Anyone reading from PeopleNotTech regularly knows we have a bit of an obsession with being practical first and theoretical second. After all, our main thesis is that while yes, there are extreme amounts of HumanDebt™ everywhere, they will never be resolved by navel-gazing or even academic exploration but instead, by genuine, invested and sustained hard graft.
We make no secret of the fact that while we know it doesn’t come easily, the human work needs doing and needs doing urgently and we spend a lot of time creating resources we offer for free starting with the extensive library of videos and articles which is often heralded as more extensive than their entire organisational L&D repository by many of our clients. We are genuinely obsessed with everyone doing better when it comes to their ability to put people first and that’s because we can all only stand to gain once we have gotten further into the work.
This is why we constantly search for new ways in which we can be useful and we have discounted licenses and offered free Covid aid and so on for as long as we can remember. With all that said, you can imagine our genuine delight to have come up with and be able to announce yet another new initiative designed to help even more people: the PeopleNotTech No HumanDebt Program that will see 20 start-ups (or scale-ups) of up to 200 employees receive a very deep discount on their PeopleNotTech license to ensure they start on the human work right. We will only charge a symbolic 2999 GBP for any of these companies to use our software in their teams for an entire year and we are even throwing in one townhall session on the human work to coach everyone into getting comfortable with the major to-do at hand before they start using the software to guide them on the rest of the work.
Why not free if it’s just a symbolic amount? Because the human work has to stop being put second and no price tag won’t accomplish that, on the contrary.
We have met many start-up founders, CEOs and people-focused founding members who understand the need and want to build this but can not afford it with ease so we want to help.
We are doing this because if you start right, from the blank canvas that puts humans firmly in the middle you are immensely more likely to avoid HumanDebt and grow in the only sustainable way that matters and because we have every faith that helping these companies put in the right foundations will bring them to IPO level faster than not having had the help and the cornerstone, so we want to have helped accelerate them on the right premises.
As we well know, the bigger the company, the harder it is to untangle the massive HumanDebt that has accumulated and the enterprises doing the best are the ones who were created with people at the centre to begin with. The digitally native. The incumbent-spin-offs. The Silicon Valley darlings. The start-ups that were invested in building the right culture. They did well. Everyone else who grew unintentionally, without putting their people first, without wondering what they stand for and agreeing on the behavioural contracts that would have set them up for success has already started incurring the dreaded HumanDebt and is doing so more every day. They may very well never succeed, it would stand to reason they won’t because playing by the rules of business of 1992 in 2022 is irrational and irresponsible and won’t hold anyone in good stead.
As a scale-up ourselves, we know how hard it is to juggle everything. It’s a tremendously busy and fast-paced life that can easily be filled with unexamined work-in-progress and that looks like it lives no physical time for much else than survival. So the human tasks, the people work, which we know so well has to become daily habit often feels frivolous or impossible to fit. But we know, and really so do all other start-ups and scale-ups leaders that if we aspire to replicate the Silicon Valley level of success we can not let that happen and we have to find ways to put people first. One of the ways that work best is to kit the teams with the Dashboard and have them use it routinely as their workspace for the human topics. That will guide them through the work and create a much-needed habit.
What these 20 will get:
- Access to the Human Work platform/ Psychological Safety Dashboard so the teams are guided through regular, team-enhancing human work for a year;
- All of the questions set;
- Access to the extensive Playbook we have created with the help of other successful teams that guides the human work;
- Constant measurement and improvement for Psychological Safety in their teams;
- A feedback loop that restores/instils trust;
- A set of methods and supporting features and tools that will help every team member increase their EQ and become aware of their emotions and the emotions of others;
- A space (and habit) for the team to discuss the human work that’s needed to keep being high performant;
- An implicit L&D platform and library;
- A measure of how they are performing against the Aristotle project scoring on topics such as Structure and Clarity, work Dependability, Purpose and Impact;
- A view of the measure of satisfaction with hybrid or remote work;
- A way for the teams to feel empowered and autonomous and in charge of their own continuous improvement loop
So that is what we’re offering. A few spots for the companies who truly want to build right. Companies that want to entrench the human work at the team level but who may not otherwise be able to afford it as the thinking around culture and the importance of humans is still incipient or the budget is nowhere as plentiful as they would like it yet. We will select these companies from the applications we get and offer the entire yearly license to PeopleNotTech’s Dashboard at heavily subsidised levels.
Not only that but the 20 companies will be spotlighted on our media channels (except of course for the ones in stealth) because people-work Superheroes deserve to be featured and hailed as makers of extraordinary things and we all can use the examples and recognition.
The form to request to be considered for this program will be included in tomorrow’s article so be sure to look out for it or email us directly at contact@peoplenottech.com if you fit the criteria (under 200 employees and knowing people-first matters) meanwhile simply ask yourself whom you want to become as a company.
One of the ones who intentionally created a fearless, emotionally connected and people-first organisation and won or one of the ones who hasn’t even considered HumanDebt or the need to get the people to work at the fundamentals level and may well not even be around for much longer?
If you’re the former, if you’re the leader of a small future-scale-up today but you want to be the next Netflix or the next GitHub or simply want to be winning in 5 or 10 years, keep an eye on this space, apply and see if you can be one of the 20 No Human Debt Start-Ups we’ll select to support and we’ll be proud to have been part of your people-first origin story.
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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