider some high touch activities, not just emails and texts, but little things, niceties, surprises, create emotion. How do you want them, what do you want them to think, feel and do? So really being intentional and it will take work,

it will be well worth the work when that candidate is great and they want to stay.

Caroline (07:42.174)
everything you just said is pure gold. So I hope everyone is listening up. So switching gears, you had a huge corporate role as the people experience officer for a large healthcare organization and recently you decided to pivot a couple years ago and go out on your own. So what prompted you to leave your big corporate job to go out and be an entrepreneur?

michelle (08:07.137)
I absolutely loved that job and I loved my team and I loved the company. And it was, if I had written what I would have liked to do in the beginning of my career, that job was all of it. I was so satisfied. My dad got sick with Alzheimer's and it is like...

the world just looked different. I can't even explain it, but time was limited with him. And I knew it was limited in general, but I decided to quit my job. I loved my job, but I loved my dad more. And just be with him while he knew who I was. He ended up passing away, which is sad, but also the only good thing.

about Alzheimer's is when it's over. It's such a destructive experience for the human being and for all the people that love him. And so I decided, you know, let's start doing all the other things on your bucket list. You got through your career bucket list. What else do you need on your life bucket list? And starting a business, weirdly, I was an MBA student who

um, studied entrepreneurship before there were books. They were putting together like a program that was not even, so it was back in the nineties, right? And so it wasn't this big thing, but I, I remember sitting there and watching it and being like, my dream is to have an S corp and a payroll. And when you work in H I, you know, there's nothing glamorous about payroll. So it was a weird dream.

But definitely it was in my mind and in my heart. And really what I've discovered is the joy of helping other companies on this journey. Because it is such a hard strategic thing to do. I do teach, you mentioned I'm a teacher. I teach HR strategy and metrics. So putting those things together professionally, academically, and then being able to do it for customers

michelle (10:27.947)
is actually really fun, sadly.

Caroline (10:33.25)
So why is it so important for HR to have a seat at the leadership table?

michelle (10:40.717)
From my opinion, from my perspective, with work, hold on, let me start over. Humans are doing the work for you. So your human resources are really what is going to get you to your strategy, whatever your business goals are. So if HR isn't at the table,

then how is their expertise, how is the messaging being communicated to leverage them in an efficient and effective way to the goals that the company has? It's just such a big missing piece of the pie. I mentioned this group of entrepreneurs I was working with this morning. We put this cartoon up and I'll send it to you. It's a picture of a mouse.

and it says strategy under the mouse and then under the mouse trap, it says culture and there's a piece of cheese on the trap. And it's sort of like culture will, you better be smart because it will kill your strategy, right? If you are not approaching it in a very systemized way, you will not likely attract, retain, achieve with your talent.

Caroline (12:02.658)
I'm glad that you brought up the company culture piece because that brings me to my next question. I feel like company culture is talked about so much in the job market space today and I feel like it's not going anywhere. And it's more than just a buzzword, it's a way, it's how your company, your employees feel about working for your company. So any tips that you've got as to how HR can enhance company culture?

michelle (12:30.509)
so many. I will say I worked at a startup with a bunch of scientists a couple of years ago, and they were building a culture. And what's fascinating, and we were recruiting from all the top universities. I mean, you name a Ivy League or top university for engineers, we were recruiting from all of them. Many of the people.

who were interviewing wanted to know about the culture and they wanted to know from the founders. They were really curious and concerned about how they were gonna be cared for once they joined the team. And it is a really hard thing because culture is invisible and it's also strategic and it covers so many touch points. So I'm just gonna tell you, I haven't even, I'm in the process right now.

