The following is a transcript of our podcast conversation with Ali Greene. You can listen to the full episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Sarah
Hello and welcome to Humans Beyond Resources, an HR podcast by Reverb where we cover topics from culture to compliance. Reverb believes that every decision a leader makes reverberates throughout the organization. From hiring your first employee to training your entire workforce, we believe in building healthy, inclusive cultures that engage your team. I’m your host, Sarah Wilkins.
Today we are discussing trauma-informedHR. Our guest Ashlee Christian is a Reverb People operations consultant. Ashlee explains what trauma informed HR is and explores the differences between a traditional HR approach and a trauma informed HR approach. Welcome, Ashlee.
Ashlee
Thank you.
Sarah
Let’s just dive into some questions. I’m really excited to talk about this topic. So just to start, can you help define what trauma informed HR is and where did your passion for this work come from?
Ashlee
Yeah. So trauma informed HR is really similar to trauma informed care. It’s an approach that recognizes the trauma and the impact of trauma really on employees and seeks to create a supportive work environment that promotes healing and well being. The approach requires an understanding of the effects of trauma on individuals, being sensitive to their needs and providing a workplace that’s respectful and compassionate. It involves promoting a culture of safety, of trustworthiness, transparency that really empowers employees to have choice over parts of their employment and make choices with regards to aspects of their time at work. And really, by adopting a trauma informed approach, employers can not only help employees heal from past trauma, resist active retraumatization, and support them in achieving their potential, as well as leading to improved employee well being, job satisfaction, and just overall organizational success. So it’s a real win win strategy. But yeah, my passion for this work, it’s so interesting and I’ll try to be brief because it is a long and windy road that got me here. But when I first moved to Seattle, I started working at a startup and I knew that I wanted to get into consulting after kind of doing this work as a generalist in a lot of small organizations. And I knew that eventually I wanted to be a consultant, but I didn’t really know why. I knew that I didn’t want to do HR internally, but I couldn’t articulate why that was yet. And I worked at this small startup and I had a wonderful mentor there and colleague who said three words to me one time that were like branded into my brain and those three words were work shouldn’t hurt. And that’s sort of this mantra and motto that I’ve really brought into a lot of this work. And I think that in realizing how much we unintentionally, but that a lot of the function of HR actually creates a lot of harm and causes a lot of harm and it’s not intentional, right? And it’s really sad also because a lot of us come into this work because we want to be helpers, we want to be supportive people in the workplace. And we really want employees to feel supported and to feel that they have people that are looking out for them. And I think a lot of us get into that work wanting to be that person. And then we come into this function and realize that that’s not entirely our jobs. And then oftentimes we end up being the enforcers of policies or practice. This is that we don’t personally agree with or that we would like to be done differently if we had our say in it. But a lot of times we don’t. We just end up having to do things that the business is looking to do without regards to how it might harm employees, how it might cause trauma. And so when I left that job and I got into consulting, I started realizing that that was the reason that I wanted to approach it externally. And then I started realizing more that I needed to find a different way into the work that felt like it was addressing some of these harms and addressing some of these ways that we can approach this function differently. So that is what led me to seminary and then to becoming a corporate chaplain, which has given me the training and the kind of Practicum work in developing some of these concepts and researching some of them. So that’s kind of the short version of how I got here.
Sarah
Wonderful. Thanks for sharing. And I love the three words work shouldn’t hurt.
Ashlee
Isn’t that great? I want to tattoo it on my forehead.
Sarah
I was just thinking, like, I want to post that somewhere in my office so everyone sees that, like, work shouldn’t hurt. Like in a frame. No, that’s great. To kind of go further, I’ve heard the term restorative HR and you’re sharing kind of trauma informed HR. Can you explain maybe the differences or similarities in those two concepts?
Ashlee
Yeah, there are a lot of people that are already starting to talk about some of these concepts in the trauma informed space and the Restorative HR space. I would say the difference that I see between those two things is that Restorative HR has much more of a focus on conflict mitigation and resolution. So using the principles of restorative justice within that framework. So it’s kind of involving the wider community in conflict. It’s not seeing conflict from a binary perspective and really seeking to understand the needs of the impacted people and sort of how you can bring restoration to relationships and to communities. So I think that restorative HR is trauma informed HR. And trauma informed HR should also be restorative HR. But I tend to prefer the term trauma informed HR because it feels more resonant with just the general principles of trauma informed care that I try to bring into my work.
