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
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As I was saying last week, we released a number of features over this summer in PeopleNotTech’s Psychological Safety Dashboard including the “Did you know?” educational feature -to increase awareness around the importance of Psychological Safety and provide a level of organisational permission-; a “Team=Family” play – to increase true engagement-; an “Instant Teaming” play – for those who need to become a cohesive cross-functional ad-hoc or project-based team faster- and the Aristotle Score – an optional set of questions and associated score to check how teams, in particular Agile ones, are doing in terms of the other coordinates studied by Google in the namesakes project that found Psychological Safety to be the no.1. shared characteristic of high performing teams: Structure and Clarity, Dependability, Purpose and Impact.
We’ll make sure we speak to you about the Aristotle score again separately as it’s ever so important, but today let’s talk about one of these features that we just released, the Remote Working Satisfaction Score.
The history of the Remote Working Satisfaction score is interesting as its first incarnation called the “Stay Connected” pack was created in the first weeks of the pandemic, right before the first lockdown hit. Created as part of our Covid response where we opened access for free to the software to hundreds of teams, it contained questions about the “sudden WFH” reality that teams were experiencing, that were meant to make people feel connected by realising everyone was in it together.
It was designed not to measure -the questions were not added to any of the existent data categories- but to give people a sense of shared reality and the comfort associated with that.
As ever with our every other successful feature we ever created, it was clients that made us see the missing feature when they asked why these questions aren’t scored as well.
So we spent a few sprints to improve the questions, devise the score -by taking into account how all the other variables such as Engagement, Learning, Resilience, Courage and Flexibility- -played into it as well-, and then decide if it ought to be optional or not and yes, we opted for the latter.
Over the last few weeks since we released it to our clients, it seems to me that this score is polarising. Most people are very excited to see it added to our dashboard as it’s not only a temporary answer to how they are doing right now and what they should continue but also an ongoing barometer going forward.
Surprisingly though, some are adamant they don’t need it.
This is fine of course, because as outlined above, we designed it as an optional feature and we can easily enable the questions pack and score or not, but other than those who don’t have anyone working remotely at all, who would not want to know how their people feel about not being in the office?!?
The first category would be the desk-chainers. After all, any kind of proof that people may be happy having some degree of Working From Home would interfere with how hard they must have worked to have ignored the stats of the #GreatResignation showing beyond any shadow of a doubt that people will not stand for a permanent, mandatory return to their desks.
That said, we don’t work with any companies in that particular situation – unsurprisingly since their HumanDebt™ must be out of this world and far too high to allow them to even see they need to better their Psychological Safety-.
We do however, work with people who may have the very best of intentions and yet they don’t -ironically- feel safe enough to ask their teams this big of questions.
Enterprises where the “them vs. us” is still in place and where where people’s needs are sadly secondary to policy creation and not driving it.
This isn’t ill-intentioned but historical. How was leadership meant to make decisions with their employees’ wants at the centre when they simply didn’t know what they were. Consider the amount of guess-work going into any of the “to desk-chain or not to desk-chain” decisions happening right now. No matter what side of the argument you find yourself on, the basis is chiefly personal view and gut-feeling peppered here and there with a study or some example of what some big name is doing.
Almost none of it is “this is what our employees told us” because almost no one asked.
The only ones entitled not to ask are the organisations smart enough to have mandated a fully adult, respectful, fully flexible policy. One that allows their employees to be the responsible adults they had hired. One that lets teams decide how, when and where to be at their best. And needless to say those are few and far between. Everyone else make any kind of presumptions that will cost them their talent should have asked.
Not only asked but kept asking.
If you’re reading this from HR/Leadership and you haven’t asked come talk to us. It’s high time.
If you’re reading this from a team where they haven’t asked and you’re fearful they won’t, but instead, impose an impossible-to-abide-by blanket policy that will force your best people to leave, equally come talk to us, we’re happy to let anyone who needs it use our dashboard for free for a few weeks and have enough data to be able to go show HR/Leadership how their people really feel.
If they’ve asked, you’re confident they will keep asking and you’re in a fully flexible situation that makes you and your teammates feel motivated and valued – congratulations, count yourselves very lucky and start doing the rest of the human work to keep your magical set-up.
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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are: Understand, Measure and Improve
Read more about our Team Dashboard that measures and improves Psychological Safety at www.peoplenottech.com or reach out at contact@peoplenottech.com and let’s help your teams become Psychologically Safe, healthy, happy and highly performant.
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