Episode 10: Featuring Mitchelle Jeffery, Founder of The Ember Collective
Your policies are failing you. You just don’t know it yet.
Most organizations write policies to control the 5% who might cause problems. But here’s what that’s actually costing you: the trust of the other 95%. And when disruption hits? Those rigid policies become the very thing that breaks your organization.
Mitchell Jeffery, founder of Ember Collective, has spent his career doing the opposite of what HR typically does. Instead of locking down every loophole, he designs policies that trust people. Instead of managing to the problem children, he builds systems that support star performers. And the result? Teams that will run into fire for their leaders.
Listen
Watch
What You’ll Discover
- Why your “fairest” policies hurt your best people – Point-based attendance systems feel equitable until you lose your top performer over a flat tire
- The real cost of control – What post-COVID return-to-office mandates revealed about organizational trust (spoiler: it wasn’t pretty)
- Fair vs. equitable – One framework that will change how you think about every policy you write
- The four policies to fix first – Attendance, bereavement, holidays, and PTO structure (yes, you can actually do this)
- Why policy beats culture programs – The counterintuitive reason you should start here, not with leadership training
- How to build trust before crisis – Mitchell’s “what car does she drive?” principle for preparing managers
- What to do when trust is already broken – The specific place to start rebuilding after layoffs or mishandled disruptions
- The wellness time shift – A simple language change that transforms how employees think about taking care of themselves
Episode Highlights
- 00:00 – Introduction: The Hidden Cost of Control-Based Policies
- 03:08 – The Trust Research: Why 71% of Organizations Are Getting It Wrong
- 04:00 – The 5% Problem: How Policies Hurt Your Best People
- 08:25 – The Attendance Policy Trap: Why Point Systems Fail
- 17:26 – Holiday Policies and the Belonging Gap
- 20:53 – The “What Car Does She Drive?” Philosophy
- 21:57 – Rebuilding Damaged Trust: Where to Start
- 24:24 – Four Policies to Reform First: Attendance, Bereavement, Holidays, PTO
Key Takeaways for HR Leaders
- You’re designing policies for the wrong people. Most HR teams write policies to control the 5-10% who cause problems. This punishes the 90% who show up trying to do the right thing. When crisis hits, these rigid policies destroy trust faster than anything else you’ll do.
- Fair and equitable are not the same thing. Fair means everyone gets the same. Equitable means everyone gets what they need to succeed. Two people watching a baseball game over a fence: fair gives them both one box. Equitable gives one person no boxes, the other two—now both can see. Apply this thinking to every policy you write.
- Start with policy before anything else. You can run culture initiatives all day long, but if your policies make people feel like the organization doesn’t care about them, you’re wasting money. Policy reform costs almost nothing and drives culture more directly than any training program.
- Know your people before disruption hits. Mitchell calls this “what car does she drive?”—when you know your employees as actual human beings, neither side can dehumanize the other during crisis. Trust reserves get built in the small moments, not the big ones.
- These four policies should be your starting point: Attendance (kill the point system), bereavement (build in flexibility for how grief shows up), holidays (let people swap for beliefs that matter to them), and PTO structure (call it “wellness time,” not “sick time”).
- Your frontline managers are stuck. When policies are too rigid, managers can’t actually support their people. Employees think their manager doesn’t care about them. The manager feels powerless. Everyone loses. Give managers room to manage.
- If your HR team can’t handle flexibility, that’s a capability issue. The objection “but how will we manage without strict rules?” usually means you need different HR support—not that flexible policies can’t work
About Our Guest:
Mitchell Jeffery is the founder of The Ember Collective, a fractional HR consulting firm serving healthcare and behavioral health organizations nationwide. He partners with CEOs and operators to build people-centered HR systems that work in the real world—not just in theory. A frequent DisruptHR speaker, Mitchell is known for challenging performative HR and perfectionist leadership in favor of authenticity, accountability, and trust.
Connect with Mitchell Jeffery
- Website: embercollectivellc.com
- Episode Resources: embercollectivellc.com/show/sparkeffect
- Phone: 865-255-8330
- LinkedIn: Mitchell Jeffery
Notable Quotes
From Mitchell Jeffery:
“Most policies are written to manage the 10% of employees that are the problem children. What I believe is that inadvertently hurts the 90% of employees who come to work and are just trying to do the right thing.”
“Fair means everybody gets the same thing. Equitable means everybody has the same opportunity for the same things. There’s a huge difference.”
Kim Bohr:
“Your policies are failing you, and you don’t know it until crisis hits. Most organizations write their policies to manage the 5% who might cause problems. But what’s that costing you with the other 95%?”
“Our research shows that 71% of employees have experienced major disruptions in the last 24 months. Organizations that handled it well reported a 12% higher trust dividend over those employees that had faced no disruption at all.”
Related Resources
- SparkEffect Trust Study – Research showing that 71% of organizations faced disruption in the last 24 months, but only 36% emerged stronger (https://info.sparkeffect.com/trust-study-2025-download)
About Courage to Advance
Courage to Advance explores how visionary leaders are building the organizations they wish existed, companies that prove business doesn’t have to be dehumanizing. Hosted by Kim Bohr, President and COO of SparkEffect, each episode features executives who refuse to accept that traditional corporate practices are inevitable, sharing the experiments, resistance, and breakthrough results of choosing human flourishing alongside business success.
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