Beyond Lip Service: Why True Employee Well-being Demands Clear Boundaries

Title: Stacey Nordwall, VP of People Strategy at Fyn Date: Fri, 23 May 2025 09:00:00 GMT Duration: 00:08:58 Link: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/previ/episodes/Stacey-Nordwall--VP-of-People-Strategy-at-Fyn-e3292rh GUID: 83a16b53-b86b-4cfa-b958-3766b25f4afb ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

The people profession spends a lot of energy caring for employees. Not nearly enough energy caring for itself. Stacey Nordwall has watched colleagues take leaves of absence from HR jobs because the emotional load became unsustainable — and she's candid about how rarely organizations actually respond to that with meaningful support.

As VP of People Strategy at Fyn, Stacey has spent her career in early-stage startups, where the line between personal support and professional responsibility gets blurry fast, and where the HR team is often a team of one. She's developed a clear framework for where that line sits: the moment she feels herself moving toward therapist territory, she knows it's time to step back. Not because she doesn't care, but because she's not trained for it — and crossing that line serves no one. Her alternative is building organizations where mental health resources are genuinely accessible and where the HR team itself has equivalent support, whether through an "HR for HR" internal structure or external coaching reserved entirely for them.

The conversation also covers two things HR consistently underinvests in: onboarding and culture change. Onboarding, Stacey argues, remains one of the highest-impact levers HR has access to — and one of the most commonly executed poorly. Culture change, meanwhile, is slow and hard and impossible without senior leaders who genuinely model the behaviors they're asking for. Her parting advice to HR professionals is almost therapeutic itself: accept that your to-do list will never be done. The work is infinite. Get good at having conversations about trade-offs instead.

• Setting HR's professional boundary — when the role of people support ends and therapeutic territory begins, and why that line matters
• HR burnout as an organizational problem — why most companies fail their HR teams despite publicly championing employee wellbeing
• "HR for HR" — the case for dedicated support structures or external coaching specifically for people professionals
• Onboarding as the underused lever — making norms, expectations, and culture explicit instead of leaving new hires to decode the unwritten rules
• Culture change requires senior buy-in — not passive approval, but active modeling and repeated explicit communication from the top
• Managing the infinite to-do list — learning to have trade-off conversations instead of continuously absorbing more work

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