Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink

49 - Cultivating Trust with HR

• Leah Fink • Season 1 • Episode 49

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Do your employees trust your HR team, or are they wary of them? Discover the complexities that HR professionals face in creating trust and building relationships with employees.  In this episode, we discuss the delicate balancing act HR must perform, serving as both advocates for employees and strategic partners for management, often leading to a disconnect that can seem insurmountable.

Are you confident in fostering an environment for trusting, collaborative relationships with HR?

If you want to understand your employees challenges, and support them with strategies that nurture positive workplace relationships, you should join us for this episode!

To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story

Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 12:00pm MST.  Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/

Speaker 1:

Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization and even out into people's personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real-life stories of leadership so you can gain a deeper understanding and level up your own skills From communication to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict and more. Join us and make sure you're creating the ripples you want. Welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink.

Speaker 2:

Hello and welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink. Today we are going to be talking about the complex relationship between HR and management and what that might mean for employees how they experience that. Esty shares their story. I've been an HR professional for many years at a variety of organizations. Something I find very frustrating is how little trust there is for HR professionals and how staff are often very guarded around me. I understand they may have had bad experiences before, but as someone who is genuinely trying to help and support them, this can be painful to experience. Again and again I feel like once I've been with an organization for a while, I'm able to develop some trust with the staff, but it always takes longer than I would like. So thank you so much for sharing that SD, and I can imagine that would be painful.

Speaker 2:

All leaders take on some component, some representation of all the leaders that someone had in the past, someone with more power than them in that situation, and you really get to be that living representation of all the things that happened right, all their experiences with HR, with managers and beyond. And that is hard, no matter what kind of leader, no matter what kind of situation. That is going to be tough, and as much as that is a reality for many leaders, I do think HR professionals have their own specific space where this is complex and a little bit different, and I really want to address some of those challenges today so we understand them a bit better Now. Let's look at some of the factors, then, that play into this, and first I find there's a component of HR which should be about managing people, about supporting people and the whole employee journey through the organization. And ideally, when I think about HR, I think of a role that should naturally be very focused in relationship, focused on that connection with individuals and how to help them. But, of course, hr professionals have so many different priorities and they're supporting usually so many people to one HR professional that this isn't realistically possible for a lot of organizations. And so then this role, which is supposed to be, or ideally going to be, very relational, becomes a lot more about the tasks and the checkboxes and the things that need to be completed every single day. And that's not to say that there aren't a lot of HR professionals that prioritize relationship, that genuinely care about people like SD, and they're trying to prioritize relationship at the same time, and maybe they can balance both worlds, trying to prioritize relationship at the same time, and maybe they can balance both worlds, but generally it comes down to a piece of conflicting priorities and limited time to do all the things you want to do.

Speaker 2:

So, even with this intention and effort put into relationship building, the first challenge is do you have access to staff? Are you really able to spend a lot of time with them? And, realistically, most employees aren't spending a lot of time with HR. They're going to spend some time at the beginning of their employment, maybe at the end of their employment, some sporadic times throughout, but ultimately it's not a relationship they'd probably be cultivating every day if they're outside the HR department. It is, of course, the direct supervisor and the team that this staff member is going to have the most connection with. They're going to be cultivating the relationships, they're going to be getting support from those people, and that is a good and healthy system, right? That's why we have different levels of management and different teams.

Speaker 2:

But what happens when there's an issue? Of course, your supervisor will try to address what they can in the moment, but when there's a bigger issue, often they might not feel able to support that or they need something else with that and so they'll bring in HR, and HR can often help in these situations. However, there's someone that has a lot of influence and not a lot of relationship with that employee, and think of how vulnerable it is for an employee to be in a place where they're now having to talk to multiple people about these large challenges that they're having. Where they're now having to talk to multiple people about these large challenges that they're having. They barely know one of them potentially, and this person has a lot of power over their professional life. They know what kind of roles HR can take on and, especially if there's been some sort of negative experience with HR in the past, they're probably going to be quite worried about what's going to happen in this situation. They may be resisting what's happening because they're worried. That's a real experience for them. So, trying to build those relationships with employees while facing these time limits, while facing this lack of opportunity to really bond with them and this past experience, those are all layered into this dynamic that the employees have with someone who's an HR professional. Now that we've said all of that, that's kind of the employee and HR professional start of the relationship.

