🧠 Your sanity hack

✍🏽 I’m HR. How do I raise my own morale?

Context: I’m an HR department of 1 who reports directly to the CEO. My company has about 90 employees. I’ve been feeling more and more demoralized, while having to pretend I’m doing great. My stress level is very high, but it’s not because of the work. It’s because of low morale and burn-out (caused by not getting enough feedback). I feel like a ship without rudder and I’ve never successfully been able to get the CEO to give me the feedback I need — I’ve asked, and she commits for a month, then stops.

📣Kathy Bryan, EVP Head of Marketing @ Electives:

Work can be hard. Some days are harder than other days. And it’s really, really easy to focus on the things we want to change. But over time, that can start to make you think it’s all bad. When you feel yourself being demoralized, try to flip the script inside your brain.

Almost always, there’s something good about what you’re doing or what your work allows you to do outside of work. Instead of thinking about everything that could be better, remember those good things. Maybe there’s a peer you love chatting with or someone junior you’re coaching and seeing grow… or maybe you have the flexibility you need to live a good life outside of work.

For most of us, there’s a lot of good things we’re doing and seeing and experiencing every day. Try to remember all that stuff, and hopefully you’ll feel more motivated soon.

📣 Sondra Norris, OD/OE Consulting:

Like Kathy said, a lot of this starts inside our own heads.

With regard to the CEO giving intermittent feedback – put the meetings on the calendar and show up prepared to create the scenario for feedback. Check in with their EA before the meeting to make sure they’re going to be there. Invite them to walk with you if you’re in person together. Provide them an agenda of things you want to discuss – especially anything that you feel they need to know about and not get caught having to say “I don’t know.”

For example – prepare great questions ahead of time about the work you completed, “I would have loved to have been able to be more effective on this part of the project – what are your suggestions?”

Also prepare great questions about the specific things you want feedback on. If conflict resolution is a skill you’re explicitly trying to improve – talk about any recent situation you intentionally called on new skills and debrief it with your CEO. You can also do that in reverse: “Hey can you be my thought partner before I go handle this situation? Here’s everything I thought of, here’s an area of concern – what are your thoughts?”

Also review what you’re doing this month or in the next 6-week period and to what end, present your list of priorities and major projects, bring up new things to get advice on how/if they should replace anything you’re working on.

Debrief any situations you were in together and ask how you could have been more effective? What surprised them about how you handled yourself? “I thought this part was tricky, and here’s what I was thinking when I answered – anything different I should have considered?”

Ask them questions about what they hear from other leaders about how you are supporting the organization – bring up anything that your spidey sense tells you might be a concerning area so they don’t have to bring it up.

Work the relationship with your CEO to be what you need.

After a few of these meetings, where you’re making it easy for them to give you the feedback, rather than them having to think of stuff to say to you when they probably haven’t thought about it, it should get better.

No one cares or thinks about us more than we do.

✍🏽 How do you deal with feeling constantly overwhelmed at work?

Context: Even though I think I manage my time well, there are always so many priorities/ requests/ projects/ etc. I think there’s a serious underestimation of all the “people stuff” we do in HR that doesn’t get accounted for anywhere in our JD. It’s harder to calculate how much time we spend doing unexpected stuff.

📣Ryan Farmer, HR Director @ TorHoerman Law LLC:

The best advice I was ever given was to step back and take a breath. Getting in your own head and letting those thoughts of hopelessness creep in isn’t healthy in any kind of situation. As a team of 1 taking care of 110 people, I 100% understand the constant task list. I practice the take a breath, tackle one thing at a time when possible and make sure you practice your own self-care because, I’ve found that as a team of 1 or a small team taking care of many people, it is extremely easy to feel those thoughts of’ “holy sh*t, how am I going to get all this done without killing myself.”

Take a breath, put on your favorite music and get after it. I have also begun to block out my own calendar with ‘focus time’ or ‘study time’ to make sure people don’t book things without first asking me first and then giving me the chance to ask the ‘is this an actual emergency’ question.