HRchat Podcast
Listen to the HRchat Podcast by HR Gazette to get insights and tips from HR leaders, influencers and tech experts. Topics covered include HR Tech, HR, AI, Leadership, Talent, Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Recognition, Wellness, DEI, and Company Culture.
Hosted by Bill Banham, Bob Goodwin, Pauline James, and other HR enthusiasts, the HRchat show publishes interviews with influencers, leaders, analysts, and those in the HR trenches 2-4 times each week.
The show is approaching 1000 episodes and past guests are from organizations including ADP, SAP, Ceridian, IBM, UPS, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Simon Sinek Inc, NASA, Gartner, SHRM, Government of Canada, Hacking HR, McLean & Company, UPS, Microsoft, Shopify, DisruptHR, McKinsey and Co, Virgin Pulse, Salesforce, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Coca-Cola Beverages Company.
Want to be featured on the show? Learn more here.
Podcast Music Credit"Funky One"Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
HRchat Podcast
From Burnout to Breakthrough with Bianca Errigo, HumanOS
This episode considers personal growth and where employee wellbeing is going wrong.
Tune in as Bill Banham talks with Bianca Errigo, Founder at HumanOS. Bianca's inspiring journey is a profound tale of resilience and transformation. After starting her career with a focus on psychology, life threw an unexpected challenge her way with her father's illness, steering her into the world of tech sales. It was a high-stakes environment that led her to experience severe burnout, ultimately transforming her approach to life and work.
Bianca's story is not just about overcoming adversity but about embarking on a global quest for personal development and health. Discover how her experiences across continents shaped her into a highly sought-after coach with a unique perspective on human behavior.
Join us as Bianca shares the remarkable path that led her to amass nearly 12,000 coaching hours, working with an impressive range of clients from Hollywood stars to stay-at-home parents. Her story is a testament to the power of personal growth and the profound impact of coaching on one's career and personal life. Tune in for a conversation that promises to offer valuable insights into navigating life's unpredictable twists and turns, and learn from Bianca’s strategies for cultivating resilience and achieving transformative change.
Feature Your Brand on the HRchat Podcast
The HRchat show has had 100,000s of downloads and is frequently listed as one of the most popular global podcasts for HR pros, Talent execs and leaders. It is ranked in the top ten in the world based on traffic, social media followers, domain authority & freshness. The podcast is also ranked as the Best Canadian HR Podcast by FeedSpot and one of the top 10% most popular shows by Listen Score.
Want to share the story of how your business is helping to shape the world of work? We offer sponsored episodes, audio adverts, email campaigns, and a host of other options. Check out packages here.
Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom. And visit hrgazettecom.
Speaker 2:Bianca, it is my pleasure to welcome you to the HR Chat Show today. Hello, thank you for joining me.
Speaker 3:Hello, Mr Bill Bannam. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited.
Speaker 2:I, like Bianca, listeners. Bianca's cool and she's spoken at a disruptive event that I was involved with and we've got to know each other over the last little while and, above and beyond all of that, she's really, really patient, because we were supposed to have recorded this interview quite some time ago and it got moved a couple of times. Um, the the best excuse I had was we had our second kids, uh, which arrived like the day before uh, we was going to record uh, but we, we, we finally got here. Bianca, I am very happy about that because you are a cool human being and you do cool stuff I am just so happy that I have on record someone calling me patient there you go it's on the record, everyone.
Speaker 2:It's on the record. Why don't you start? The close ones please share this episode with everyone. Um, why don't you start by sharing your journey and what led you to the founding of the company? Can you, can you just take us back and talk us?
Speaker 3:through? Yeah, absolutely so always been fascinated with human health, human behavior and why do people think and feel the way they do. I studied psychology at university. The idea was to pursue a career in, in therapy, um, and work on that sort of one-to-one side of things. I always explain that my career has been a very spaghetti-like career, so the therapy plan didn't quite work out.
Speaker 3:Three weeks after I graduated I found out that my dad had three months left to live. He was a super healthy individual. He wasn't a big drinker. He had never had a cigarette out on his bike every morning. A big drinker he had never had a cigarette out on his bike every morning, and so it was a huge spanner in the works and the first time in my life that I was sort of faced with something that felt totally out of my control and totally unpredictable, and as a result of that, I had to get a job, and get a job very quickly. Being in my early 20s, solely motivated by money, I wanted to buy my dad his health. If I couldn't buy him his health, I wanted to buy him a Ferrari. He was a very Italian man, it couldn't be anything else, and so on that mission, I started my career in tech sales sales floor of 800 people. One of very few women youngest person in the company worked my way up through the company, was sort of doing at some point 20 hour days, seven days a week and just throwing everything I had into that job and was doing okay. It was doing well in it and then my father passed away.
