Prioritizing Employees’ Well-Being in the Workplace with Tamara Fox

As human beings, we all encounter problems in our lives. Some may be traumatic, and it's just a fact of life. These experiences can make it hard to focus on our daily tasks, especially at work. How can we create a workplace culture that supports employees during these times? In this episode, I sit down with Tamara Fox, a coach and head of consulting at LOEB Leadership. We discussed the impact of trauma on both personal and professional life, and the need for workplaces to address employees’ trauma, and the future of their work. Tamara shared about the approaches to leadership development and the benefits of prioritizing employee’s mental health. Tune in to learn how we can build a more supportive workplace --- Listen to the podcast here: Prioritizing Employees’ Well-Being in the Workplace with Tamara Fox Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. On this particular podcast, I’ve talked quite a bit about our work culture and about how many things about our culture that we all encounter at work need some adjustment in our thinking. And one of the topics that I was recently introduced to at the Boulder Startup Week last month is the topic of what happens when one of your coworkers, one of your employees has a traumatic experience. Now, we’re all going to have traumatic experiences in life, it’s just a fact of life that something major is going to happen to you and something major is going to happen to you that’s going to cause you to maybe even focus on that particular aspect of your life a little bit more, even a little bit more than your work, and we need to find a way to, on a broader scale, allow people to be coworkers but also human beings. Today, my guest, Tamara Fox, is a coach and a consultant, and she was the speaker at this particular event on workforce trauma. --- Tamara, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you so much. So, I want to first start off talking about your particular story, your particular journey, when you talk about what made workplace culture something that really interested you and then what made specifically how people endure these traumas at workplaces something that you want to kind of lean into with your career. Yeah, absolutely. So I’m definitely one of those people that I took my own personal experiences and made it into something I’m actually passionate about and doing in the workforce today. And I always start my story back in 2011, when I was 19, I always age myself now when I do podcasts, I think that was 13 years ago, it was wild. But in 2011, I was 19 years old and I woke up and I was living in an apartment in Denver, Colorado, and I woke up to a masked man standing over my bed with a gun who raped me and actually physically assaulted me as well, like dislocated my arm, did a whole bunch of stuff to me that, you know, won’t go into details. I truly saw my life flash before my eyes, thought I was going to die, never see my family again. So that was 19 years old. Wow. Pretty life changing experience, that was the catapult into my experiences with personal trauma myself, like going through something traumatic. Pretty shortly after that, my dad had been battling with an opioid addiction, most of my childhood, it just didn’t really come to the surface or I wasn’t really aware of it at like more conscious level until after my trauma and I think my trauma actually catapulted him a little bit, made him a little bit worse, because when your family experience something like that, of course it has an impact on the family around them so his opioid addiction got to the point that he was verbally abusive, he was blacking out and not remembering things, and he was abusing opioids illegally. So then that happened and he became suicidal and his mental health was just awful. So that had an impact for me on a trauma perspective. Then, from 2016 to 2024, I had nine deaths, so nine deaths in nine years, so approximately a death a year. One of those was my father who died right at the start of COVID. He died April 4th, 2020. Another was, I always talk about this one because I don’t think it’s spoken about enough is my dog who I got for that trauma in 2011. I got a German shepherd for protection who enabled me to sleep at night, helped him with PTSD, helped me with anxiety. She passed away March 21st, 2021. And then one of my brothers was hit and killed in a car accident, March 18th, 2022. So, again, nine deaths in nine years. One of my best friends was killed in 2022 as well. So four of those deaths were definitely very traumatic, very unexpected, especially for somebody in their 30s to go through. So that is a little bit of my personal history. And when I was 19, after that first traumatic event, I knew I wanted to help people because being at that age, I was about to go back into college at the time, I had taken a little time off, and I knew that I was going to enter the workforce and need help. I had severe PTSD, severe anxiety, I knew I was going to need support, so at that time, I was like, okay, I’m gonna go into human resources. That’s how I can help people in the workplace. Well, the longer I was in HR, the more I learned this isn’t really 100 percent what I want to do, I don’t love the compliance side, the legal side, the hiring and firing and benefits. While those all have a purpose, it didn’t actually feel like I was doing what I was called and like meant to do, like what fueled my fire. So, with time in the human resources space, I shifted over into what I always call the fun side of HR, which is leadership development, culture, engagement, basically anything around developing people and creating workplace cultures where we can thrive, where people can be their authentic selves. So that is the work I do today. I am a national board-certified health and wellness coach and then a leadership development consultant and culture consultant, the world’s longest title, I should probably find a way to shorten that. I work one on one with individuals in a coaching setting, whether leadership or health and wellness, and then I also work on that macro scale with organizations, training and teaching about what to do with trauma in the workplace, when somebody experiences trauma or grief, because as I talked about in my talk, there’s only two things in life that are inevitable, life and death. Much of the work I do is really transforming how we respond and react to trauma and grief in the workplace, but then I also do a lot of coaching and training and development with leaders and organizational cultures as well. So you had this awful traumatic event at the age of 19 and then you decided, first, I’m going to pursue a career in HR, the first few years when you found yourself in some of these like non-fun aspects of it, and I think everyone’s kind of familiar with that, like, oh, the person that has to sign off on performance improvement plans, the person who has to look up all the legal things if there’s a conflict and someone does something, all that, the compliance part of it. What were those first few years like? And then what kind of things did you experience and potentially even struggle with that as you were kind of coming to the realization that what you were doing was not exactly what that experience kind of called you to do when you pick that path? Yeah. I started in HR when I was 20 so while I was still in school, so I’ve been in this career 12, 13-ish years. I was in very entry level roles and, of course, anytime you’re in more entry-level roles, you do more administrative, behind-the-scenes work, so it wasn’t until I was in HR for a couple years that I started doing more of things like recruiting and performance improvement, employee relations, performance improvement plans, or benefits, those pieces, so I did a lot of employee relations, like having difficult conversations, writing people up, firing people, hiring people. It all felt very transactional to me. Like, well, I know that that is required in order for a business to be successful, you have to hire people, you have to promote people, you have to document performance, it just felt like I was going through the motions instead of getting fulfillment and enjoyment out of what I was doing. I knew there was more in HR, which is why I kept pursuing it and learning more and pushing myself to venture into the space that I wanted to, but it just felt like I was out of alignment or inauthentic for me. Towards the end of the time, I was doing things like employer relations, it would actually cause stress internally for me, like I don’t like firing someone, I don’t like having to be involved in layoffs, it just made me feel very uncomfortable. And I understand the business perspective. I know that it’s required at times. I know it’s necessary, I see the employer’s perspective and the why. I felt so out of place doing that. And I would see colleagues around me just naturally, almost like do it with ease, and it wasn’t something for them that caused any emotional reaction or response. So once I learned more about the leadership development side, culture side of things, that’s where I continued to pursue and I just felt more ease and alignment. I know they always say in any type of personal development space, when you feel resistance and something you’re doing, it typically as assignment, it’s not meant for you. You’re kind of going against yourself and how that can kind of eat at you in certain ways, right? Because if what you’re doing, and I’ve experienced this in my past as well, where every single day, you wake up, you’re going to work but you’re doing something that’s either completely out of alignment or even something that you don’t even necessarily agree with, you talk about these major, like one instance traumas, but that seems like kind of like this kind of longer term,...