On a completely different topic today – how are we all?
“Fine”?
Are we though?
We’re not. No one is fine.
Not as fine as we used to be. We may have super exciting things happening in your lives and we may be super grateful for having survived a global pandemic and those elations may be masking the non-fine-ness but it’s still there. We are doggone tired. Fairly bedazzled and certainly weary. We’re fearful, tentative, unengaged and rather spent. This is not our best selves. Our most honest, most creative, most applied selves. It just isn’t our finest hour. Not by a country mile.
We’re filled with good intentions and conscious of how extensive the backlogs so we pack up WIP and hope for the best. We tug at tickets we usually could get through in this time frame but then notice we haven’t managed and that was discouraging. We look at problems that would have been a two hours head-scratch-and-Google before and we’re still stumped by them a week later and we feel stuck. Uncreative. Muted and dull somehow. And it feels like even summoning the will to be very upset about feeling this way, is one effort too far.
We’re all burned out. Not to minimise the experience of those that are severely and clinically so and how they are battling crippling anxiety and even depression, we’ll have to agree collectively we are nowhere there, but we sure aren’t ok either. Not ok and not fine. All of us.
If you take a step back and you look at this objectively, it is almost risible that we humans somehow concluded “Right, this life-threatening danger is kinda done, back to it, let’s just go back to our routine and pretend we can do all the things we used to at all the speed we used to with nary a nod to how insane this all was”. Ummm what about taking a breath? A long one? And I don’t mean that one vacay you crammed in or how you blocked an hour of “protected time” in your calendar but a contemplative, lungs-filling, life-affirming and deep-grounding-thoughts-permitting long breath.
If you’re reading this in the same company you were with when the pandemic started for you, you’re probably not only as actively disengaged as you were when it did, but now you’re also burned out and resentful that the great resignation came and went and here you still are so of course you’re discouraged and super tired.
I have news for you – the people who did avail themselves of the wave of change and are now having different email signatures are not tremendously better off either. Yes they are enthused and full of new-job-energy beans but they are also in a position where they can do even less self-care to combat any of the burnout as their new positions demand they prove themselves asap and they haven’t yet found their footing enough to demand time and resources for self-respect.
So if you stayed you’re un-fine and if you left, you’re un-fine too, albeit in a different way.
This isn’t just a feeling, look at the objective signs. Business ghosting; people starting to get on zooms as acts of presence; most if not all projects severely behind, -things that should have wrapped up Jan/Feb being nowhere done-; and just a general sense of starting to understand the underwater pedalling is in absolute overdrive while we try to smile and appear to be gliding calmly on the sedate waves of corporate needs.
A much less evident and unexpected sign of burnout is actually the extreme meaning-searching we see on LinkedIn. We’ve all noticed the shift. The “personalisation” of LinkedIn. How posts became even more human, have more personal stories in them and hit harder with more honest and previously-unuttered-in-a-business-environment truths. And it stopped being business only. Humanitarian stories, current events, personal accounts, life milestone celebrations, deep thought explorations and discussions of better quality than on the corridors of the best conferences, all of the dialogue, the thirst for learning, the truth-telling – all of these are amazing and needed and awesome but they are also a visceral counter-reaction to the lack of interest in how we feel.
We feel un-fine and that is the truth. And we want to talk about how we are feeling. We want to talk deep, human, meaningful stuff that makes us feel heard. Neither are deniable.
Two of our clients are talking about burnout extensively. And don’t get me wrong that’s commendable and needed. But is mentioning and acknowledging it enough? No. If you set aside how they are frontrunners by even concerning themselves with this and you objectively look at their efforts they do say “You are un-fine and we want to know how you are” but then they abruptly stop and people can sense there will be a “now what?!?” moment that will be a complete let down because nothing of value has been put in place and they instinctively choose not to trust the dialogue and not engage with any of the efforts. And that further creates HumanDebt.
Obviously ignoring -or not sufficiently un-ignoring- burnout is just one of the ways in which we create it this days and maybe not the most urgent one because we still have the huge to-do of figuring out how to do hybrid in a smart, non-command-and-control way and we still have to first and foremost affirm we want and need the human work and help teams do it, but it’s one of the ways nonetheless and all of these combined will equate to more HumanDebt than most shops can handle and still survive.
It sounds like such doomsday scaremongering “Oh no, if we ignore how people feel, how un-fine they are, if we don’t sort servant leadership, team autonomy and a climate of psychological safety, if we don’t regroup around the shared purpose of putting the human work first and if we don’t find ways to embed it and instead we keep getting more HumanDebt we will not be around in 10 years” but it isn’t that at all, I’m willing to set up a major public dare for those of you who disbelieve the danger – “How is your company doing on X, Y and Z when it comes to people? If you believe they are doing the right things and this Human Debt is inconsequential buy their shares”.
Forget the organisation though, as ever, there’s loads we can and should do at the team level. If you’re a client use the “Combating Burnout” Team Action in the Playbook but if not hold the space. Ask truly open-hearted and intrusive “How are you REALLY?!?”s as often as you can and let people truly search themselves and say what ways they are un-fine in. At least that. And if there’s WIP you can limit of course do that, and make sure you leave room for the human work. As an individual, as a leader, as a team. Everyone needs to create, facilitate and demand the space to feel and communicate. Everyone needs to minimise impression management and turn to their colleagues in a safe and open environment. And to become obsessed with self-respect and self-care. That’s the only thing that will get us through and get us to be fine again.
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At PeopleNotTech we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams. If you care about it- talk to us about a demo at contact@peoplenottech.com
To order the “People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age” book go to this Amazon link