10 Things We Loved About 2021

Things We Talked About This Year

Here we are at the end of the year, so it’s only fitting we take stock -?I wrote over 100 editions of this newsletter this year. Frankly, they’re too many for me to write a detailed (but likely “I-told-you-so”) retrospective -or even re-read TBH!:)- but we have predicted and debated much of what we saw happening this year in the world of work and then we always returned to the main compass - the ideas that are the pillars of how we can make it all about the people not the technology, the organisation, the numbers, or the process.?

These are the big themes we have been hammering at PeopleNotTech on relentlessly on repeat:

• Focus on the teams!
• Increase Psychological Safety if you want to see happy, retained teams and high performance - stop impression management, start working on a feedback loop of data and action!
• Teams themselves can put in the work to better their team dynamic -if you’re an organisation- empower and give autonomy and support and if you’re the team itself - stop the excuses and do the work!
• The HumanDebt? (all of the things we left undone that we owe our employees so we make them feel valued, respected, happy and performant) needs to be worked on intently and that needs to happen NOW!
• There’s a lack of true organisational permission from encouragement to resources!
• There’s a clear and present danger in the Great Resignation - the resignation of the leavers and that of the stayers!?
• The human work needs to be made a true day-to-day work priority and it needs to be done before the ops and coding work!
• Servant leadership is the only way to go in the advent of hybrid-only but it needs rewiring the mindsets of micromanaging leaders who are clinging to command and control!
• HR and Ops/Tech need to build a bridge and tackle the HumanDebt together. Or else!

All of them are worthy of that dramatic exclamation point at the end, because they’re all urgent and super important.

Much of our message will likely stay identically the same next year and in a sense, this second -or is it third or fourth- Covid wave, means we have an extension on that window of discussing these topics that we were fearing was closing.

What’s To Come?

Nothing radically new really, all of the above still need so much dissecting and translating to practice, but the transformation from rhetoric-only to genuine, clear process and mindset change, is what we need to act on in 2022.?

If your strategy doesn’t focus on diminishing the HumanDebt and emerging as happier and more performant humans by starting with the Psychological Safety of teams, if it doesn’t tackle the big themes, if it’s constructed around hand sanitiser and office rotation protocols instead of rewiring mindsets and truly helping your people then you need a closer look. If you’re one for New Year’s Eve Resolutions then make this closer look and the resulting actions depending on it, your main one.?

Horrific as both 2020 and 2021 were for many of us, there are ways in which the world of work has changed that are worth being grateful for as gratitude has been shown to rewire our brains towards resilience and positivity so I propose we start a list. Here are some of these to kick us off but feel free to add to the list, the longer the better for everyone:

Things We Loved About 2021

1. How the POC of hybrid has concluded with everyone having to concede remote is possible and therefore needs to be accommodated.?By everyone really. Once the initial dinosaurs made noises -that we didn’t let them get away with-, about a full return to the office and that didn't work for them,?these days, you’d be hard-pressed to find any enterprise who would say “We did function just fine in fully remote and we are aware we'll bleed out all talent but we still deem physical-office-work the norm for 100% of our time”. That would simply be suicidal in this day and age. And what an amazing and refreshing change that is.?
2. How much smaller the word is - When global business was about air miles, PowerPoint in boardrooms and then awkward dinners, the world was immense. When it’s now all-Zoom - it’s infinitely smaller, contracted more accessible, more open to the distance being irrelevant. It’s common to get a message saying “I’m just up the road from you, in Scotland!” if you're in London when before it would have felt far to us all. It’s rare that people concern themselves with the physicality of “local presence” either to start doing business or to operate when everyone is just a video conference away.?
3. How much more equal the world of work has become- people take themselves and their title far less seriously when they are all sat in front of a screen on a chair in a shed or a guest-room-come-home-office just like the next guy, and while some CxOs have still hidden in operational work, most teams report a lot more engagement and of more “human” quality with their higher-ups in the virtual world.
4. How much less “work dread” there is - I have no data to back this up, but for anecdotical indications, but the famed “most heart attacks happen on Monday mornings as people dread going into work” is likely not the case now that the parameters have changed and I would bet the overall “dread” has diminished. It certainly looks that way in the engagement levels of our teams that have high Psychological Safety.
5. How we all SO want to help and collaborate! On a macro level just look at national efforts and charity and the willingness to band together to help essential workers and services but at a workplace level, we see a lot more willingness to do things together and be engaged with each other across teams. We have a clear example of co-creation in our playbook, which is created by our client teams that are successfully applying certain team actions/interventions to better the elements of their Psychological Safety the data in the dashboard suggests need helping, and are then being curated and published for all other teams using our product. Every team we work with is more than open to helping others with their learnings!
6. How we are all learning the value of self-care. A few years back self-care would be considered fluffy mumbo-jumbo and be fodder for eyeballs in an enterprise setting and now even old school execs know it needs talking about and mandating to help people stay away from burnout and anxiety.
7. How we are re-learning our professional value thanks to enough time to do introspection and to seeing the GreatResignation happen around us. We’ve all re-evaluated our worth, our direction and checked where our passion and plans are - that can only be a great thing.?
8. How now we know we can overcome - we have more resilience, we learned we can indeed live with anything - would you have considered a world of eternal lockdowns, masks and distance two years ago?
9. How many more dimensions we have - we have all now stopped trying to pretend we are corporate robots with no life outside of the professional setting. We have lives indeed - hobbies, chores, children, vacations, doctor appointments, "personal things", you name it.?After the BBC kid appeared on the famed zoom interview we no longer try and hide these lives and remote working made us all into the guy they were interviewing, sans the embarrassment.?
10. How the conversation on deeply human topics from mental health to emotions is now wide open. This last one is the greatest reason to be grateful and the most precious of all wins and we must defend it with all our might.?

What else would you add to the list? What are you grateful for? Last but certainly not least - we are grateful for each and every one of you guys reading this who let’s face it if you’re reading this, you’re on the “Let’s Get Our Teams Some Well-deserved and Much-Overdue Psychological Safety” Team.

So here’s to an amazing 2022, team! So much we have to do and such mountains to move, but the journey will undoubtedly be awesome!

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This Thursday on the Fundamentals of Psychological Safety Series: “The HumanDebt? - organisational level and team level” 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