Are your awareness days just glitter on a turd?

Awareness weeks and months come round again and again on the HR calendar. If you're in HR, you've probably spent a fair amount of time and energy making one of them happen.

The talks have happened. The communications are sent. The app has been promoted again. The lunch and learn had a decent turnout. You've done what you can with what you've got.

And yet. Something isn't shifting in the way you know it needs to.

You're not imagining it. And it's not because you're doing the wrong things.

The glitter

A few years ago I wrote a LinkedIn post with this line: you can sprinkle glitter on a turd, but it's still a turd. It went more viral than anything I have ever written. Which tells you something about how many people in organisations immediately recognised what I was describing.

The glitter is everything you're doing. The campaigns, the sessions, the resources, the carefully worded policies. Some of it genuinely helps. A good session can shift perspective, give people language for something they've been struggling to name, plant a seed that takes root later. That is not nothing. Glitter is lovely, like on a cake (edible glitter, obviously!). But on a turd, not so much. In fact it's just a bit of an insult!

The turd

The turd, to put it bluntly, is the day to day experience of actually working in your organisation. The manager whose behaviour everyone knows is a problem but nobody has addressed. The workload that keeps expanding with zippo conversation about what comes off the list (NOTHING is coming off the list!).

The values statement that says 'we celebrate mistakes and learning' while the lived reality is completely the opposite. The culture where raising concerns feels scary and potentially career limiting, despite what the policy says.

Why the same blockers keeps showing up

Here's what I hear most often from people in HR and people roles. You're arranging great sessions, building good programmes, creating real resources. But you keep hitting the same wall.

Because the things that would actually shift the culture (leadership behaviour, ways of working, how performance is really measured and rewarded) often aren't yours to pull.

And that is an incredibly frustrating place to be!!

Speaking the language of performance, not just care

What I see make a real difference is when the people doing this work find a way to connect it to the language of performance rather than the language of care.

Not because the care isn't real or important. But because 'this is the right thing to do' can be easy for a leadership team to nod at and not act on. 'This is why your best people are leaving, and here is what it's costing you' tends to be heard differently.

How to genuinely invest in change

The initiatives matter. They signal something real. But the organisations that actually move the dial are the ones where leadership are genuinely invested in changing the environment, not just funding an app or a programme.

That is harder. It takes longer. It requires conversations that are much more uncomfortable than running a single resilience webinar. But it is where the magic actually happens.

If this resonates, I work with organisations on both sides of this: the sessions that help people understand and shift, and the more embedded consulting work that helps people teams make the case internally for the structural changes that actually matter. Get in touch if you want to talk about what that could look like for you.

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If this resonated, there's plenty more to explore. On my FREE RESOURCES PAGE  you'll find podcasts, short videos and downloadable guides on performance, psychological safety and the science of why people do their best work.

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