The HR Besties podcast hosts delivered their first live podcast session in Las Vegas last month as part of the annual HR Tech conference. Hosts Jamie Jackson, Ashley Herd, and Leigh Henderson joined dozens of HR leaders and technology vendors at the conference expo to talk about finding joy at work.
The HR Besties first launched their podcast last year, complete with a “staff meeting” agenda that includes “cringey corporate speak” and hot topics. Since then, the three HR pros have used their combined decades of experience to discuss HR horror stories and explore issues important to an HR audience.
The live session was a joyous occasion. The besties dove right into how they experience joy at work, and how to see and share joy at work with employees.
“Joy is incredibly subjective,” Bestie Leigh Henderson said. “Step one is figure out what actually brings some joy, and as an HR leader for nearly 20 years, oh man, I’ve seen the full gamut [of] variations of joy within the workplace. Some people crave creative pursuits. Some people crave collaboration…Some people crave things entirely outside of the workplace, which is totally fine too.”
Henderson said her experience developing her HR Manifesto project on social media and IRL was actually a pursuit of joy. As an HR exec for a number of Fortune 100 companies throughout her career, she found herself often sifting through HR strategy for some “toxic workplaces,” coaching executives and CEOs “to not be jerks.” She needed a break.
“I took that break, and I signed up for TikTok one day, and I put a couple of videos out that same night, and two weeks later, I had a thousand followers,” she said. “I just want to have an impact. I just want to help somebody, and that happened.”
For the HR pro behind the Humorous Resources social media accounts, Jamie Jackson, work is joy.
“I actually find joy every day at work, because I enjoy helping people, and that’s literally why I got into HR,” she said. “It’s sometimes annoying…but yes, am I still going to help you and feel some sort of joy [while] helping you with your open enrollment elections? I am.”
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Jackson said that she joins the many HR professionals who find joy in the service of others.
“As long as I help someone every day, even if it’s just resetting a password…and I made their day, their life a little bit easier, that is my joy,” she said. “Typically, when someone’s coming to HR, it’s usually when they have an issue or they have a problem…so to be that breath of fresh air, I think that’s important."
For Manager Method founder Ashley Herd, leaders can have a disparate impact on the joy of their employees.
“Maybe controversially, there’s not really such thing as corporate culture or organizational culture,” Herd said. “There’s like little micro cultures all over your organization, and so the hard part about that in HR, especially if you’re in leadership, is trying to create the environment.”
Herd said an HR leader could read reviews on sites like Glassdoor and see comments that appear foreign to them and see comments that resonate with them, and know which manager is perhaps responsible for them.
“When I have experiences, I just want to have a good time,” Herd said. “ So I want to come to work and have a good time, so I come in with the assumption…I come and I’m like, I don’t need a budget to laugh about a YouTube video with my colleagues, and so the one beautiful thing is no matter what your role is, you can have an influence tomorrow of what that looks like, you can be that person.”
Herd said everybody has the “superpower” to create fun at work.
“Shoot for the moon, you’ll land among the stars; you’ll land among a 3.4 Glassdoor [review],” she said.