Sarah
Wonderful, thank you for explaining that. Your intro you kind of talked about many HR leaders come in hoping to kind of be a helper, provide a great workplace. And sometimes that’s not always the case or they’re not always able to do that. So can you explain some differences between a traditional HR approach versus a trauma informed HR approach?
Ashlee
So there are six kind of key principles in trauma informed care and these are standard principles that can really be imagined through different lenses just depending on the setting. So the first principle is safety. Then we have trustworthiness and transparency, peer support, collaboration and mutuality empowerment, voice and choice, and cultural, historic and gender issues. So within each of those principles you can kind of see where you might be able to apply different principles to different things. And so when you’re thinking about a traditional HR approach versus a trauma informed HR approach, one of the examples that I love to give and that I really advocate for, and I think this is a place where HR people and organizations cause the most amount of harm. And I have been harmed in this process as well, and that is for involuntary terminations. And so within HR and organizations, oftentimes we have to involuntarily terminate people. Unfortunately, we don’t like doing it, but it has to be done. There are a couple of reasons that that happens, right? And we have the one reason that everybody sort of thinks of when they think about this stuff, which is gross negligence. It’s like somebody really messed up. That’s a very small percentage of people that actually do that, right? The most of the time the people that are getting terminated are people that just aren’t quite the right fit. Maybe they were on a pip or they just had some performance issues that they hadn’t quite worked through. There’s a whole lot of reasons. Or maybe it’s reduction of force. Maybe there are larger layoffs that are going on, but we tend to handle all those situations the exact same way. Right. Which is where we’re sitting down in the meeting and we’re saying, hey, I’m so sorry to tell you, but this is your last day here and essentially ending with all of your stuff is cut off and we’ll see you later. And that’s the end of it, right? And I kind of joke when I coach employees or managers about terminations and I say for the most part, you will be surprised that most people take it really well, except the one time that I didn’t. And I tell them the story about when my position was eliminated, where I worked, and it caused a lot of trauma and a lot of harm because of the way that they did it and because of the words that they used and the way that they positioned the reasoning around it. And so I really want us to be really intentional about that. Because even though it’s never going to be something that feels good, there’s ways that we can do it to make it not feel bad or not feel harmful, right? It’s never going to feel good again. But so one of the big things that I advocate for, and I think this kind of highlights a key difference between traditional HR versus trauma informed HR, and that is giving employees a sense of empowerment, voice and choice when it comes to the termination process. Also employing some of those things around trustworthiness and transparency and peer support. So the example is instead of saying that, hey, we’re terminating you, this is your last day, we say, hey, we let them know what’s going on, and say, you can choose for today to be your last day. And I’ve advocated for this to happen usually in the beginning of the week. So we’re talking like a Monday or Tuesday. And if you can even think about even a little further, maybe you’re getting close to the end of the month. And if you just decide to push that effective date a couple days in the future, you give that employee health insurance through the end of that month, right? And so just thinking about little ways of how can we make this a softer landing for this person, right? And that’s where you’re going to think about severance, you’re going to think about Cobra payments. Regardless if you can do any of that, the least you can do is not pull the rug from out from under them and also cut everything off because really there’s no need to do that. And I think that a lot of us sort of have in our risk assessment brains this kind of Murphy’s Law that if it can happen, it will happen. But I just don’t think that’s the case, right? And so giving people the ability to say, hey, we’re going to leave your slack on. We’re going to leave your email open. You are welcome to do what you need to do to transition your work, to reach out to any external partners, to reschedule meetings or cancel meetings, and to communicate to your coworkers about what’s going on. We will leave the communication up to you. We will leave the choice up to you of whether or not you want today to be your last day or sometime else this week and give them that trustworthiness, right, to say, we trust you. We know that you’re not going to do anything like that we wouldn’t want you to do, right? And we understand that what we’re doing is really difficult and we have a lot of compassion for that. And so we want to make this as easy and as soft of a landing as possible. And so I think that that kind of gesture just goes a long way and I think that it makes people who are participating in that process from all sides feel a little bit better because you’re being very kind and compassionate about something that is just going to be very difficult no matter how you slice it, right? So that’s something that I’ve really been advocating for. And again, it takes a lot of trust, right? It takes a lot of kind of convincing people like, no, this is okay, I promise. And also keeping an eye on things, right. They don’t have to be in all of the systems, right? If there are systems that are really risky for them to be in, turn it off. But if your entire operations rests on the fact that one employee who may be disgruntled can take the whole thing down, maybe you should also look at just some of the things around how your organization is being managed if you’re that concerned about that risk.
