What is Soul-Full Human Resources™?
Soul-Full Human Resources (HR) is Conscious Revolution’s organizational philosophy and approach that facilitates the collective thriving of both the people and the organization. Soul-Full HR is practiced within an organizational ecosystem that is committed to continuously moving towards a universal experience that is caring, restorative, dignified, and committed to mutuality, clarity, and building trust.
Soul-Full HR benefits everyone in the organization, including the leaders with the challenging and rewarding responsibility of caring for the people and the organization simultaneously. Soul-Full HR achieves better results for the organization too. Traditional approaches to HR harm everyone in the organization, including the leaders who are required to participate. Naysayers may claim this is employee-centric HR, sacrificing the organizational needs by prioritizing employees first. This is a limiting way of understanding people and organizations. There is plenty of evidence that traditional approaches to HR, often wrapped within traditional approaches to running an organization, don’t work long-term.
Once the Soul-Full HR alternative is understood, leaders become committed to practicing Soul-Full HR across the organization because they recognize the positive impact on themselves and their team members, while business goals are achieved or exceeded.
This blog teases out the differences between traditional Human Resources Principles and Soul-Full Human Resources Principles.
“Soul-Full HR benefits everyone in the organization, including the leaders with the challenging and rewarding responsibility of caring for the people and the organization simultaneously.”
Traditional Human Resources Principles
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In a traditional organizational approach to people, employees are working to get a job done and the organization cares about them to the extent that they can fulfill that job. The organization says that it cares about its employees, but employees know from their experience and their interactions with each other and leadership that employment is a transactional exchange. The organization shares only what it believes the employee needs to know to get the job done and no more. The rest of the employee’s life is none of the organization’s business until it interferes with the person’s ability to get the job done. People are afraid to bring their full selves to work, they are afraid to be human and make mistakes, as they are perceived and responded to as failures.
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A traditional management and HR approach, born from slave plantations and Industrial Revolution factories, is still present in many organizations today. HR practices are punitive, compliance-oriented, fear and scarcity based. HR is practiced with a win-lose mentality where if the employee wins, the organization is losing. With this approach, when an employee provides feedback, the organization is resentful and dismissive, rather than seeing an opportunity to learn and enhance individual, team and organizational well-being. With this approach the well-being of the team and the organization is often sacrificed for the needs of the few in power.
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A traditional approach is treating employees differently, or having different organizational practices based on position, title, value to the organization, or based on race, gender, or other identities. The employer believes that they are all-seeing and all-knowing and have full power and control without providing employees with information or choices. The employer believes that the employee is fortunate to be working for them. Hierarchy, power, and control is emphasized over truth, self-determination and transparency.
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A traditional approach emphasizes the at-will employment relationship in language, philosophy, and practice. The employer expects to be served by the employee and be respected, but does not offer the same measure of respect to the employee. The employer emphasizes that the employee is there to do a job and meet top-down generated goals. The employee is expendable. This may not be directly said, as most employers are more savvy than that nowadays, but their expendableness is felt by employees. When not satisfied with the employee, the organization provides convoluted or no feedback, gets frustrated with the employee to a degree that is often not recoverable without the employee being aware of the severity of the issues, and terminates their employment. When an employee is not satisfied with the employer, they complain about the employer, rather than attempting to influence the employer or find employment elsewhere. They may also resort to quiet quitting, which significantly impacts organizational morale and success.
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A traditional organization has a lot of rules, or acceptable ways of working, that aren’t articulated anywhere. Employees don’t receive regular feedback and aren’t asked to provide feedback. Leaders are often frustrated that employees haven’t met expectations, but upon further inquiry, the initial expectations weren’t clear. Organizational processes are over-engineered, do not add value, have not been updated in a long time, and are disliked by almost everyone.
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A traditional organization operates from the premise that trust is earned and employees need to prove they can be trusted while the organization is not obligated to build trust. Policies are documented with a motivation to have a way to punish or penalize employees who are doing the wrong thing. Underlying these policies and practices is a fundamental belief that most employees are trying to take advantage or get away with something and that the role of the organization and the leaders is to maintain control and be clear about what happens when someone does something wrong.
