This episode is part of the Happiness Reset at Work campaign, where Klaudia introduces you to 5 drivers that contribute to building more satisfaction in our careers so that you can reconnect and re-energise with your work in 2025. 

The 2nd driver of happiness at work is: Fairness.

Klaudia welcomes Michelle Hartley, an expert in transforming HR teams, to share practical tips on creating a fair workplace. They discuss the importance of addressing feelings of unfairness, whether through official channels or by fostering employee communities.

Michelle emphasizes the power of connection in combating burnout and encourages listeners to set healthy boundaries to ensure fair treatment.

The conversation also highlights the importance of collective advocacy in challenging the status quo and making lasting changes in the workplace.

Hello, happiness seekers. My name is Klaudia and you are listening to the Happiness Challenge.

This episode is part of the Happiness Reset at Work campaign where I introduce you to five drivers that contribute to building more happiness and satisfaction in our careers.

Across January, I release three short episodes for each driver in which I bring you the science behind each factor with set of reflective questions, hands on ideas to implement in your working life and a piece of expert advice.

And that's why today I'm absolutely honored to be here with Michelle Hartley who is going to give us more practical tips on how to create more fairness at work. What a topic. Welcome, Michelle.

Thank you. I'm really excited to be here. Thanks for having me, Michelle.

First of all, give us a quick intro of who you are, what you do.

So my name is Michelle Hartley. I essentially mess about on LinkedIn, but officially I transform HR teams from beige to brilliant through training, coaching and my magical energy.

Love that. The magical energy is definitely shining through Michelle, on your LinkedIn, I wouldn't call it messing around. There's lots of very good content.

Just saying. Okay, so we're speaking about fairness. Quite tough topic, but I think in your world, Michelle, quite common one.

Ultimately, if we're facing situations at work when we feel we haven't been treated fairly for whatever reason, how do we approach those difficult conversations?

Yeah, this one comes up a lot actually. And you're right, fairness comes up daily for me in my role around hr. I think the hardest thing often is to kind of raise our hands, right.

And say, actually that didn't feel good for me and I didn't like that. I guess the official answer is there's always going to be a lovely pile of processes and procedures in which you can officially raise your concerns.

So something like a grievance or there might be an employee kind of resolution procedure, that kind of stuff will exist. My feeling though, and there's a couple of different angles here. So there's the rebel angle and there's the political angle.

So as we'll start with sensible one, we'll start with the political one. For me, in my HR career there's been a lot of kind of understanding and, and navigating politics. Right.

So understanding how the organisation works on the surface with all those processes and procedures, but then understanding what happens beneath the surface with the people, the power brokers and how it works.

So I think where there's issues and you want to kind of just suss out what might be happening and how you can make things better is to find out who might be the Kind of political person that you can get chatting to. Sometimes that is an HR practitioner in the organization. Sometimes it could be a senior leader.

It could even be a senior leader from a different function that you trust, where you just kind of say, look, can I just pick your brains for five minutes? This is a thing. What do you recommend? And they might come up with some great ideas. Right. So there's a possibility there, too.

The rebel side of me says, create your own employee forum and raise Mary hell.

But the reality is lots of organizations are missing tricks around things like, you know, working groups, employee voice, speaking spaces, having those resource groups. So I think if those things don't exist in your organization and there's something that you don't like, make one. Just make one.

Make a women's connection networking group, make an LGBTQI connection group, make, you know, whatever you think, a diversity and inclusion connection group. Make a group that enables you to get your voice heard. And I think that's a really good place to start with it.

Yeah, I love that. This idea that coming together to challenge some of the situations or issues, it's so much more powerful. And we feel supported and we.

We don't feel isolated, and we don't think, oh, did that actually happen? Maybe I'm just being oversensitive. You actually thinking, no. I have people around me who understand, and they trying to challenge that.

If we want to be those rebels in the organizations to put forward specific changes at organizational level, how would you say we can challenge that status quo at work?

Yeah, and I think there's also kind of this rebellious angle as well, isn't there? So you can be the organizational rebel and start shouting about stuff.

I think sometimes there's a softly angle where you're just talking to people and understanding what's happening. In my experience as a kind of senior HR leader, I did used to use a lot of employee voice stuff. I would be connecting top down.

And I think often what happens is that comes down top down in the best way for the right reasons. But actually there's a better view of going bottom up.

So I think where there are situations at work where you want to do something different, you want to kind of push the status quo.

I think doing what we said exactly in the last one, where we talk about, you know, power in community, is kind of work out those people where you can make those connections. So for me, I think one of the things I always talk about is the cure for burnout is connection.

And where we see a lot of, you know, stress at work, we See lots of people feeling under pressure. We see lots of reactions to the overwhelm and overstimulation of an entire day at work.

And actually I think creating connection and connection spaces can actually challenge a status quo in and of itself.

