"Ask, Don't Spy"

Today’s article was going to be about curiosity and learning and their connection to Psychological Safety and whether or not the correlation is as exact as we believe it to be, as tomorrow’s video tackles that, but we couldn’t have let last weeks “HR fiasco” pass. Many of you would have seen that Barclays was called out in the press for having installed software on their employees' machines without their permission to measure what they do with their time. 

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the company who designed the Barclays “employee spying software” sold it as a good idea. How did that conversation go?

“Do you even know how much time they spend actually working?”

“Well we know how much time they spend in the building”

“What about at their desk? How about which program or browsers they are using? What about their breaks? How do you even monitor if they aren’t spending far too much on a toilet break?”

“Well…”

“That’s how you gain access to unprecedented data and therefore optimise cost and performance - you monitor all these things and you change behaviours by advising that they spend more time “in the zone”, that they take shorter breaks less often and you categorise their trips to the loo as “unaccounted activity” so they know it’s not ok to be messing around on company time! Get our software in and watch your employees triple their productivity!”

What was their tagline? “Measuring performance by time chained to a desk”. Or maybe it was: “Trust. Who needs it when you can measure toilet breaks?”

Here’s why this is sad: outside of all the common sense ways that have escaped the execs who got this in, it’s a set-back for digging for data in general and that’s a major pity. It’s a pity because the tempting conclusion is that we should inquire less in the lives of our employees when in fact we ought to inquire a great deal more except not in ways that deceive them and ruin any ounce of trust we should be striving to build. 

The “organisation” owes its employees a major amount of investigation and probing. They have a lot of “human debt” in inquiring what their employees think and feel but that curiosity has to be caring and open-hearted and not misguided and sneaky. There is no case for observing behind an interrogation mirror but for sitting in the same room and learning. 

We were speaking about this case internally and with clients at PeopleNotTech and as we were scratching our heads wondering what has possessed the executives who deemed the silly spyware a good idea, and what it was they were attempting to accomplish, it has occurred to us, that maybe they were trying to baseline lack of engagement when physically present I.e. that the assumption was “we need to do something about this: our employees are in the building but they are not engaged and if you don’t believe us, we’ll show that to be the case with data”.

Perhaps they had a lofty goal in mind - they were going to show these figures to the bank’s board and they would slap their foreheads with a firm revelation in the presence of undeniable data and let everyone work flexibly from home thereafter as a result. Perhaps they were going to kick-off a massive “employee respect” - wish that was a thing!- project, where, in light of showing management that their people are emotionally detached, they would be able to bring their happiness back into serious focus once they had this data of how long they were spending hiding in the toilet and how many times they had accessed the Daily Mail from their desktop. 

The relationship between the employee and the organisation is so very fractured already that any sense of “company level team” is inexistent as it is. Even before stunts like these humans everywhere feel spied on and distrusted, what will episodes like these do to that trust? 

At PeopleNotTech we do think that measuring anything at an enterprise level is almost always futile, ineffective and gives little in the way of practical ideas and that measurements should instead be done at the team level and kept private to the respective team, the only productive bubble unit that matters and the only group where any lasting and important change can be done for the good of the employees by instilling Psychological Safety, but being curious, asking, wanting to decipher what you’re employees think and feel is never a bad thing as long as you do so overtly and considerately. 

Here’s some common-sense advice for those organisations who do care and do want to measure from a good place not a love of 1984:

• Extend a hand. Spend time showing enough genuine, open-hearted curiosity to get your employees’ buy-in. It’s not till they trust you to have good intentions in attempting to find out, that you should start designing how to inquire.
• Get real agreement. Design this probe together - you have smart people in your enterprise - use them instead of some random consultancy to help you design this exploration and have it be intensely emotionally relevant to your own team.
• Make it feel truly safe. Be open, be clear, be forensic in demonstrating safety, lack of repercussions and permission to fail.
• Be 100% open and honest. Hide nothing, ignore nothing, spy on no one! (who would have thunk that last one had to be spelt out?!?)
• Measure what matters. Finding out what to measure so that it truly matters, is not easy, we spent the better part of a year thinking of what are the core things that create Psychological Safety and what are solid ways to measure “courage” for example, but here’s a tip: whatever you learn is important it’s almost guaranteed it will never be “time spent moving the mouse” or “time spent on a certain browser or app”. 
• Build strong feedback loops. Show what changed as a result of what you learned, what improved. Keep asking and demonstrate the feedback loop is solid and this is now an ongoing dialogue and they are being “seen” and truly “listened to” from hereon. 

“Ask, don’t spy” ought to be a good first commandment if we are to collectively attempt to grow together by learning about each other. This should not become "permission not to “intrude” or “pry” - this should be a moment to reflect on what it is we could do jointly, curiously and open-heartedly to build a Psychologically Safe “Big Team” by asking the right caring questions.