We all want to succeed and we all want to do our best work. We all also want to have the people who choose to share their skills with us and do a job for us to be happy, we do. We may not actually do anything about making that happen but in principle, of course we all want that.
What makes our people happy? Respect, care, the magic of teamwork, being in flow and feeling like they are making an impact and doing their best and seeing it be recognised. That could very well be an exhaustive list as well and still, we’re all victims of the cognitive dissonance the status quo of the workplace engulfs us to the point that we either do not see that list or believe it to be un-fixable.
We never met an enterprise that was genuinely malevolent. The sorry state of generalised fear, the active disengagement, the dread, the mistreatment, the lack of emotional investment, the politics, the punitive and sanctioning behaviours, they may all be there but never are they intentional, who would, after, want to be the architect of so much misery that only collectively slows us down? So it’s never intentional. But it’s there.
In the absence of bad intentions, we can only attribute the sorry state of HumanDebt™ to hubris and negligence. There’s also something to be said about how this massive organisational inability of making our people happy has not been an evident issue before because the way that work was organised before the age of digital and Agile has never exposed the need for the human work. In slow, waterfall contexts we can subsist on command and control and lack of care for behaviours and emotions, in fast-paced, highly volatile environments where all we need is true collaboration and healthy team dynamics while we have also to apply self-care to be competitive. All that’s human work. None of that requires billions or PhDs. Most of the need is for goodwill really.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqwqZKt4ntw
In this video, we reiterate that there’s a simple formula for any enterprise that genuinely has its mind and heart in the right place:
Science/Awareness about the need for human work to be competitive + enough Human Work Superheroes + leadership that gets it and wants to truly put their people first= making the people work part of the day-to-day work and therefore becoming highly performant and competitive in this new world of work
We are of course not claiming it’s “easy”, we are simply saying it’s necessary and doable.
One of the first steps, as ever when it comes to these new and theoretical topics about human issues – is disambiguation. What all do we mean by the need for it (and this is where the first part of that equation comes in – the theoretical exploration is imperative to build lasting understanding beyond awareness) and what does the human work really entail? It’s really not that complicated, counterintuitive as we find this.
The “human work” refers to learning to recognise and name all the emotions you experience yourself and those you observe in others and being willing to do something about them both when it comes to the team dynamic and when it comes to our own feelings and reactions. In short – the human work demands we increase and use our EQ on a daily basis in our individual work and in our team interactions. The “why” we’d do it sorted above, this is the “how” and it’s such a simple answer that it serves as an excuse-buster “spend regular and focused time thinking of these topics and resolve to do something about behaviours that need correcting and enhance the ones that work.
Whether a new wave of burnout is coming and whether or not we will be looking at another instance of the “great resignation” is not even in question – both are likely and no enterprise can afford them. The way to try and avoid them is the same way to overall productivity and even performance – distributing the human work to the team and getting them in the habit to do it.
As this video (eventually) says – speak to us, we’ve seen it all. The rare good, the generalised bad and the extraordinarily ugly. We are unshockable and full of good ideas and solutions that have worked for other teams before and the Dashboard serves as the space to do the human work and therefore enables it for many hundreds of happy teams as it can do for yours.
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At PeopleNotTech we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams, come see a DEMO.
“Nothing other than sustained, habitual, EQed people work at the team level aka “the human work” done BY THE TEAM will improve any organisation’s level of Psychological Safety and therefore drop their levels of HumanDebt™.”
To order the “People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age” book go to this Amazon link