In the last few articles, I’ve talked about the fact that we may be creating new HumanDebt™ and that the only way to combat it effectively is to distribute the people work to the teams. We’ve also written an article in he Fundamentals of Psychological Safety Series entitled “The People Work – what does it take?” and the next one is “Individual objections to the Human Work” so we are working hard to give you enough ammunition to get your own organisation on the right path when it comes to these topics by appealing to the reasoning of its best asset – its people.
It should come as no surprise that we believe the work to better the team dynamic has to start with psychological safety and be done by the team itself and that is why we measure it and why we’ve included our plays so that teams can do just that: undertake the people work effort at their own bubble level and see the effects of changing behaviours as a group.
To do that though, we have to have teams that feel empowered to make any changes or examine their behaviours and to invest the work of making this new ask a priority and a habit. This is, unfortunately, stupendously rare.
A lot is being said about autonomy, lack of hierarchy and how it all fits into changing from command and control to servant leadership.
All of these are big themes that are to be urgently explored and almost everyone has made an attempt at discussing them, but as of now, there only are a handful of champions of the human work out there that have made the leap from just raising awareness, to putting it all into transforming action.
They spent time on comprehending the levels for teams to feel they truly have autonomy, they re-educated their leaders, they made room for the people work and now are working hard to understand what it takes to create good habits and create policies to recognise and remunerate the “soft skills work” or really, the efforts their teams expand to better themselves through higher EQ and regular teamwork.
While these companies are an exception, they are positioning themselves for success and these conscious efforts will undoubtedly become the norm.
To aid with this, we at PeopleNotTech have created the Playbook by crowdsourcing actions that teams who use our Dashboard have taken to affect a certain behaviour and included them in our software solution. Some of the most popular ones are things such as: “The Humour Workshop”; “Impression Management Counter”; “Team=Family”; “B!tch Fest” or “The Courage Hackathon” but we are adding more by the day and have just introduced the “Burnout Antidote” one and most recently, “Check Your Team Resistance” play.
This last play is designed to remind teammates of the importance of recognising when they are their own blocker regarding the team effort needed to change the status quo. The play starts by acknowledging there are two types of resistance to the people work – the organisational level one and the team level one and while there is little or nothing that we can do to affect the former we can certainly change the latter given enough goodwill.
One of the first tricks to reduce the human work resistance at the team level is to commit together to doing this people work with regularity and then ensuring it becomes a habit. To form a habit, a target amount of actions (either those in the Plays we provide or other ones the teams think of) is helpful as is “habit stacking” which involves attaching the specific times for the human work to one of the other habitual team behaviours such as the weekly team meeting or a Retro.
From then on it’s all about consistency and constant measurement to see results.
As usual, if you are not a client of our Dashboard, look out for the video tomorrow detailing some of the steps your team would have to undertake to constantly position the importance of the work (which we accomplish with our “Did you know?” feature) and to manually measure what exact behaviours are most prevalent for the team (which is of course measured with our algorithm that breaks down behaviour components of Psychological Safety in our software). But if you are, and to show the amount of work you are putting into helping the organisation with distributing their people work effort, do this play as soon as you can and record your results – so you find out what is your baseline from when you first started using the software to the present day.
What we saw teams report is that, as their team level resistance goes down and they have more dialogue, are more empathic, measure and observe their behaviours habitually and attentively, their level of confidence goes up, their overall sense of wellbeing and their regard towards their own independence and autonomy do too. And the more they feel that after doing the human work, the more of the work they do and so on. A virtuous cycle that serves them well and soon after translates into actual performance.
We have a couple of even more exciting plays in the pipeline,- having seen them work for some teams- a few technical ones around impression management and dialogue in pair-programming, etc and some strategic ones such as a play to connect own OKRs/KPIs/goals to the results in the PNT Dashboard but what remains no matter what, is the fact that these plays need doing and that the work in itself requires less of the resistance and more of the goodwill and ultimately, more of these stupendously courageous, outspoken, invested, passionate, happy and therefore high performing teams.
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This Thursday on the Fundamentals of Psychological Safety Series: “ Individual objections to the Human Work” so make sure to subscribe so you have it in your inbox.
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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are: Understand, Measure and Improve
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