There’s a particular moment—somewhere between noticing a scent that shouldn’t be there and sitting someone down to talk about it—that HR becomes more than just policy. It becomes anthropology.
This month on Human Solutions, Pete Wright sits down with Terry Cook and Tom Jones for a course in navigating the most uncomfortable corners of professional HR—body odor, domestic violence, and workplace impairment. But this isn’t just an etiquette tutorial for the brave and the nose-sensitive. This is about the human—and legal—implications of what happens when our personal lives collide with professional expectations.
How do you handle body odor without turning empathy into accusation? What does it mean when you suspect domestic violence, and the person across the desk trusts you enough to say, “Yes”? And where exactly is the line between suspicion and assumption when you think an employee might be impaired?
This is an episode about silence—what it costs to break it, and what it costs when we don’t. It’s about the limits of policy and the power of institutional empathy. And it’s about the people on the other end of the phone—the Terrys and Toms—who make it their job to sit with discomfort long enough to make something useful out of it.
Because sometimes, the most powerful tool in your HR arsenal after a good policy is the courage to say, “Let’s talk.”
Links & Notes
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