HR Book for Children? Or Perhaps HR Book by Children?

What happens when a child discovers that adults in her parents' workplace can sometimes be cruel to each other? Perhaps you will take it completely ironically.

This may be because many of us have a "what is done is done" mentality when it comes to forgiving, unless we are fully accepting or even anticipating the dehumanizing ways in which colleagues treat one another.

Although it's not what we've been brought up with, at some point between childhood and professional life, we ​​forget the lessons we learned as children about caring for others, as if we needed a children's book to remind us that the workplace can be, or should be, a place of care.

A book called Take Care is about a girl named Louise who learns in her class a rule that is not followed in her mother's workplace: "Take care of yourself and take care of others." What happens next ends up reminding her mother of some valuable life lessons.

Take Care is written by Laura Hamill, HR and Science Officer at Limeade, and Jolene Cramer, Senior Director of Integrated Marketing at Limeade.

TLNT recently interviewed Laura about why she wrote her new book and some of its lessons for children and adults.

What prompted you to write a children's book?

Laura: We've done some research recently on the science of care, which has to do with the well-supported idea that the more organizations encourage and support their employees, the better off those organizations will be.

After Jolene saw my presentation on this topic, she suggested that we write a children's book to reinforce these concepts for them. We wanted to show the importance of everything we learn as children about caring for others and the importance of applying it later in the workplace.

At times, this book looks like a book for adults in the form of a book for children.

The book is directed at both. Parents will read this book to their children. This book is based on purity and wishing the best for children. Jolene has two young children, and I have a 20-year-old son and a 16-year-old daughter. We both want the children to have positive experiences when they start working, as we don't want them in toxic environments.

Children naturally understand the value of taking care of each other, but why do we forget later in life and at the start of work to apply such life lessons?

You know what? Not long ago I was giving a talk to department leaders in a large company about the importance of taking care of people. The CEO at the time, a nice old man, expressed his enjoyment and enthusiasm for the show and continued, "This is a strange concept for me. No one has treated me humanely in my entire career." He had worked for a long time and always expected people to treat him in a certain way.

This shows us the need to change our view of work, as we really need to focus on treating people as human beings.

True, but where do we go wrong? Why don't we treat each other in a more human way?

In my first job in the Internet age, my office was across from a conference room. Where people were scolded, we called it the Punishment Room, and someone threw a chair there.

I think we've reached the stage of throwing chairs or doing worse things that don't show care. This is through many practices that do not support the idea of ​​care, such as departments that adopt the principle of command and control, which was not a good model for manufacturing management years ago and still is, and yet these practices still exist. Nowadays, we expect people to interact through work and creativity, but we still treat them in the same old ways.

However, I have seen a lot of development in companies over time. I remember a few years ago, we talked to organizations about caring for employees and treating them humanely. People said it was ridiculous and quipped that it was good luck, but fortunately, companies are now increasingly embracing the idea that how you treat people is fundamental to a successful business.

It may take more time to convince some people, however. I was meeting with a potential client to give a presentation on burnout, and I showed him a slide for the presentation, but when he saw the slides showing the organization's responsibility for burnout, he asked:

"Can we delete these slides? We don't want to discuss our role in burnout." This indicates a lot of inaction.

In the book, a child sees her mother lose her temper at work and is shocked to see her parents act this way.

Yes, and the irony is that the reason we act this way so often is not because we don't care. It is caused by our own frustration and excessive concern, and many people invest a lot of time in work, and they want others to invest a lot of time as well and end the conflict in a satisfactory way.

It's just that there are better ways to resolve conflict, and the book shows the importance of apologizing as a way to show others you care when you've done something wrong and to reprimand others at work.

It occurred to us while reading your book how important it is to teach the idea of ​​care to young boys in particular. We seem to raise our children in ways that prevent them from talking about such emotions and lead them to view caring for others at work as a weakness.

Yes, our society sets strict gender roles, which can paralyze our movement. It is important to raise our children to care and to show them that attention is a natural and human thing and not a feature of a specific gender.

Meanwhile, women in leadership roles face a difficult situation. My style has always depended on pleasing others and fulfilling their desires, but early in my career, I felt that I had to stop. I could no longer be who others wanted me to be, and it got to a point where I said to myself, "Damn it," and then I decided to be myself, and luckily I was working in a place that accepted it.

What do you think are some common misconceptions children have about work?

Non-essential things at work will catch the kids' attention, such as eating snacks in the office or moving desks up and down. While my children told me how happy people are at work, they loved it and enjoyed it at the same time. They said, “Everyone is so nice to each other!” But part of the issue is that we, "the parents," send messages to our children in the way we talk about work at home.

Setting children's expectations about work early in their lives helps set an example for them. It is important for parents to feel positive and enthusiastic about work. Of course, we also do not want to create lies about work and portray it as always fun, but it is nevertheless important to realize that children take into account the way we view work.

For example, I grew up in a 60-acre log cabin with no electricity from the fourth grade through college.

Did you say without electricity?

Correct! Anyway, my father was a carpenter; he had many bad experiences at work; he didn't keep a job for a long time; and he always talked about how much he hated people. I felt at the time that his experience was horrible, but on the other hand, it made me interested in becoming an organizational psychologist.

It didn't make sense to me then how you could hate the people you work with. If this was not what I wanted for my career, I just wanted it to be really good, and that was the main reason I was interested in creating workplaces where people treat each other humanely.