Four HR lessons from the authors of workplace books

Hope is in the air.

So far this year, several authors have shared with HR Brew some lessons for people pros navigating the choppy waters that are the modern workplace.

Here, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite takeaways.

Grief needs more attention. “The concept that loss and grief are universal topics that we either have experienced or will be experiencing, and yet it’s one of the most underrepresented topics that’s being discussed in the workplace…We talk more about communication preferences and work styles. We talk about well-being. We talk about mental health, but somehow this topic hasn’t yet made it into the forefront. And, my hope is that HR professionals can really consider what the impact of grief literacy might be in their organization.”—Patricia Bravo, author of In the Room: When Grief Comes to Work

Employees need coaches. “It’s your responsibility to set up a one-on-one with each employee, either at the office, or by phone, or by Zoom, where you can really continue to build this relationship. And, it’s not just about giving feedback. It’s about asking, ‘How do I help you do your job better?’ When you think about what a coach is, the earliest definition of a coach is a vehicle or vessel that takes people or goods from one place to another, and so our job as a coach is to take people from the place where they are to where they want to be in their careers.”—Lois Frankel, author of Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office: Unconscious Mistakes Women Make that Sabotage their Careers

Women need to see more progress. “There’s been a real conflation with the rhetoric of empowerment with women’s actual access to power, which really hasn’t shifted over the time. And, in fact, because of the rhetoric of empowerment with girl power, girl boss…People have enormous misperceptions over how well or how poorly women are actually represented or not represented.”—Stefanie O’Connell, author of The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up―and Then Pushes Them Down

DEI work needs to continue. “The summer of 2020 was this massive explosion in interest in DEI, but, as I write about in the book, I actually don’t think it was good for the industry…They were all interested in the quick, one-and-done, flashy, external-facing, change initiative that we knew at this point wouldn’t change anything…For me, as it turns out, work actually was worse during the summer of 2020, because the quality of the requests that I got dropped so much.

“Now, the pendulum is flowing the other way, partially because of just how empty all that buzz was in 2020 and 2021. People got really tired of workplaces that didn’t actually care, saying, ‘Oh, we’re going to throw some money at the problem, and bring in some entertainers to do a song and a dance about how much we care about race’...Eventually workers were like, ‘We’re sick and tired of this. We’re still getting discriminated against…This isn’t serious.’”—Lily Zheng, author of Fixing Fairness: 4 Tenets to Transform Diversity Backlash into Progress for Al