So I think thinking about what connections you can make with, you know, people, teams, groups, your work, business goals will make a massive difference in terms of challenging some of that status quo stuff.

So powerful. I love what you just said about the cure for burnout connection. Because we have to stop, we have to reflect, we need to think how we're feeling.

Even as you mentioned, like sometimes we just running, we just in that running mode without any self awareness that we are burning out and noticing that and stopping is so powerful. So this idea of connection and so important in the hybrid environment when we don't have those like water cooler moments often with our colleagues.

And let's think now more at the individual level. 1 I think common lack of fairness. We may not even see it as a lack of fairness I think sometimes, but it's.

It might be is that distribution of workload in the team things like things landing on our desk last minute that we not ultimately really excited to do or picking up pieces of work for another colleague. You know, we've been in those situations when we just what do we do here?

So in those situations when maybe there is a little bit of an unfairness, we feel how the workload is distributed, how do we set boundaries at work with colleagues and with our manager so that we feel okay, we are being fairly treated, friendly.

Yeah, I think.

Do you know what that's such a good point about being thrown that grenade or the hospital pass of the piece of work that's been around three members of your team already and you're ending up with it for the last bit. I think there's a key phrase I used to use a lot which I. Because I. You might be unsurprised to hear this.

I have trouble with boundaries and I always take on too much work and I am a self confessed recovering people pleaser. So I'm all always trying to kind of rein that back in all the time. But one of the things I used to say was yes, I can absolutely do that.

But tell me what of all these things over here that I'm going to stop in order to fit this one in? And actually that often kind of just stops people in their tracks and they kind of go, oh.

So then you kind of get that almost collaborative input of oh, okay, well what have you got on? What can we stop then what needs to be done? Obviously some leaders might say, well, all of it needs to be done, be done.

And then I will say, cool, I will do that one for you in three months time. So I think what helped me as a recovering people pleaser was that it's not a.

No, it's not now because then you are setting a boundary but you're giving yourself a bit of, you know, leeway from that immediate no. And then as a manager and a leader of HR teams, I used to sit with my teams and go through the Eisenhower matrix, the time management tool.

Important versus urgent.

That was brilliant because it meant I got to see exactly what was going on for them and I was able to help them to prioritize stuff because if they're prioritizing things, I'd be like, no, no one's going to die if you don't do that piece of work. So I think that can be a helpful tool to use within that space.

And then in terms of boundaries in and of themselves, I think there's something about starting small. Start small with a small boundary.

Like I'm going to take my full lunch break today and I'm going to take it away from my desk or off site or in a coffee shop and actually take that break. There's your boundary number one.

You know, you could start with another micro boundary that might be I'm not going to get into work or I'm not going to start work at my desk until earliest 15 minutes before my scheduled start time or I'm going to leave on time for three out of five days this week. You know, don't over commit yourself, but set those boundaries and be consistent.

And something you will have seen on LinkedIn that I'm super passionate about is these Microsoft micro movements towards a bigger goal. So I always kind of say to people, what does 1% look like?

And a 1% better boundary is I'm going to have a lunch break, I'm going to take a break, I'm going to be away from my desk, I'm going to leave my phone behind. So those things can be really powerful. Like 1 percenters.

So always say with boundaries, when it's as a recovering people pleaser, I'm going to keep saying it because one day it'll come true. As a Recovering people pleaser, 1% better on my boundaries is still better every day. Right. So small things are easy for me to set boundaries on.

So I think starting small is good.

Yes. And then it's more achievable, isn't it?

Because I often when I talk to people about boundaries, people like that's it, I'm setting boundaries, you know, and it's like such a shock to everyone also around them because it's like, oh, okay, what's happening there? Whereas as you said those are micro moments and micro habits and micro boundaries we can start implementing and it's more realistic as well.

And I think we all recovering people pleasers because let's be honest, we do want to be liked, we want to be seen as a team members. So of course we feel a bit guilty and selfish there. So when we do it at the micro level, that shock is not as extensive to us as well. Love this.

Thank you so much Michelle. This is very insightful advice on so many different fronts and I'm already thinking, oh, micro boundary for next week, what that could be for me.

So I'm definitely be taking that one. Work a listener find you for more information.

Oh I love this. Yeah, so you can find me mucking about on LinkedIn. I am Michelle Hartley, finder of awesome on LinkedIn.

Brilliant. And yes, please do check out Michelle's content. I'm not going to say what are you doing on LinkedIn?

Because I don't want to spoil people fun, but I participate all the time and I love it. Thank you everyone for listening to the Happiness Reset support campaign. I really do hope that this episode is useful and impactful helpful for you.

If you are receiving a summary of this driver of Happiness fairness, subscribe to my newsletter on LinkedIn or on Substack and I see you at the next episode139 where I'll be diving into the third driver of happiness All About Purpose. Thank you again for listening and as always, I dare you to be happy. Bye.