Sarah
Yeah, I like that you pointed that out. That was actually something in a really early podcast episode we talked about regarding kind of handling reductions in a respectful way. And that was one of the points, is like allow people to say goodbye. These are people they’ve worked with and the risk is very minimal. Right? And yeah, like you said, you can take away some systems, but you don’t have to just cut people off that second. Right. So just such a kind thing to do. And I love the tip about or the point about like, can you help them with a softer landing, about moving it to the beginning of the next month or something like that so they have a little bit of time with health insurance and things like that. There was another example you shared once and it was around kind of hiring and onboarding and I really liked that one. Would you mind sharing a little bit about that one as well?
Ashlee
Yeah, that one is another really exciting one. That one. I’m working my angles with this one. But one of the big things about hiring is that oftentimes either people are coming from one job to the next, or they’ve been out of work for some time and they’re really looking to get into their next job immediately because they need the money, they need the insurance, all the reasons that people need to be employed. Right. And anybody that’s been unemployed for any amount of time probably knows that it’s really hard to enjoy that time off. Right. Even if you have a job lined up, it’s really hard to enjoy and to just rest and to really think about this next chapter that you’re walking into. And I think that typically people leave jobs for reasons most of the time because there was something there that just didn’t work for them. Whether that’s a values misalignment, there is harm being done, maybe it’s just not quite the right role, not quite the right fit, but people are leaving jobs for a reason, right? And so I think most of the time people don’t actually think about why they left that job or if they do, they’re not actively working to resolve that within themselves. And what they’ll do is they’ll just put all the trauma and all the things in their little bindle and they sling it across their shoulder and then they just bring their little bindle to their new place and they drop it on their desk and they go this is all my stuff. And I think that we see a lot of that trauma sometimes in workplaces, right, because some things will tend to come back up and even though it’s not necessarily that new places, they didn’t cause it, but now it’s theirs to sort of deal with, right? And so I think that having a space for employees to take time between jobs to rest and to reflect and for it to be purposefully for that activity is something that I’m really trying to advocate for. And this could be something as it could be one week off, it could be two weeks off. But essentially the idea would be that you have a start date, that’s sort of a practical start date, that that’s when you’re going to start getting paid, that’s when your insurance effective date is going to be from. And then there’s an expectation that you are not working for the first week or so. And then you come back, you are ready to go. You have had time off. And we have kind of put that immediate investment into your health and well being from the beginning, under the expectation that we want you to take this time to rest, to reflect, to think about some of the things that you didn’t like about that last job or some of the ways that you didn’t like to be managed, for example, and come into this new job after that period of time. Kind of ready to discuss some of those things, to think about them and to make sure that you’re not bringing them into this new place without working through them a little bit. And obviously one or two weeks is not enough time to solve all the world’s problems, but I think that it shows that immediate investment in your health and well being and I think the other thing is a lot of places have policies around taking time off in the beginning, right? I’ve seen policies where you can’t use your PTO for the first 90 days, which if any of you are at one of those companies run, because I think that that kind of policy is really awful because sometimes you need to take that time off. Three months is a long time to not take time off in and people, I think they don’t want to look like, oh, I’m not a hard worker, so a lot of times people don’t like to take time off in the beginning. So this eliminates all of that and says we are forcing you to take this time off. The other thing is it comes down to accessibility, right? Like if I have a lot of privilege, I have a lot of resources, I can afford to take that time off between jobs. Not everybody can. So then what you’re ending up with is like an inequitable kind of experience coming into a job where you have some people that have taken the time to rest and reflect and recoup. You have other people that are just like need to get in there because they need the resources, they need the health insurance. So this way it’s very much an investment and also kind of a leveling the playing field when it comes to being set up for success, coming into a new role. So I’m really excited about this and I’ve been talking to a lot of people about it.
