Episode 31 - The Hidden Weight Of HR - Part 1: HR Happy Hour’s Trish Steed & Steve Boese On The Cost Of Underusing Human Resources
Most executives think of HR as an order window. Fire this person. Hire that one. Fix the culture. Improve the managers. But underneath that fictional menu is a function absorbing things no one ever puts on a report: the weight of every employee's hardest moments, handled quietly, while still being expected to move the business forward.
In part one of this two-part conversation, we pull back the curtain on what HR actually carries.
Trish Steed, CEO and principal analyst at H3 HR Advisors, spent two decades running HR inside a Big Four accounting firm, a PR agency, a children's hospital, and an IT consultancy. Her verdict on what executives get wrong is direct: they treat HR like a menu. Fire this person. Hire that one. Fix the culture. Improve the managers. Her business partner Steve Boese, co-founder of H3 HR Advisors and program chair of the HR Technology Conference, supplies the structural half of the problem. Most items on that menu were never HR's to solve alone. And underneath the ordering sits a layer of work nobody sees, absorbed by a team carrying the hardest moments of every employee's life while still being asked to move the business forward.
Why is treating HR like an order menu the most expensive mistake an executive can make?
The requests themselves are legitimate. Somebody has to run the termination, post the role, redesign the incentive plan. The problem is what the transaction crowds out: a partnership that could be reading the culture, shaping hiring, and improving business decisions before they're made.
"Stop using HR as just like a checklist or a menu that you can go and order something off of."
– Trish Steed, CEO and Principal Analyst, H3 HR Advisors
Some of the orders are impossible on their face. When an executive team asks HR to fix the culture, raise managerial capability, or make the company more innovative, they are handing over problems whose causes sit somewhere else entirely.
"Many of those really big, important problems are really wrapped up in the tone that the executive team is setting, the organization's strategy, the behaviors that have been allowed to sort of take hold, and what's rewarded and what's only tolerated and what's not tolerated."
– Steve Boese, Co-Founder, H3 HR Advisors
The return-to-office fights of the last five years are the cleanest example. HR was tangentially involved in most of those decisions. HR then gets handed the resulting turnover, the engagement scores, and the absenteeism, and gets asked to fix them.
The pattern is most expensive in M&A. At one company whose entire growth strategy was acquisition, the people who arrived through those deals were invariably unhappy, and HR had not been part of thoughtfully folding them in.
"If you bring HR in late, like on M&A to where they're just kind of doing the paperwork, you're going to have so much regrettable turnover from the company that you're bringing in."
– Trish Steed
Trish ran the other version of that as head of HR at a 2,500-person company closing seven to ten acquisitions a year. She flew out with the C-suite when deals closed, and her presence changed what those first meetings were. They became human experiences rather than business ones, because someone in the room was there to remind the leaders to talk to people as people.
What gets missed is smaller than anyone budgets for. At one acquisition, her colleagues watched the incoming partners write on the office windows with markers and were genuinely scandalized. It was dry erase. It was a completely normal habit in the culture they came from. Nobody had asked, before the deal closed, what a normal workday looked like on the other side.
The research is unkind here. A large share of acquisitions destroy shareholder value over time, and Bain's work on why puts poor deal thesis first and talent, leadership, and culture second. That second cause is exactly the one HR is best positioned to see coming, if anyone asks in time.
What does an HR team absorb that never shows up in a report?
Trish was one of three HR professionals physically inside St. Louis Children's Hospital. The rest of the function sat blocks away in another building.
The hospital's mission was to do what's right for children. HR's job, as she understood it, was to do what's right for the people who do what's right for children. That distinction got tested when her team had a compensation initiative they were proud of and were told instead to hand deliver cupcakes to every nurse during Nurses Week. They pushed back. They lost. It became one of the best experiences of her career.
The reason has to do with what those nurses carry. Anyone who has walked a children's hospital knows the sound of a toddler crying in pain, and it is not a normal cry. When the medevac helicopter came in, staff were told to stop every meeting, stop what they were doing, and start praying, because a child arriving that way was in dire condition. Trish moved her office because of where the helicopter landed.
Handing a cupcake to someone living inside that, and thanking them, produced tears and hugs. It was not a $10,000 bonus. It was one person acknowledging another.
The same logic runs past the clinical staff. Her hardest support problems were the housekeepers and the floor finishers, who were in the rooms constantly, who knew the children and the families, and who were there when a child did not make it. Everyone worried about the nurses. Somebody had to know what housekeeping and food service were going through.
A lower-stakes version shows up in any industry. Running benefits enrollment on brand new technology, Steve had people come to his office ostensibly for help clicking the right buttons. What they actually said was that they had a child with special needs, or a spouse with a chronic disease, and which selection should they make.
"There's probably a lot of executives who listen to this show who lose sleep at night worrying about these things. And I would say just that, yeah, the HR folks do too, and are often really, really directly connected to the people and the stories."
– Steve Boese
Gordon Bethune understood the principle when he turned around Continental Airlines, a story he tells in From Worst to First. He worked the ticket counter every Thanksgiving and served the meal in the break room, taking his holiday where his employees were taking theirs.
What should you do when a reliable performer's output starts to slip?
Trish came back from maternity leave and was immediately asked to terminate an employee. He was not especially likable, but his performance had been consistently high before she left. So before anything else, she sat down and asked him what had changed.
He was going through a brutal divorce. He had told no one at work.
The company lost a good employee who, in a different culture, would have gotten support instead of a termination meeting. Watch for the stone walls. If someone has been steady for a long time and then isn't, something is usually going on, and asking costs nothing.
You only ever see the part of the iceberg that happens at work, and the fix is a question followed by silence. Ask how someone is doing, then ask how they are really doing, then stop talking and listen. People will disclose what they want to disclose.
There is also a resource sitting unused in almost every benefits package. One of Trish's clients, a senior executive, had both divorced parents enter hospice at the same time and had to put her mother's dog down on the same day, all while carrying a full workload. Trish suggested she use the employee assistance program. The response was: the what?
An EAP covers family planning, wills and estates, substance abuse, mental health, financial distress, debt, gambling. It is confidential, it often includes free sessions, and it vets and refers local providers. Trish calls it one of the best kept secrets in employee benefits.
Which leaves the harder question, and the one Part 2 opens with: whose side is HR really on?
What to do this week:
First, stop ordering off the fictitious HR menu. Bring your HR team a problem or an outcome you're trying to reach rather than a task, and bring them in before the decision is made rather than after.
Second, when a consistent performer's output drops, get curious before you get procedural. Talk to your HR team about what might be happening outside of work before anyone reaches for progressive discipline.
Third, find out what your employee assistance program actually covers, then make sure every employee knows it exists. It is a concierge for personal problems and most of your people have no idea it's there.
Related Episodes
– Episode 28 - Self-Advocacy: The Most Important Rule That Nobody Teaches You
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