Speaker 3:I was hospitalized and the doctors said that I'd effectively gone through like a two-year burnout to the point where my stomach walls could no longer work. I couldn't digest my food. I couldn't sleep lying down. I had fibromyalgia. So I was in pain from head to toe, anxious, depressed, you name it. I had it.
Speaker 3:Took a year out, went travelling, bought a tuk-tuk called Tina, travelled to Sri Lanka, lived with Aborigines in Australia, got as far away from London life as possible, but very much went on my own personal development journey during that time, trying to get my mental and physical health back on track. That then led to me, when I came back to England, adding to my qualifications, going into one-to-one coaching. So I've actually I think it's now closer to 12,000 coach one-to-one coaching hours. I've coached everything from Hollywood celebrities to England rugby players, to businessmen and women, top CEOs, to stay-at-home mums and dads and everything in between, and have a lot of experience on in that one-to-one coaching.
Speaker 3:That then led to me wanting to provide that level of coaching at more scale, so I started delivering talks designing well-being strategies. I've worked with American Express, snapchat, university of Cambridge, philip Morris, large global organizations with regards to their well-being and then on that journey it led to HumanOS, which is my baby. You just had a baby. I had a baby last year slightly different babies, but my baby and what we're trying to do is combine that very human coaching side of things on all areas of health and well-being with the data, with the strategy piece, to actually build more effective well-being strategies within the workplace.
Speaker 4:Supporting over 6 million employees across 180 countries. Neocase is a pioneering SaaS platform for automating HR service delivery and we are proud to support this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. Our clients use Neocase to achieve faster time to value through reduced implementation costs and real productivity gains. Learn how your team can reduce time spent on administrative tasks through process automation and workflow efficiencies using Neocase at neocasesoftwarecom.
Speaker 2:Okay, thank you very much for sharing. Let's talk a bit more about human OS. Then I'd like to get your take on where employee well-being is going wrong at the moment and then, of course, how human arrest is trying to solve some of those problems is trying to help. What makes you guys unique?
Speaker 3:yeah, I mean it's such a good question and I think break it down. Firstly, like, where is employee go, well-being going wrong? Like, really, without sounding too depressing, where is it going right right now? Um, when you look at the data and what's going on in the workplace, all the data is going in the direction we we don't want it to go.
Speaker 3:It's become very transactional and organizations have very much approached it for the last sort of couple of decades of how much value can I get from these people as opposed to actually, how much value can I give these people people as opposed to actually. How much value can I give these people? And if you think about it, with our own personal relationships, if we went about our lives just thinking, how much can I extract from the individuals I'm surrounding myself with? You know we're not going to have very good relationships, but that's exactly what's gone on in the workplace, and so what's then been created is a really unsustainable working approach, um, from the corporates, from the individuals, and so at human os.
Speaker 3:What we're trying to do is almost be that cultural change agent. And you know you asked a really good question of like how, how do we stand out? What makes us different. I think there's not just human arrest. I think there's a lot of corporate well-being solutions now who have come through off the back of there being so many corporate well-being solutions that aren't working and that aren't doing what they said they're meant to do, or aren't doing it for the right reasons, and so what we're trying to do is really bring that sort of humanity to it again, but actually base it on the data, base it on the science, allow organizations to make effective decisions based upon what's going on within their workplace it's that time in the conversation where I ask my guests to offer some practical tips, some some strategies.
Speaker 2:What, what do companies need to do to ensure that they they build effective well-being strategies, and what are some of those stages? What are some of the conversations that you'd have if you're going into an organization?
Speaker 3:I think at a very basic level. Firstly, when it comes to well-being, I think organizations have it really tough as well, like they've tried so many things, they haven't worked, they don't get engagement, they don't get results, and so they've thrown a lot of money in these areas, but it's like even with good intentions, they're not working. So I think, from a very practical sense, it's not about the bells and whistles. It's actually about how do you meet the basic psychological needs of your people. Again, and it's almost taking a step back to take two steps forward.