Sarah
Yeah, I mean, I love that. The first time I switched jobs, I couldn’t take time off between. I worked till a Friday at the first company and then I started on Monday at the next one. And looking back, that was super hard and very exhausting and all sorts of things that I never got to really deal with, moving to a new place. And then I had the privilege between my last job and coming to Reverb where I was able to take about three weeks off and I needed that time to kind of be ready to come in fully, kind of recovered from my last role and ready to start. And so I like around leveling the playing field for people to give them that time because I do think it’s important to have that time between. But as you said, not everyone has that privilege to be able to do it. So leveling the playing field seems great.
Ashlee
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m sure that you could enjoy that time off right when you knew that you could afford it, that you could take it, you knew that you had that job lined up. That’s the best kind of time off. Right? That kind of time off. We don’t really get often.
Sarah
No, we don’t. Yeah, I just had completely all I got to spend time with my daughter who was really young, but yeah, very.
Ashlee
Free, very few cares. Very few cares.
Sarah
And got back really excited to start whenever I did come to Reverb. So all of this sounds great at face value. And I would say many leaders would be like, yeah, I would love to approach things from a trauma informed way for HR, but you probably encounter some pushback, especially when it comes to things like budgeting for people to take off a week when they first start or some of the other things that you may implement that come with a cost. Have you received any pushback and what is it and how have you kind of advocated for these approaches after receiving it?
Ashlee
Yeah, I think I found a lot of ease in just having the conversations with leaders about the approach. I wouldn’t say that all of my clients have fully operationalized the mindset, but I think so many people are exceedingly open to this conversation. I think especially the type of clients that we get here at Reverb who want to practice HR in an innovative and dei focused way and in a very kind of revolutionary maybe is a little strong word, but they want to practice HR in different ways, right? And so I think that the clients that we get are very open to these kinds of conversations. I think that ultimately they understand that we’ve sort of reached an impasse with the function, right. That kind of indicates that we really need to rethink the way that we approach HR and just, like, work in general. I think the pandemic really laid bare just like a lot of the ways that we approach work and that we treat employees in the workplace just does not work anymore. It didn’t work, but the pandemic was like, it really doesn’t work. And so it really forced us to think about a lot of these things. I think it’s hard because a lot of the things that I’m asking of people within this framework require a lot of behavioral changes. Right. The money is one thing, but the behavioral changes are the big sticking point, right. Because they require you to just rethink a lot of things, right. And they require you to have a lot of trust in people. They require you to think of things outside of a binary idea of right and wrong. They require you to think about things in a more nuanced way and in a way that kind of treats people as individuals, which is hard for in HR in general, right? And it’s one of the things that we kind of shy away from because we want to make sure that we’re applying policies equitably. And so sometimes when we get into a not one size fits all approach, we can open ourselves up to not applying things equitably or potentially being discriminatory. And of course, we always want to think about those things. But yeah, I would say that it requires more work, right. The lazy option is doing things the way that we’ve always done them, right? It’s what I call sort of like corporate social contagion of like, we terminate people this way, it’s because everybody else terminates people this way, so why would we do it different? Because everybody else does it that way. And even for that example, in particular, when I talk to managers about that, one of the most common questions that I get from people is we can do that. And I’m like, we can do whatever we want. And so I think even just, like, kind of approaching some of these things, people are surprised. They’re like, oh, and it’s just like, yeah, of course I’m not going to tell you anything that you shouldn’t be doing legally. But I think that it’s hard for people to even imagine different ways to do things because we’ve just been conditioned to do things a certain way. And so I think the ease in having the conversations and the ease in understanding why some of these things are beneficial because I think especially from mitigating sort of people’s trauma in the workplace, there is such a direct line for people. And people have talked to me about this and I see this where it’s like my burnout is caused by me not getting enough time between jobs. And they can draw that very direct line from not getting enough time to rest or not getting enough time to work through some of the things that they experienced in their last job and burnout or things that they’re experiencing at this job. And so when you can draw that really straight line, it becomes really easy to just say like, see this, this is why we’re doing this. And so even if they’re not ready to fully dive into some of these changes, they are so open to understanding that there are changes that we need to make. And just approaching it with some of these different principles and saying just like, think about these. Think about ways when you’re thinking about policies or benefits or things that you want to improve. Let’s make sure that we’re looking at this list and seeing how we might be able to incorporate some of those things. And I think it’s really difficult because sometimes people think like, oh, we need to do all of this tomorrow. And it’s just like, no, we take our time, we don’t need to do it all in a day. But I think the idea that we know better now and so we need to do better because there’s no excuse to not at this point anymore. So I would say that I have gotten a lot of ease at having the conversation and depending on what it is that I’m trying to change, I have a lot of success with those things. And I will say the involuntary termination thing is one of the things that I have operationalized across most of my clients.
