The People Impact Podcast

Feedback. We all know it’s important. We know people benefit and grow from really great feedback. So why is really good feedback so scarce in our workplaces? Feedback in its purest form is an act of vulnerability on the part of both the giver and receiver. And this makes it uncomfortable. Still despite the discomfort it is valuable. Consider the cost of the mental load you carry around each day th...

Imagine you’re trying to bring more diversity and inclusion to the Canadian forestry sector: a sector where the traditional image of diversity used to be a woman in heels holding a saw.  Kelly Cooper, the founder and CEO of the Centre for Social Intelligence, is excited about the changes she is seeing in Canada. She was able to realise an industry-wide initiative and created the first public-...

It has profound impact on how people show up at work and yet it hardly ever gets addressed. It’s all that is not on paper, but that is implied, assumed and perceived. Alongside the legal employment agreement there is the psychological contract: the actual relationship between organisation and employee. And just like the relationships in your personal life it takes work that is worth the investment...

Bernice Feller-Thijm is an inclusion strategist who helps organisations truly create a diverse and inclusive culture. Especially after the surge of the BLM movement, conversations started happening within organisations that hadn’t been had before. What became all the more apparent is that right now, not everyone gets to participate in the same way. What helps is firstly to have a lot of conversati...

Are you literate in reading all the relevant information? With all that’s going on around us, and inside you, it’s high time to process and digest. All that’s in your head and in your heart – and also in your body. Neuroscience shows that the nerves in our entire body are constantly picking up, and giving off, signals. A whole rich field of information that’s available to you. What are you noticin...

Eden Whitcomb is not just any tech recruiter in Berlin. In our new HR Matters podcast episode, Eden tells us how he started out with great sales skills (as you do, in recruitment) and then got curious to grow further. He started to work out the patterns and trends in the work that he’d been doing. In one year, he recruited 97% men and 3% women. What was happening here, he wanted to figure out, and...

If you work in HR, you’ll recognise this. If you don’t, this may be an eye opener for you. As HR professionals, we are the vault for a lot of secrets. We hold so much information for other people. Life happens right in our workplaces, and HR professionals take on a big part of dealing with that. Hiring to firing – for right or wrong reasons. New life to health issues and death. Financial troubles....

When you’re wishing and actively aiming for big picture change around diversity, inclusion, equity, equality and justice, that means you’re making long-term behaviour change happen, from personal awareness to large systems. And you can’t fix that all with a snap of the finger. The topic of our newest episode can play a vital role in your journey: communities. They’re the place where you can get su...

The first thing we want to start off our brand-new season with is a tandem of two tools to help you feel lighter and see new possibilities. Looking ahead at 2021, we are more than eager to go forward and get out of the heavy, sticky place that is right now. Logical problem solving doesn’t always get you there. In times like these, what you need is a deeper resourcefulness that we all have inside o...

He was having a great life and career path, yet Garry Turner felt a heartache. So he got curious. “This is not the whole of me,” he realised. “There are more sides to me that I want to bring out.” Garry is an interpersonal catalyst who combines commercial expertise with a deep understanding of culture and people - and increasingly, inclusion. From his international sales job he upskilled to organi...

Cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Our new HR Matters podcast guest Maria Ross discovered how empathy is the superpower of marketers while working as a brand strategist, researched the competitive advantages of empathy to customers and employees, and poured it all into her book ‘The Empathy Edge’. This episode is about putting empathy to work. Empathy is a mindset, a...

This year’s been busy for remote working enthusiast – we’d say guru, really – Lisette Sutherland ! She opens up her treasure chest to share her insights on how to keep this remote working adventure going well. Because it looks like we’ll be working from home for a longer time, both by necessity and choice. Lisette’s first and biggest tip: get comfortable in your workspace. Wherever you’re working,...