Speaker 3:So companies are doing great things like OK, let's give our employees free gym memberships, but what if they don't have the time or energy to go to the gym? Or let's put all these perks in the office, whether that's free fruit, whether it's meditation rooms, you know, whether it's comfy, ergonomic chairs, but then actually, what people don't want to be in the office every day? And also a lot of what organizations are doing is very reactive. So you have these great eaps in place, and if they have an eap, that's actually working. But that's very much the case of what do we do when things go wrong? And so, from practical sense, it's what are you implementing to stop things going wrong in the first place, in terms of your training, in terms of meeting those basic psychological needs, in terms of your culture, in terms of your values? What are you implementing to prevent the problems in the first place?
Speaker 5:Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazettecom. And now back to the show.
Speaker 2:Bianca, I mentioned earlier on in this episode that one of the cool things that you and I have managed to get up to so far is you were kind enough to come and join me at a Disrupt London event within the wellnergy festival by nick steert and the team um, I'd love for you and it was.
Speaker 2:It was good fun despite the terrible, terrible weather that we had. I'd love you now to take it. Take a couple of minutes if you don't mind and tell our listeners a bit about uh, your session during uh, during that disrupt period, your experiences there, and also I happen to catch you on the panel about 30 minutes later, so maybe you can mention the panel as well.
Speaker 3:Yes, sure, so I. It was my first Disrupt talk pitch, which I was really excited and also really nervous for, and I didn't know if I was going to absolutely smash it or it'd be an absolute car crash, because it's one of those things if you've never done it, you really have no idea how you're going to respond to 30 seconds a slide and the slides just move in. But I really enjoyed it. It was a really great you all the speakers that day I just thought were phenomenal. It was so interesting hearing everyone else. Um, what I discussed was a lot around the human capital trends report by deloitte and the human sustainability piece, and actually you know a bit of what I touched upon at the beginning is how do we move away from this very extractive approach, transactional approach we have between employer and employee? And actually how are we creating value for our employees beyond just the day-to-day work? Um, and so again, keeping it practical. And what does that look like? We touched looking at sort of management training, trying to make sure we're training individuals on human-based skills, not just job-based skills. You know 83% of managers now a days have had no formal training. And also, if we look at the traditional route to being promoted within the workplace. That's always come through becoming a manager, and to become a manager you get more money and obviously people want money a lot of the time, but they don't necessarily want to actually manage more people. So it's resulted in a huge sort of challenges around that management piece. So we touched on like actual management training, human-based skills, not just job-based skills. That then ties into the workload piece, which we know is a huge stressor in the workplace at the moment. We touched upon this 360 approach to well-being, which is really fundamental right now.
Speaker 3:Again, like I said earlier, organizations have a lot of things in place, but if their individuals don't want to use them or they're not meeting their needs, then they're fairly redundant. So actually, how can we ensure that we have strategies and we have benefits? Even though it shouldn't be a benefit, we should. What do we have in place that ensures that our people can get what they need when they need it? That's right for them? Um, and also we touched upon the sort of giving people purpose again, which I think is so important right now the way the world's changing, the levels of technological advancement, the political unrest, the economic instability there is so much going on in the world and it feels really scary for a lot of people at times and very unstable. We as the employers, as a society, we need to be giving up individuals purpose again, and so we looked at that and what does that look like? And actually, how do we make sure the business and their values align with the individual and their values and start to just create really good relationships between the two again?
Speaker 6:Hi everybody. This is Bob Goodwin, president at Career Club. Imagine with me for a minute a workplace where leaders and employees are energized, engaged and operating at their very best. Employees are energized, engaged and operating at their very best. At Career Club, we work with both individuals and organizations to help combat stress and burnout that lead to attrition, disengagement and higher health care costs. We can help your organization and your workforce thrive, boosting both productivity and morale across the board.
Speaker 2:To learn more about how we might help you and your company, visit us at careerclub okay, very good, and if you want to check out bianca's disrupt london talk, you can do that right now. You just go over to disrupthrco and then you can find the city of london and then it'll be up there ready to impress you. Uh, bianca, that almost takes us to the end of this particular conversation today. Before we do wrap up, how can our listeners connect with you and learn more about all the cool things you're getting up?
Speaker 3:to um. So bianca arigo on linkedin e double r I gO. Humanoscouk is our website. We're also HumanOS on LinkedIn. There's a few HumanOSs so it can be a little bit confusing and that's generally best to find me.
Speaker 2:Perfect. Well, that just leaves me to say for today Bianca, thank you very much for being my guest on this episode of the HR Chat Show.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for having me, Bill. It's been a pleasure and worth the wait in gold.
Speaker 2:And listeners as always. Until next time, happy working.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.
