In this week’s Chasing Psychological Safety we’ve spoken about the fact that Psychological Safety is never “Done” and how, despite how it doesn’t immediately appear so, the reports of issues in the Google Borg SRE team are in fact good signs of the vast amounts of work they have dedicated to the people work and to Psychological Safety in particular.
Both of these articles cost me followers/subscribers. At first, I thought it was because they didn’t agree with the rather controversial point of view choosing to focus on the wins but then I met some ex subscribers at a breakout of a keynote and on a podcast.
They all said pretty much the same thing once they were satisfied l was genuinely curious why they left it and not simply being a diva – “It was depressing. I felt triggered. At first, reading your stuff was just a reminder to keep doing what I was doing. At that time I was at Superhero-in-training level, saying and pushing things to demolish some HumanDebt that others didn’t, the beacon of sanity and advocate of the people work in my org. Then, I have to admit as time passed, I did slow down a bit on these topics. It felt like too big a boulder to push up the hill and I kept getting knocked back and told it wasn’t my place and that it was being taken care of. At times even ridiculed. So I didn’t stop but certainly slowed down. And then every time you’d write something that made sense, I’d feel like I failed. Not a good feeling and I have enough things that depress me not to read this too so I unsubscribed.”
How very understandable! No one wants the relentless reminder they haven’t arrived where they had to be. The newsletter became the equivalent of that annoying habit-creating app we installed in January in our frenzied enthusiasm to create new habits and uninstalled by February – or March for the more resilient ones- because it kept sending notifications that served as a reminded we didn’t get there at all.
Let’s face it, it’s a looooong road ahead to do this people work, we ought to perhaps settle in, be kinder, have some fun and take breathers just so we do not feel like uninstalling anything.
So what do we do? What should *I* do? Stop driving this hard? Stop repeating how super urgent it is? How big and important a task it is to obsess with the people work in order to lower our HumanDebt? Maybe I can start packing this full of eye-roll fodder instead? Tell you some of the countless stories of extremely bad management we keep gathering? We can all commiserate or even crack a smile. Or examples of CxO powerlessness. Plenty of those from everywhere, unfortunately. We can all agree the organisation is failing them and failing us all. We’d bond over the injustice. Or maybe it’s just about cherry-picking enough magic tricks. Shortcuts to make the people work easier, seamless, maybe invisible. But all of those are heavy and many quite dark.
Then it hit me that maybe we simply need the occasional levity about our absurd situation. Ways in which we all see and feel the HumanDebt. Our work lives are sadly rich fodder indeed.
It would surely be more fun for everyone. I’ll do some of that, look out for the occasional post on what I see in the popular culture realm that shows people reacting to the HumanDebt. Ordinary folk with enough gumption and imagination to create a funny meme or a relatable TikTok. Maybe a common thread where we can all park the ones we find. That would hopefully make this less dry, less harrowing. And God/dess knows we need less harrow.
This one for instance is too true and sums up how people feel about being asked about their stance on remove vs office:
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMLNT1nd9/
Or this one that’s spot on about why many people are still getting on the GreatResignation train:
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMLN3EaEb/
So I’ll try and get us smirking at times. But I won’t stop on here. I can’t. We can’t. We can not afford to acquiesce to the fact that thinking of all this stuff and feeling a duty to do something about it all, is uncomfortable, any more than we can afford not to do it day in and day out. That said, let’s try and make it lighter at times and easier for each other.
I should have had this revelation sooner – after all, not only is our product featuring wording or visuals that aim to alleviate the serious character of the questions (and we even used to flash the occasional Demotivational Poster to make it more engaging but it was too often deemed “silly) but, more importantly, one of the plays that see our teams get the quickest results is the “Humour Hackathon”.
A year after its launch, looking at these teams’ data and our own (it’s a popular play for PeopleNotTech’s own teams) it’s clear that they see an increase in Emotional Bond/ Engagement, that their Openness goes up and their Resilience too. If we could map it, chances are there is a strong long term correlation to retention as well, not only performance.
In this play that we offer as a Team Action in our playbook, team members open up and share what makes them laugh: what comedy they enjoy, what brings on a smile from jokes to videos or memes. What helps them through. When they do it for the first time, they may understand the unifying power of humour but they are cautious in what they share. As a matter of fact, the less psychologically safe the team is, the more mindful to be politically correct. As time passes, their team dynamic betters and their degree of PS grows, when they do it again the shared things are so much edgier and therefore deeper, they carry so much more of who they are that it’s a joy to be around these teams when that happens, we’ve been fortunate enough to be invited to some of these sessions to coach or facilitate.
So here’s a people work shortcut for you even if you don’t have our software – brainstorm how one of these Humour Workshops would work for you and get one done for your team.
I’ll get one organised for ours now.
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This Thursday on the Fundamentals of Psychological Safety Series: “ Psychological Safety in the New Hybrid Environment” 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