Speaker 2:

In addition to this, there's also relationships between HR and management. That's a big piece that we need to consider, because, after all, hr should be getting their direction from the leadership of the organization, and leadership is pretty much always going to have different perspectives and different priorities than employees do. And they're the ones working closer with HR. They're going to be creating organizational structure and ways of working, they're keeping HR informed of these big picture changes. They're going to be driving culture and trying to support HR in that, and so that's all being communicated between leadership and HR, probably at more regular intervals. So, when it comes to their perspective on a situation, hr professionals are generally going to be more similar to the perspectives of the leadership team and, on top of that, they're going to be spending a lot more time with the leadership team generally, and that's going to also be cultivating relationship.

Speaker 2:

And what does this mean? I have spoken with a lot of employees who feel that their HR are friends with the management team, with the leadership team, and that they might share information with leadership or be more likely to take the side of leadership if an employee brings a challenge forward. And so, as much as it's important to cultivate that healthy relationship between management and HR, it needs to be done in a way that doesn't feel like it takes precedence over the relationship with employees, and even that you're conscious of what perspective the employees might be having about this. What is the appearance of the relationship between management and HR, between management and HR? That all being said, finally, there's a sad situation that also layers onto this, but also some leaders unfortunately use HR to take on responsibilities that they don't feel comfortable with or they don't feel skilled in, and something I've heard about probably more often is leaders who use HR to deliver feedback. They're not comfortable giving consistent, constructive feedback, and so they'll go straight to HR for the paperwork side of things and they'll have them write out employee plans and plan this, and then HR presents it to this employee. They might not have even known there was any issues at all and suddenly they're getting a plan that says you need to correct these things or you might lose your job. That's big, that's a really big responsibility that now, in that employee's mind, they're seeing coming from HR, when it should have been a healthy process that was engaged with their management, that went through all these different steps.

Speaker 2:

On the extreme end of this, I've also talked to fractional HR, who have talked about being hired by companies to come in and do mass layoffs because their leadership team isn't comfortable with doing a lot of layoffs at once. They want to save everyone's mental health in the organization and so they'll bring in someone external to do that, to do the dirty work, as it were, for that situation. And it's understandable how leaders want to keep mentally healthy in their roles and they want to be supported and they're trying to protect their own mental health. And this all being said, this also really creates this experience that staff have where they're going to their next company and all they're going to think of is how much they can't trust HR, how much HR has relationship with management, is on the side of management and is not safe for them to go to. And really, this culminates in the two perspectives that I hear about HR, and either HR is there to serve the company and, in fact, are working against employees as almost the enemy, or that HR is there to support and advocate for their employee, even if they might need support different or against what management is going with. And so these really two big, conflicting pieces of how people perceive HR.

Speaker 2:

You really want to decide what that looks like for your organization. And if you're an HR professional, you are now hearing and you probably already know a lot of these things about what you might have to overcome when it comes to building up that trust and that relationship with those staff. And if you want to look at building trust and relationships, you can listen to some of our other episodes that focus a little bit more on that or reach out. I'm happy to share some tips and ideas. And if you're a leader that's not an HR professional, it's really important that you're considering how you can be supporting your whole team to be interacting in a healthy way with HR.

Speaker 2:

How do you ensure that you're not prioritizing the relationship between HR and management where it might be disadvantaging the employee relationship with HR? How would you best support your team while leveraging the strengths of HR and make sure that it's a healthy experience for everyone, because it can be extremely beneficial? If your culture and your organization does focus on the employee, does focus on relationship and how you're cultivating this, then you're building that into your HR team and you're building a kind of situation where your employees not only have a management team that they can trust through your culture, but also have other people that when they are struggling, they have someone to go to. They have that. External support can be so powerful and such a great way to keep great employees, as always.

Speaker 2:

If you want to discuss this a little bit more, we don't have time to go into all of the ways that you could potentially do this, but please do feel free to reach out and I would love to have a conversation with you, sd, I am very excited for our conversation.

Speaker 2:

Let's make sure that you are getting the best results from all the work that you're putting in to build trust and build those relationships. And, as a reminder to all our listeners, if you have a story or a question that you want to share, we would love to have it. You can send that using the link down below in the description and, as a thank you for that, I'll follow up with a session to make sure your questions are fully answered and as a way of saying thank you, and I want to thank you so much for listening, for learning with me. There are so many relationships going on in the workplace at all times. There's so much complexity and I appreciate you taking the time to consider how these might be affecting other pieces of your work and how they might be affecting your employees. And, as we close, remember to ask yourself what kind of ripples am I going to create this week?

Speaker 1:

We hope you enjoyed the episode. Make sure to subscribe, comment and connect with Leah at meetleahca.