This interview is an element of Workology’s HR highlight series, where we highlight influential HR leaders who’re shaping the long run of labor through daring ideas and real-world impact. For this post, we’re talking to Rocki Howard, Founder and CEO of The Humanity Practice.
Rocki Howard is the Founder and CEO of The Humanity Practice™ and a workplace practitioner with greater than 25 years of leadership experience within the staffing and talent industry. Known for her daring, practical approach to organizational transformation, Rocki works with leaders and organizations to strengthen culture, leadership, and performance in ways in which show up in the actual experience of labor.
Her work is grounded in a straightforward but powerful belief: organizations don’t rise to intention — they rise to practice. Values and culture commitments come to life through the systems, behaviors, and expectations that shape how work gets done.
Through The Humanity Practice™ framework, Rocki equips organizations to operationalize humanity at work, embedding trust, belonging, and clarity into leadership practices, team behaviors, and organizational systems.
A trusted advisor, speaker, and workplace strategist, Rocki partners with organizations to construct workplaces where people and performance grow stronger together.
5 Questions With Rocki Howard
You say organizations don’t rise to intention — they rise to practice. What does that seem like in real terms for HR leaders who wish to move beyond values statements into real culture change?
I’ve spent most of my profession inside organizations that genuinely care about their people and their culture. The intention is sort of at all times there. What I’ve learned over time is that intention alone isn’t what shapes the worker experience.
Employees don’t experience intention. They experience practice.
After I say organizations rise to practice, I’m talking in regards to the on a regular basis patterns of labor. How leaders give feedback. How decisions get made. How performance is evaluated. But in addition how colleagues treat each other within the moments that matter — how people listen in meetings, how ideas are received, how conflict is handled, and whether people feel secure speaking up.
Those small, repeated moments are what culture actually looks prefer to employees.
So for HR leaders, moving beyond values statements isn’t about abandoning values — it’s about translating them into clear expectations and observable behaviors. If trust matters, how does it show up in decision-making and collaboration? If belonging matters, how does it show up in hiring, meetings, and team dynamics?
When organizations connect their values to the systems and behaviors that guide each day work — what I call the Humanity Practice — culture stops being something people discuss and becomes something people consistently experience.
You’re launching the Humanity Practice Index™, which quantifies trust, belonging, and clarity as performance indicators. Why is measurement the missing link in most culture and DEI strategies, and the way does this shift the conversation at the chief level?
Organizations have been measuring culture for years through engagement surveys and worker feedback tools. Those insights may be incredibly invaluable. What’s often harder, though, is translating that information into a transparent understanding of what conditions contained in the organization are shaping the day-to-day experience of labor.
The Humanity Practice Index™ focuses on a selected set of workplace conditions that shape humanity at work and influence how teams perform — things like communication, trust, psychological safety, organizational support, wellbeing, engagement, and belonging.
These aren’t abstract ideals. They show up — or don’t — in on a regular basis work. In how information moves, how people collaborate, whether individuals feel secure raising concerns, and whether the systems around them make work possible or unnecessarily difficult.
When leaders can see these conditions clearly, it becomes easier to grasp that human imperatives and business imperatives are usually not competing priorities — they’re deeply connected. When trust is powerful, information moves faster. When psychological safety is present, higher ideas surface. When communication and support are clear, teams spend less energy navigating friction and more energy doing meaningful work.
The goal isn’t simply more culture data — it’s clearer insight into the conditions that make work function well for people and teams.
You describe your work as making humanity operational. What are essentially the most common systems or processes that quietly undermine trust and belonging — and the way can HR leaders begin to revamp them?
One challenge I see is that many organizations still consider humanity at work as something soft or optional. In point of fact, it shows up through on a regular basis behaviors that shape how work actually functions — how people communicate, give feedback, respect boundaries, and lift concerns.
The systems inside organizations should reinforce those behaviors, but many organizations struggle to do this in ways which are easy, consistent, and sustainable.
For instance, an organization may say wellbeing matters, but workload expectations make it difficult for people to disconnect. Or collaboration could also be encouraged while performance systems still reward individual competition. Over time, people notice the gap between what a company says it values and what its systems actually reinforce.
Making humanity operational means defining and reinforcing the behaviors that shape the moments that matter at work, while aligning the systems around them so those behaviors develop into a part of how the organization operates day by day.
That’s also why the Humanity Practice Index™ examines how those behaviors show up in practice — for instance whether employees feel their boundaries are respected when workloads increase.
When those behaviors and systems are aligned, human imperatives and business imperatives stop competing and begin strengthening each other.
You’re launching the Workforce Inclusion Practice™ as a part of The Humanity Practice™ ecosystem. What makes this approach different from traditional DEI training and why is that difference critical right away?
Over the past several years, many organizations have invested in training and awareness around inclusion. Those efforts have helped start vital conversations and construct shared understanding.
Where many teams still struggle is translating that awareness into repeatable internal practice.
That challenge has develop into much more visible recently. Many DEI teams have been reduced, budgets are tighter, and leaders are navigating increased legal scrutiny and public attention around this work. At the identical time, most organizations still want workplaces where people feel respected, included, and in a position to contribute fully.
The Workforce Inclusion Practice™, a part of The Humanity Practice™, provides facilitation infrastructure that HR teams, ERG leaders, and folks operations professionals can deploy inside their very own organizations.
Lots of the people asked to guide inclusion conversations are getting into highly visible discussions without deep subject-matter experience or dedicated resources. Each facilitation kit provides the structure, scripts, and reinforcement tools teams have to run those conversations thoughtfully and consistently.
The materials are practical, sustainable, and reasonably priced, while still allowing teams to adapt language and examples to reflect their very own culture and context. They’re also structured to support thoughtful implementation in environments where legal and compliance considerations matter.
The goal isn’t to rent expertise for a moment — it’s to construct capability contained in the organization.
You’re working on a book titled Daring, Good, Badass Blueprint: 12 Strange Practices for an Extraordinary Life. How do on a regular basis personal practices hook up with organizational leadership and culture?
This book is deeply personal for me. For years I’ve been advocating for grown women who’re carrying loads of responsibility — of their careers, their families, and their communities — while still attempting to construct lives that feel meaningful and expansive.
Lots of us did what we were told would result in success, yet we still find ourselves navigating systems that weren’t built with us in mind. What I’ve come to understand is that the reply isn’t waiting for those systems to alter before we claim the lives we would like.
It’s practice.
The small, intentional actions that help us reclaim our voice, protect our energy, make aligned decisions, and define success on our own terms. That’s the guts of the book: twelve odd practices that help women live boldly, think brilliantly, and move through the world with unapologetic ownership.
And when people practice that type of agency in their very own lives, something powerful happens. They show up in another way at work — with more clarity, more courage, and more respect for themselves and others.
In some ways, they develop into Humanity Practitioners, modeling the behaviors that help others thrive. And I can’t consider a greater foundation for constructing stronger leaders and more inclusive, high-performing, human-centered cultures.
For me, this book brings together my advocacy, pieces of my very own story, and the idea that runs through all of my work: we alter the world through practice — one story, one conversation, one motion at a time.
RESOURCES
Rocki Howard – The Humanity Practice | LinkedIn
The Free Humanity Practice™ Snapshot: The Humanity Practice Snapshot