TL;DR: Deb Muller and Rebecca Trosky discuss insights from the 2023 Employee Relations Roundtable, focusing on aftercare during and after investigations, the increasing mental health demands on ER leaders and the emerging use of AI in employee relations. They invite ER professionals to join ongoing conversations on empowER.
Three Key Takeaways from the Video: Insights from the 2023 Roundtable
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Aftercare — or “throughcare” — is critical, encompassing support for employees during and after investigations to foster well-being.
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ER leaders face increasing mental health responsibilities and need training to recognize and respond to employee distress without being mental health experts.
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The use of AI in investigations and employee relations is a growing topic, with some organizations hesitant and others exploring innovative applications.
Video Transcript: Insights from the 2023 Roundtable
00:00:05.120
Deb Muller: Hi, I’m Deb Muller, I’m the CEO of HR.
00:00:07.400
Rebecca Trosky: Hi, I’m Rebecca Trosky, I’m the Chief People Officer of HR Acuity and also an early adopter back when it was just a new technology, so I was a customer too.
00:00:18.560
Deb Muller: That’s right, and we are here for Two Minute Matters. We’re just going to talk about ER and sort of nerd out on it on timely topics for two minutes and we hope you’ll join us in the conversation.
00:00:28.640
Rebecca Trosky: Yeah, absolutely. Can’t wait to get into it because we do this all the time.
00:00:32.320
Deb Muller: We do do this all the time. When you have a CEO that used to be an HR leader and then you have an awesome Chief People Officer who used to be a colleague and a client, sometimes we get a little off track, so we figured we’d bring those conversations to you.
00:00:54.039
Deb Muller: Enjoy. We had an after care session with our entire community and I had the honor to lead it. We knew it was important because we knew people were not tackling this as well as we thought they could or thought they could. We know how important after care is.
00:01:09.680
Rebecca Trosky: Yeah, I like to call it through care — so it’s what you do after the investigation but also how you take care of your employees during an investigation.
00:01:16.080
Deb Muller: Okay, I’m already spilling stuff all over. We’re going to just go with it. The other thing — more on after care — we’ll hear about that because there were some great suggestions and we can maybe use another two minutes to talk about all those.
00:01:29.520
Deb Muller: The other thing that came out in the roundtable discussions was mental health and how our ER leaders are having to deal with this and they are not mental health practitioners.
00:01:37.920
Rebecca Trosky: We heard a lot of ideas about different types of organizations to help train not only the ER professionals but also the managers so they can listen, see the signs, and know what they can do when one of their colleagues or team members is suffering, in trouble, or maybe just things don’t seem right.
00:01:54.799
Deb Muller: So that was a big one. I’m always impressed by our community because ER practitioners nowadays have to do everything we always used to have to do.
00:02:06.159
Rebecca Trosky: And to your point, all of these other things — becoming mental health first responders in a way or triage experts. That’s a lot to ask of our community, but what’s great about the Roundtable is they’re able to support each other, give each other ideas for training, for process, even just to feel heard by each other.
00:02:25.800
Deb Muller: I think that’s one of the beauties of the Roundtable.
00:02:27.920
Rebecca Trosky: The other thing that came out was AI. They’re starting to talk about it — big spectrum. Some companies were like, uh-uh, we’re not using AI; others are really digging in thinking about ways to be innovative — just like we are. How do we use AI in investigations and employee relations?
00:02:44.440
Deb Muller: We’re going to talk more about that, I know, on another Two Minute Matters as well, but that’s what’s up.
00:02:52.680
Rebecca Trosky: All right, so join us every couple weeks. We’re not sure how often yet but we have a lot to talk about.
00:03:02.159
Deb Muller: Join the discussion with all ER professionals on empowER.
00:03:07.799
Rebecca Trosky: And these two minutes matter because your employees matter.
00:03:10.280
Deb Muller: Oh, I love that. All right, I’ll see you for the next one.
00:03:12.239
Rebecca Trosky: All right, bye bye.