In AHRI's video series, The Big Ask, HR leader D’Neale Prosser tackles some of the biggest challenges facing the workforce today, including what to do when a leader is the cause of toxicity and managing multigenerational tensions in the workplace.
AHRI sat down with seasoned HR leader, D’Neale Prosser, a self-proclaimed “Mary Poppins of HR”, to get her views on some of the big, bold questions coming from the HR community.
Prosser – who has held senior HR roles with Qantas, IKEA, Mattel and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners – shares her hard-earned pearls of wisdom on topics such as mental health intersecting with poor performance, leadership toxicity and more.
Watch the video below or read our highlights below.
Video highlights
Co-designing multigenerational engagement
Q: As the workforce becomes more multigenerational, how can HR create engagement strategies that resonate across age groups?
D’Neale Prosser: What’s beautiful about our workforce at the moment is there is this intertwine of different opinions, perspectives, needs and wants.
What I like to do is form focus groups, talk to the people that you’re trying to design strategies for, and involve them in the process. I think that’s where you get the meaningful solution for that potential demographic.
Handling an institutionalised team member
Q: How should one handle an institutionalised HR team member during organisational change and HR reform?
D’Neale Prosser: There might be one team member that has ‘been there, seen that’ and is maybe a little bit more resistant to change.
I actually use that as a bit of a motivator to understand, ‘what do they know about the business?’ ‘What can they teach me that they then feel involved in the decision making process?’ I think that’s key to actually building trust and moving past the resistance.
Quite often, fast forward six to 12 months, you start to actually understand that it’s not a resistance to change. It’s almost like a territorialism or a protection mode that they go into because they’ve seen people come in and out of the business.
Managing toxic leaders in the workplace
Q: What should you do when you know a senior leader is the root cause of cultural toxicity and no one else is willing to call it out?
D’Neale Prosser: Build trust or build a relationship with that person, where you understand what are their triggers, their boundaries, their motivators, and actually go past the ‘toxicity’ part and try to give them some examples of where their behaviours are letting them down in the workplace as a leader.
Take them out for lunch, have a coffee, build some trust and interaction, and then just dive into the feedback.
Give examples, move past it, but most importantly, check back in on that person.
Useful resources
- Gain the knowledge and skills needed to navigate the complex landscape of psychosocial wellbeing in the workplace with this course from AHRI.
- Master the art of difficult conversations with this course from AHRI.
- Learn how to support your employees’ mental health with AHRI’s ‘Implementing wellbeing initiatives’ course.
- Become an AHRI member for access to useful resources, research and content to support you in your career.
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