“Each Soul-Full HR Principle is connected, reinforcing each other to create an employment experience that nurtures everyone’s soul. ”
Soul-Full Human Resources Principles
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Soul-Full HR honors the humanity of each employee, their soul, as a whole person who is devoting a significant portion of their precious life’s time to making the organization successful. Each employee is recognized as having a complex history, emotions, traumas, fears, dreams, goals, responsibilities, and a sense of identity and respect that in some measure comes from their employment. Leaders build deep relationships of care with employees, recognizing that each employee desires and deserves to feel that they are valued and there is meaning in their work, and that each employee desires and deserves to hear the truth. Learning from mistakes and extending grace is expected. In practice, leaders in these organizations love their employees and would do whatever is in their power to help them, even when that person is no longer at the organization.
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The Human Resources function has the immense power to create and implement restorative HR processes and practices that enhance the health and well-being of everyone inside the organization, in turn enhancing the health and well-being of the organization. Embedded within a restorative approach is a commitment to relationships, abundance, collaboration, curiosity, reflection, and listening. Restorative practices aim to eliminate the perpetuation of harm and require questioning status quo approaches and slowing down to determine what enhances the well-being of the individual, the team, and the organization.
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Soul-Full HR is centered on honoring the dignity and inherent worth of each individual. Respecting dignity is fundamentally grounded in a philosophy of mutual respect, regardless of organizational hierarchy, position or rank. When honoring dignity, humility is ever present; everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn. Dignity is demonstrated when you care and honor the whole person by being transparent with information, and providing candid feedback while regularly soliciting feedback. Honoring dignity is demonstrated when equity is centered in all organizational practices. Organizations prioritizing dignity have practices that facilitate self-determination by providing full information and employee choice.
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Soul-Full HR is centered on a relationship of mutuality. Both the employee and the organization recognize that there is mutual benefit in the relationship with one another and strive to keep that mutual benefit in long-term balance. All parties have gratitude for one another. The organization recognizes that the employment experience is more than just paying competitive salaries, and includes providing a restorative, developmental experience for the employee where they feel cared for, meaningfully recognized for their contributions, and have an opportunity to develop in fulfilling ways. In an organization prioritizing mutual benefit, feedback is regularly given and solicited and goals are shared and determined collaboratively. The employee recognizes that when an organization is working to provide a restorative experience perfection is not possible and that entitlement erodes the spirit of mutuality. Both parties choose to be accountable to each other. Each party has the respect for one another to share when mutuality is not felt and suggest remedies that may restore mutuality in a respectful, relationship-oriented manner. This could lead to the organization and employee parting ways. This is perfectly normal and can be done in an amicable, dignified, respectful manner.
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An organization practicing Soul-Full HR attempts to create clarity in every aspect of working in the organization; clear roles, clear expectations, clear accountabilities, ongoing direct feedback, clearly articulated, and thoughtful ways of working. A significant part of a leader's role is to create clear, mutually beneficial expectations and regularly share the organizational perspective of employees' contributions. When things are fuzzy there is a clear way to get a better understanding and an openness to questions. All organizational practices are designed to be clear and as simple as possible. To ensure a clearer understanding for everyone, practices are written down and easily accessible to everyone.
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A Soul-Full HR organization believes that everyone wants to succeed and trusts that everyone is doing the best that they can. They believe that inviting an employee to work in their organization means that they are choosing to trust them. Trust is only taken away in the unlikely event that it’s violated. The organization fully empowers employees to do their work and trusts that decisions made by those closest to the work are the best decisions. The organization prioritizes building trust with employees through transparency, honesty, and the principles stated above. Leaders in the organization are worthy of trust by demonstrating the courage to be humble, learn from others, share full information, be accountable, speak their truth, disagree with the majority opinion, and provide meaningful feedback.
Each Soul-Full HR Principle is connected, reinforcing each other to create an employment experience that nurtures everyone’s soul. Organizational needs are met and holistic individual and organizational success occurs. There’s lots of research to prove this!
At Conscious Revolution, we work with leaders on tough, complex issues all the time. There is rarely a clear path. To gain clarity, we often ask them and ourselves, “How can we navigate this in a way that allows us to proudly look at ourselves in the mirror?” Following the Soul-Full HR principles has allowed us and our clients to look ourselves in the mirror with pride time and time again.
