How trauma awareness in the workplace is growing for people leaders
Greater awareness around mental health in workplaces is now leading to more recognition around trauma and how it can impact one’s performance and work experience. And the shift is being led by Gen Z and Millennial workers who aim to break generational cycles associated with the topic, experts say.
While the word trauma itself can be loaded for some, by definition, it “results from an event, series of events or set of circumstances that is experienced as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting effects on functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional or spiritual wellbeing.”
Some new programs offer training to help HR professionals, managers and others in people leader roles to recognize how trauma shows up in the workplace and how to create policies and procedures to better support staff dealing with trauma from personal or even past professional experiences.
“It’s not about digging into people’s individual history, so much as it’s about understanding how we can create a workplace that honors different trauma histories and doesn’t perpetuate further harm,” said Jessica Donahue, a fractional HR professional. Donahue recently earned certification as a trauma-informed workplace practitioner, through a 10-hour training course through the Wounded Workplace program.
In a recent Linkedin post Donahue explained her personal experience with trauma. “As a kid, my home life was marked by addiction and dysfunctional relational patterns born from generations of unprocessed trauma. I learned to find safety in the only place I could: at school. Achievement became my primary strategy for feeling safe and seen, first in the classroom and then in the workplace,” she wrote.
After 15 years in corporate HR, Stephanie Lemek created the Wounded Workforce training program. In working through her own trauma with a therapist, she realized there wasn’t any standard guidance for creating trauma-informed workplaces, so she made her own.
“My goal really is to take the amazing work that’s been done and translate it in a way that anyone can understand how to apply these principles to the workplace and use it to bolster internal cultures,” Lemek said.
“Regardless of whether or not you’ve experienced trauma, regardless of whether or not you recognize how that trauma may be showing up for you at work, the way we build our cultures, our processes and our systems, supports those individuals and helps them and the organization be successful,” she said.
The training covers seven principles of trauma-informed workplaces, which include safety, trust and transparency, community, collaboration, empowerment, humility and responsiveness, and cultural, historical and gender issues. It then goes deeper into how these principles show up at work, and what policies and practices can help support them.
Safety, for example, includes physical, psychological and financial safety. One policy that helps support financial safety is the idea of a salary floor — or minimum salary employees are paid at an organization. At CHANI, an astrology app, staff have a $80,000 minimum salary floor.
“If someone’s worried about their livelihood, being able to care for themselves and their family, it’s really very hard to feel safe,” Lemek said.
Empowerment is also key — as many trauma survivors struggle with feelings around a lack of control. When HR professionals ask Lemek what’s one thing they can do to be more trauma-informed, she suggests, “Start thinking how you can provide your teams with choice. How can you create choice for your teams? Can you give them options? Can you let them choose how they complete their work?”
Collaboration is another important principle that shows up in workplaces and involves power dynamics and imbalances, as childhood trauma with a parent can mirror relationships with a boss and employee.
“We’re looking for ways to avoid re-traumatizing you, as a survivor of any kind of trauma. And we’re also looking for ways to just minimize harm in general,” Lemek said. “It’s a big task to think about building a trauma-informed workplace, but the thing about big tasks is they’re built by a whole bunch of little tasks,” she said.
Throughout Donahue’s career, she’s worked in environments that felt trauma-informed, but also others that weren’t. “When I think back on the different employers I’ve worked for throughout my career, it’s clear that some of them were trauma-informed and helped me along in my healing, while others were far from it and kept me stuck,” she said.
In those that were unsupportive, she felt she had limited choice and autonomy in her role, minimal flexibility and that power dynamics were unbalanced, she said.
In roles where she did feel supported, her manager played a key role by fostering trust, clarity, transparency and directness, she said. Donahue is a Millennial herself, and believes her generation and Gen Z will help continue to eliminate stigmas and break their own cycles. “I think it’s only going to become more and more kind of woven into conversations with those younger generations to come,” she said.