Soft Skills

Understanding Display Rules & Emotional Labour at Work: Cost, Consequences, and Coping Strategies

Imagine you work as a barista at Starbucks. A customer walks in on a bright sunny morning, eagerly anticipating your warm welcome, the comforting aroma of freshly brewed coffee, and your excited request for their name – which per pre-established rules, is always hand-written on the renowned coffee cup. However, that day you wake up feeling off, and show up to work as your true self – an individual battling different kinds of life stressors. You decide not to greet the client, you refrain from engaging in small talk, and avoid taking their name.

The customer looks up at you and asks: “Is something wrong?”

This scenario highlights the significance and ever-so-faint yet important presence of display rules and emotional labour in workers’ lives.

3 Reasons to Value the Power of Alignment When Hiring

There’s a moment that takes place within every hiring manager’s career: the moment they realize there are more positions to fill than they have employees. The panic. The stress. The expectation of doing their job well. Managing deadlines, and performance, and tasks.

You may be staring at a blank schedule or lengthy project list or answering questions from those above you and find yourself wondering ‘how will I ever fill these positions?!’ So you take action in a similar fashion as many. You dig through applications, make posts on social media, call recruiting agencies, sift through resources and services trying to find warm bodies to fill the vacancies that have been created.

If you have ever been in a position of hiring, you have felt this moment of stress and frustration. During these moments, what often takes place is what I like to call ‘settling.’ You settle for someone that doesn’t quite fit your culture because the project list continues to grow. You settle for someone because they have experience in the job at hand. You settle for someone because just knowing you will have a desk filled is better than the stress you have felt during this experience. But settling is never the way toward success and sustainability. Settling will have you arriving at the exact same place, walking through the same experience once again. When you settle in your hiring practices you guarantee your unhappiness, high stress, and constant turnover.

3 Steps to Boosting Employee Engagement on Mondays

We have all felt the impact of a long week. Friday arrives and seemingly everyone is awaiting the end of the day with more excitement than is ever brought to the arrival of Monday. You begin hearing statements such as ‘Do you have plans for the weekend?’ or ‘Thank God it’s Friday!’ Looking forward to the weekend seems to be a favorite pastime for so many.

The challenge of keeping employees engaged during the week has become an even greater obstacle as we navigate the COVID-19 pandemic and adjust to remote workers and hybrid workdays. As a leader, empowering the start of each week plays a critical role in how your team approaches success. You can greatly influence the mindset, rhythm and temperature of your team by making sure everyone begins the work week with as much positivity and excitement as possible.

A Human-Centric Workplace Reading List

It’s the end of the year, a hectic one to say the least, and The Humans of HR, including myself, couldn’t think of a better time to sit down and relax with a new inspirational and/or educational human-centric workplace book. For that reason, I have built a list of different resources for our readers, where I highlight some of my favourite HR-related books which revolve around the topics of career development, soft skills, diversity & inclusion, and international mobility.