As promised last week I am picking up the “state of us post pandemic” once again because we are nowhere better and it’s now officially “a few years down the line”. Beware this will be an up-in-arms article in the vein of the “Nobody’s OK FFS” ones of a few weeks ago and that’s because we have to talk about it again. I find it appalling that we are still here and the crisis is deepening and it worries me that with the extreme economical hardship we may be facing ahead (ironically some of which can be easily attributed to this very state of affairs) we will again deem the human crisis in the workplace as non-priority.
Our people (and ourselves) are:
- Overworked
- Overwhelmed
- Tired and run-down
- Disillusioned and disengaged
- Dreading, fearful, anxious and depressed
- Far more unproductive than they should be or that we can afford
Why do we need to talk about it again? Because we do precious little about it other than expect it to magically and quietly take care of itself in the background. Which, let’s face it, will never happen. We’re in denial. We don’t want to face up to the enormity of the job. We are still hoping despite the data and the overwhelming body of evidence that “it’s not that bad”.
“Oh but that’s not true, I saw 100 articles about burnout and one just yesterday from HBR packed full of advice on how to increase your resilience and combat most of the ailments above” I hear you say. This is interestingly telling – the article in question was written in 2019. While it became LinkedIn-viral no one in the comments dissecting it and praising it, stopped to point that out.
What possible value does a general “be kind to yourself and set boundaries” type of advice from the “before times” have? How will it speak to this insanely unprecedented new reality where we function knowing that most of what we came to rely on life wise can easily be thrown up in the air at any time? When we saw the true nature of VUCA (VUCA, short for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, used to be a trendy management term about the same time as the article and is really just a catchall for “Hey, anything can happen!”)? When we have had to hold up the fort and pretend we can carry on as if nothing is happening when indeed we were going through life-and-death limit situations? When we felt so much and none of it was verbalised. When we mourned, we feared, we hoped, we survived and we did it all while still writing code and answering emails and that dichotomy, (akin to those ploughing along work in war zones such as our colleagues in the Ukraine) needs recognition and processing before it will stop reflecting in our state of mind and performance today.
The truthful answer is “not much value at all”. But equally, it’s not like we can pluck that article out and instead insert a much more relevant one based on brand new studies on how we really feel because guess what? They barely exist. With companies such as GitHub and Microsoft paving the way into looking at the effects of the pandemic, there have been a few larger explorations including some results from Gallup and even McKinsey but really, there is dramatically little done to understand the dramatic effects of the pandemic or how to tailor old resilience advice to make it work for us now.
As ever, when the answer to how to lower HumanDebt™ is distributing the work to the team level and ensuring it is mandated and rewarded as the hard human work that makes us high performing that it really is, when it comes to combating burnout and reversing this wave of mental health issues and active disengagement, the answer lays with demystifying the emotional work and then insisting it is being done regularly.
There are no magical shortcuts. To feel better, to recover, to progress – we have to have processed what happened, feel like we are restored enough and have boundaries and self-care routines in place and then turn our attention to analysing our emotions and behaviours and those of others and towards reconnecting to our purpose to re-become productive.
This insane crisis is partly due to the depth of the overall HumanDebt anyhow. We live in a society where the vast majority of individuals have a very low EQ. They find it hard to name and recognise emotions in themselves and others even if they should have the curious empathy to try and attempt it. They think discussing emotions and behaviours is somehow weak or non-professional. They took in massive amounts of formal education and not a jot of it has taught them anything about this topic, so they take that as further proof that the topic of our inner life shouldn’t even be brought up. As if having feelings should be taboo. It’s a societal level crisis of mental health that stems chiefly from inability and lack of practice and preoccupation. The human work was never mandated, taught in school or made comfortable part of our every day life.
This, you must agree, is an untenable and disturbing status quo. We shunned emotions for so long, we have a hard time accepting that we have to put self-care in place and keep to it religiously. We spent so little time discussing people’s feelings and dynamics in a work context, that it is seen as contra-productive to analyse them at all. It feels naughty, like we’re borrowing company time to think of or talk about our unimportant lives and what we feel. Like we shouldn’t matter. Like us as humans that have emotions are an imposition and like we ought to stay as close to the perceived ideal worker as we can: a robot executing on their tasks while devoid of humanity. Outrageous really when you stop to think about it.
What do we do collectively as a society when we see this is the case? That we have burned out our workers and gave them back articles from 2019. That we spent their good will and passion on simply remaining our employee or the domain of the work exclusively, and instead of thanking them for even sticking with us, we give no second thought for what they just went through. That we let them fend off for themselves and try and survive the strange kind of hell we traversed without either supporting them or changing the script so that when they breath in and life is semi-back to normal work is different – that it sees them and it allows them to breathe and regroup with as much restorative down time as they need and as many self-care and boundaries management as possible, ideally all of which play out in a now-all-flexible-all-remote-outcomes-based workplace.
As ever when I think of how behind we are on this monumental collective to-do, I can’t imagine why we left it so late. Why isn’t this taught in schools? Why don’t our youngsters learn that alongside diet, sleep and exercise, breathing, gratitude, mindfulness and meditation are not silly hippy methods but as basal of hygiene as tooth-brushing and the tools and practices are firmly anchored in neuroscience and can be learned. This would allow time for the habit to do these consistently to be created reliably in young minds and then be carried into a reliable and resilience-building life-long habit. It would teach them they have to take care of themselves and understand it. That they have to explore their feelings and never burry them to be healthy. That they can and should take care of themselves and maintain whatever wellbeing routine they put in place. That it’s basic adulting to do so to remain balanced and healthy. That’s what rests with the educational system, society at large and individual personal responsibility. All else left to do, say and put in place to facilitate the human work then rests firmly solely on the enterprise. It is on them that they block and protect the time, that they see and reward the human work and that they give their people the tools and the culture to encourage it.
Tomorrow’s video will have some of the practical suggestions and while they are from the “now times” and a lot more pertinent than recommendations in 2019, the truth is the only advice is, as ever, to do the human work already. Next week, we’ll further try and compile all our articles that come up with exact ideas as to how to lower the team resistance, how to democratise the human work, how to audit HumanDebt and in general, how to do your part to rewrite this sad drama page in the history of work into one of hope and righteousness that keeps us as humans at the very centre and lands the gains of the pandemic for all workers.
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“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™.”
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