We’re a distributed fully remote international business at PeopleNotTech but even so, many of us are in the United Kingdom so yesterday we decided to let people choose if they wanted to avail themselves of the bank holiday and honour their Queen’s memory by reminiscing or watching the majestic televised display of affection or not, and unsurprisingly, most of us did indeed take the day off to reflect hence the lack of newsletter.
There isn’t anything I could say here about the loss or the significance that you haven’t read already, but I would be remiss to not admit that personally, to me, there is no one to have contributed to feminism more than our late Queen, there is no better example of extreme work ethics (with the final mark of it being how she was working on Tuesday and passed away on Thursday) and there’s no clearer manifestation of true servant leadership borne of a sense of purpose and mission greater than we can imagine. May we always be inspired by what she stood for.
Our work lives, our needs, our squabbles, they all seem minor in comparison and in the grand scheme of things perhaps they are, but in the day-to-day reality of our businesses, they are not so. As mere mortals, we’ll never measure up and surely no organisation expects us to. That said, over the past few days, her vivid memory came with some voices saying we ought to be more hardy and resilient as she was in lieu of the perceived “snow flakery” they claim to be observing and that is dangerous rhetorics.
Irrespective of whether we are ready to admit it or not, we are traversing a period where the workplace is transforming entirely and the cornerstone of this transformation is a return to our human nature complete with the recognition that we have emotions that heavily influence our work behaviours. As such, the nature of our work is changing, what we are called to do is no longer the same as it was before this shift and no organisation will be able to move forward if it hasn’t been intensely mindful of its culture and the people work that needs to take place.
Mental health, and individual and group well-being, have not become top of mind out of a sense of morality, or because we owe our people more care and respect, but because they now directly impact the bottom line. In this day and age, where collaboration, flexibility and human interaction are unavoidable, there can be no performance if we disregard our people’s ability to engage effectively. In other words, none of this is about ultra-sensitivity, ensuring one’s employees are in a strong and stable emotional groove and are engaging in healthy, safe and fair team dynamics is simply good economics as there can be no performance in their absence.
So back to the task at hand: understanding how to embed the human work that individuals and teams need to do on a daily basis into their usual job description, schedule and overall work life by explicitly compensating them for it.
For the record, while our campaign is to eventually get enterprises to actually also pay employees for this work, we know that feeling satisfied and motivated goes beyond financials of course and we are acutely aware of the research suggesting monetary compensation alone is ineffective.
As Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic writes in Harvard Business Review, “the results indicate that the association between salary and job satisfaction is very weak. The reported correlation (r = .14) indicates that there is less than 2% overlap between pay and job satisfaction levels. Furthermore, the correlation between pay and pay satisfaction was only marginally higher (r = .22 or 4.8% overlap), indicating that people’s satisfaction with their salary is mostly independent of their actual salary.”
So what we are saying is not that there should be a monetary-only reward for the human work but that, whatever mechanism of rewards and recognition you are already employing, it needs to take into account this work in the same way it would evaluate any other elements of the job. So be it salary, rewards and incentives, benefits, bonus systems, in-kind remuneration, career ascension, perks, beer on tap or stickers, the way we say “thank you, here’s your pay off for the work” has to be expanded to say “thank you, here’s your pay off for the operational work as well as all the human work you’ve been doing”.
We’re sure most of your HR “Comps” departments are already eternally trying to ensure they are evading adaptation-level phenomena and that their ability to recognise their employees is strengthened to provide motivation and engagement so we will not dissect each package, but instead, focus on where this recognition must begin – at the way we measure our employees’ work and performance. The dreaded “performance reviews”.
I have yet to meet any employee to say “Yes, our performance reviews are utterly fair, transparent and we are all looking forward to them” and that includes people who notoriously have some of the most modern ideas implemented. Most of us dread them, and some of us abhor them entirely. At a minimum, they are often a waste of time. Not only are they of no value to improving motivation but in some cases, their mere existence is making performance worse to have them in place. But even then, they remain ubiquitous so where they exist they must include how much of the human work the employee has done.
In some places, they have been replaced by trendier terms such as “performance development” or “KPI-evaluation” but they refer to the same process. But should we remove the process what do we have in its place to inform us with regards to our people’s performance?
What we advise when we run HumanDebt Audits for organisations is to walk away from the concept entirely and instead return to basics and ask themselves: “What do employees really want if we take the financials off the table?” in most cases, if it’s being asked in earnest, these are the answers that always shine through:
Clarity and direction
A sense of safety
Ongoing communication and always-closing feedback loops
Agency, autonomy and respect
Human connection and a sense of belonging (to the team or the organisation)
A sense of purpose and impact
Opportunities to grow and learn
Incidentally, doing the human work helps deliver on each and every one of these needs if intelligently embedded in the day-to-day work, so paradoxically, doing the human work is its own reward but that certainly doesn’t mean the enterprise is absolved from firmly and unequivocally elevating it from a “fluffy” afterthought to a respected and integrated part of the day-to-day.
How deeply and how often do you think of the behaviours you reward in your employees? How much open-minded exploration have you done to determine what makes the most impact? How often do you revise perks and goals to avoid adaptation? How often do you recognise any element of the human work be it teamwork or having had a needed 1-on-1 or speaking up? How do you evaluate and measure? What do you show you praise? Let us know in the comments or the messages as usual and let’s change the status quo to make it better for everyone.
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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