Bringing the Human back to Human Resources with Traci Chernoff

Action's Antidotes

It’s no secret that employees spend the majority of their life working. A nine to five for five days a week is draining, and it’s unrealistic for us to expect employees to shut off their personalities when they feel like a human-machine. That’s why it’s important to establish a more people-centric strategy to empower workforce members. Today’s guest, Traci Chernoff, is an expert in people, strategy, and innovation. In this episode, she will share a few things about what we can do to help restore humanity in the Human Resource Department. Let’s hear some golden nuggets from this professional. --- Listen to the podcast here: Bringing the Human Back in Human Resources with Traci Chernoff Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Have you ever had a job where you felt less than human, you felt like nothing more than a cog in a machine, and had trouble finding your purpose, or why you're really there? My guest today, Traci Chernoff, is an HR executive, really involved in a lot of initiatives around the future of work, as well as the host of the podcast, Bringing the Human Back in Human Resources. --- Traci, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Definitely. The first thing I want to ask you -- given that I suspect that a lot of my listeners have had this experience, or maybe even currently having this experience in their place of employment. We're living in a time when a lot of people are reconsidering -- whether you call it the great resignation, the great reshuffle, whatever you want to call it -- their relationship with their work. What does the phrase "bringing the human back in human resources" mean to you? It's a great question. To me, what's so interesting about this is that the human was already in human resources. It's the reason why it's the title of the department or it's the phrase that we use when it comes to this industry. When it comes to really why I always talk about bringing the human back, it's that we lost our way. For me, the way that I grew up, so to speak, in HR is that it was clear that there were some really, really strong foundations in the industry and in the practice. My takeaway was that there wasn't really enough of a focus on the people behind the problems or the people behind the solutions. One of the reasons why I started the podcast, Bringing the Human Back to Human Resources, was because I wanted to make a call to action that we had to take a look at the way that we were operating and the way that we were addressing these problems, and solve for them through a people-centric approach. I always say that people are at the center of everything that we do. It's the reason why our businesses today -- there's not one business I'm aware of, at least, that can operate without a human being. That's really what it means to me. Oh man. I'm picturing some weird, dystopian, future movie with a robot business and everything's just robots. There's still going to have to be someone to help that robot. There's still going to be someone fixing the robot. There's not going to be a robot fixing a robot, because then, who's going to fix that robot? Yeah, exactly. There was a movie when I was younger. Will Smith was in it. It took place in the year 2030. iRobot. That was about robots building robots. Yeah, but look, you couldn't have a movie without Will Smith. See? Exactly right. Or the writers, or any other people. Let's start with a little context about the history of human resources. You talk about the human always being there, but then human resources losing its way at some point. How did that whole process, for people who don't quite know what happened in the 20th century, play out? Yeah. It's a good question. First of all, my understanding of HR is very modern, because I started my career when it wasn't called personnel.