Sarah
Yeah, that one seems like a no brainer. Right. As far as how to do that. Yeah. In which you need to do it the old way. Right. Very few instances where that needs to happen. I like a lot of things that you said, particularly it can feel overwhelming and like you need to go do a lot of things right now and change everything. But just looking and seeing what can we do, what can we start to change? And your example of operationalizing involuntary termination process differently across all clients is a simple thing that everyone can go do. Maybe there’s some other things that you would like to be able to do, but you need more time to kind of figure that out. Right. And so just taking steps is important, right? Totally.
Ashlee
Absolutely. And becoming familiar. Right. Like with these concepts, there are a lot of people that are writing about these things, that are writing the Washington State Department of Health and Social Service, they’ve created a trauma informed care training that specifically goes into all the principles of trauma informed care and kind of specific modules for implementing in various types of places. And so this is free. There are things that we can be educating ourselves around these things for free and getting more well versed in that kind of stuff. And then when you understand the principles and you understand just a little bit more the impact of trauma on people, you can just be a lot more careful in the way that you go about your work or the way that you go about conversations. And yeah, it’s really empowering to just have that lens because you know that you might not be 100% perfect all the time. I know that I’m sure I say and do things that unintentionally traumatize or retraumatize people, but just thinking about it and I think we’re starting to see this a lot more in society as well. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, especially this year, I’ve noticed more than ever all these organizations like Etsy and these other places that are like, hey, do you want to opt out of Mother’s Day emails or Father’s Day emails? And just that option for people is so revolutionary and I think it helps other people understand that folks carry trauma around, that kind of stuff where you can see an email like, why would somebody want to opt out of Mother’s Day emails? And then they start to extrapolate that and start thinking about it and it just sort of opens that world up for them a little bit to understand that people are coming into this world with vastly different experiences and perspectives from them. And I’m really encouraged to see a lot more of this stuff happening.
Sarah
That’s great. Yeah, you kind of mentioned just educating yourself as being something that people could do today and we can include that link in the show notes, but anything else you would want to leave people with today to do around advocating for trauma informed HR practices?
Ashlee
Yeah, I mean, be brave, right? I think that, again, we need to break free around the ways that we’ve been doing things because it’s gotten to us to a point, right, but it’s not going to be what carries us into this next phase of work. And I think we’re seeing a lot more employee led movements. I think we’re going to see a lot more of that the more that we don’t get ahead of some of these things and how we’re approaching our relationship to work and our relationship to employment. And so, yeah, I think that my biggest thing is like educate yourself, be brave, be bold, be different. We don’t have to keep doing it’s. That old quote like the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting. Different results. So, yeah, that’s sort of what I want to leave everybody with.
Sarah
That’s great. And then I think, back to work shouldn’t hurt. Work shouldn’t hurt. So thank you for leaving me with that as well.
Ashlee
Yes, it’s honestly such a mantra for me, and I’m so happy to share it.
Sarah
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