It's very hard to explain. So when somebody comes to me and asks me to help them with their company, they're sometimes asking me for something very tactical. We wanna do leadership training. We wanna improve our culture, or we need help with our applicant tracking system to fix our culture, or we need a range of different things. So what I'm developing right now with a student from the University of Chicago is a culture survey that really mirrors the strategy and the culture. So...

going to have a real short version that people can have that will just help them see the holes in their culture. So when you invite me out to do leadership training, that's just one little hole in your culture. It's still, the bucket is still leaking in all these other places. So maybe when you invite me in and we have a conversation and we kind of go through some aspects of the survey, you're going to say, Oh, you know what, we really need to start with our values and the behaviors around them. Because that

will help to clarify all the other things in this chain. So what I was noticing, I guess, is that I was solving problems and not strategy. So I wanted to find a way to bump it up. So the answer to the question is, give me about three months and come ask me for a culture assessment that I'm currently developing. But it really links together all the different elements of culture, because it is a big project and a big undertaking.

michelle (14:50.953)
And so that's another reason to use your time and money efficiently.

Caroline (14:57.93)
I think you're coming up with something that's huge because a culture assessment is so needed. I don't care if you're a two-man company or a 5,000 or 100,000 employees culture is so important. As a recruiter, I can't tell you how many phone calls I've had with candidates that wanna leave their company because they don't like the company culture. And it's one of the driving factors of why.

people want to leave their jobs is typically either one of two things, company culture or compensation.

michelle (15:30.278)
Mm-hmm.

Caroline (15:33.454)
So what is the worst? And I know you have a whole long list of HR nightmares, but I'd love to hear maybe one or two that really stick out in your mind.

michelle (15:46.777)
It's interesting because I block some of it out. I'm just going to say I remember working. I worked in HR for 20 plus years. And I remember thinking, oh my god, I need to write all these down because you do forget over time. I'll tell you my favorite story. And it's really weird. And nobody's ever asked me that question, so I'm excited to share it. Well, and it starts out with my.

biggest pet peeve, which is people not telling the truth. I had a leader call me and he said, oh, you know, I had an employee who didn't follow a safety rule. I'm just going to give him a written warning. And I had worked with this leader for 15 plus years and thought, okay, well, I guess if it was a bigger deal, he would let me know. Well, about an hour later, the CEO calls me and said, did you hear what happened? And I said, no. And he goes, did you talk to X? And I said, yeah. And I said, he told me it was a safety issue.

and that he was going to give him a written warning, he goes, you need to go investigate. It's like, OK. So that guy left everything out of the story. Basically, the story was the employee who worked in an area where there was an MRI machine, and you walk into an MRI room, and you see everywhere, do not wear metal, no metal, check yourself for metal. Well, the.

the person was wearing ankle weights, which he didn't know what was in them, but apparently it was metal. And so when he walked into the room, he got with the patient, he got sucked onto the magnet. And his solution instead of pressing the button and calling for help was to ask the patient to help him to take his pants off because he thought if he could take his pants off.

Caroline (17:25.089)
Thank you.

michelle (17:42.285)
that he would be able to slide his foot out of the pants and then get help. And it just goes downhill from there. But the point is it was a lawsuit and I'm sure the patient got a lot of money and good for them, they deserved it because this person was not looking out for the patient, they were looking out for themselves. And who wants to see somebody with their pants off? Please, come on, it's just ridiculous. So.

I don't know, it wasn't my most nightmare, but it was my most memorable. And I was also pretty pissed at that manager and they got to hear that, so.

Caroline (18:22.162)
I love that story that is seriously hilarious and also sounds terrible to deal with from an HR standpoint. I cannot even imagine.

michelle (18:31.453)
Yeah, yeah, no, yeah. And in HR, you have just those all the time. But that one just stuck with me, mostly probably because just how stupid that solution was. And it gets worse. Like, there's just so many things that went wrong between the write-up, basically. That person was not there anymore. Let's just say that. That was the end. I'm pretty sure the first day of MRI training, they say, do not bring metal into the body.

Caroline (18:54.114)
soon.

michelle (19:00.757)
So, I mean, yeah.

Caroline (19:04.098)
So on that note, how can our listeners find you?

michelle (19:08.497)
You can find me, I do have a podcast where we tell HR stories just like that one, things good, bad, and ugly. That is True Stories at Work. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can go to my website, physicsatwork.com, and would love to connect.

Caroline (19:28.598)
Thanks, Rachelle.

michelle (19:30.465)
Thank you so much for having me. It was so much fun.