It is the only safe and solid ground for the diversity of thinking that is essential to create a solidly successful business: Trust. And yet, creating it is something that leaders tend to skip over. We’ve seen that strong teams with a high level of trust are created after they have worked together for an extended time span, or gone through a galvanising crisis. Our guest Jason Treu talks us throug...

When you commit to being an ally at work and want to take meaningful antiracist action, there are various roles you can take on, to fit with who you are, where you are and what you are particularly good at. We talk about some good examples of this in our new episode: Recommending Black people and people of colour, actively talking about their expertise and skills. Inviting an investment in the per...

Viktória Pikovská , a professional photographer and art business owner, tells us her personal leadership story. Viktória’s journey brought her from Slovakia, where she captured human emotion in photography, to the art scene in Rotterdam, where she started her own art business. Starting a business that connects to her purpose, and providing a human-centred work environment for her own team, has pro...

At all times. Particularly now. It is going to get better, but in the meantime: Resilience. There are a million and one things our minds are trying to solve. Our brains are in overdrive trying to solve problems that are, at the moment, largely unsolvable. Ask your brain to slow down. Give yourself permission to say, right now, for a few moments, I’m not trying to solve anything. Your brain needs a...

With everything that’s going on in the world right now, how do you and your organisation show up? The clearer you get on that, the stronger and more beneficial it gets for your bottom line, for your people, for yourself. The current levels and arenas of crisis impact everyone and they come with a lot of rigidity, divisiveness, tenseness. We can guarantee your customers, your employees, your busine...

Did you realise? It’s always in the room. Unwritten expectations that influence and guide the day-to-day actions and decisions in your organisation. You see it in how people show up, in how they interact. This episode looks at systemic thinking and specifically at how a systems perspective can help us diminish racism in work environments – even where you hadn’t noticed the impact of it before. Wha...

Talking personal leadership: kind, funny, outspoken, courageous. That’s what Laura Khalil brings in her work and to this episode. In all of her initiatives, Laura Khalil helps ambitious women and allies live well and lead well. We talked with Laura about taking charge of the things we can control in our lives, recognising the things we can’t and moving forward with a lot of grace. Honestly asking...

Diversity & inclusion is a journey. Strengthening it in your work environment is, as Vivian Acquah sees it, like a dish that requires marinating and developing flavour. Vivian is the Workplace Wellness advocate who contributes to keeping your employees happy, healthy and safe. She recently published an article with actionable advice on how to dismantle racism in the workplace. When you realise...

The world of work is hard enough as it is, so why is it that we laugh so little in the work place? And why might laughter be important?  In this episode of HR Matters, we explore the value and importance of laughter, comedy and what our guest Chris Tabish calls Comediology. In fact he found it so valuable he wrote a whole book about it by this very name.  As Chris says, there’s this thin...

You can probably hear it in our voices... this is a topic that really matters to us: systemic racism and the journey towards diversity, equity and inclusion. We are two white, cis, middle class, international women – which informs our perspective. We have a very deep commitment to inclusion. We know the value of inclusion: it unleashes innovation and allows any kind of organisation to thrive. Maki...

How do you know your worth? Part of this is investing in yourself. On the newest HR Matters Podcast episode, we talk with Denise Liebetrau about making sense of compensation and benefits, both from a business perspective as well as for individuals. We talk about individual human perspectives and conversations on comp and ben. Your own comp and ben. This is about knowing what you deliver that is of...

Diversity and Inclusion consultant Toby Mildon enables D&I in culture and business systems, and he just published a book called Inclusive Growth. In this episode we talk with Toby about the wide range of diversity: race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, physical and neurodiversity, and more. With his background in tech, he points us to the importance of culture combined with the power of...

How is your brain dealing today?  At the start of our 4th HR Matters podcast season and before talking with new guests in the space of work, in this episode we get personal, talking about what it is like to live and lead right now.  There’s been nothing gradual about the transitions we’ve been experiencing. We see vast changes ahead that will have more ripple effects, happening to real p...