Exploring How to Reward the Human Work

As we warned yesterday, we are fighting on behalf of the teams that have mercifully overcome their resistance, biases and fears and have started regularly engaging in the human work - we believe they deserve unequivocal recognition and payment for doing so. This is the beginning of a heavy exploration to understand what it would take for organisations to facilitate and finally recognise and reward the efforts of those that have put time into doing the human work.

In this video, Ffion and I start framing the effort.

https://youtu.be/U-L1ddRiugU?

We will undoubtedly come to where we have to decompose the mechanisms that enable the incessant command and control and we’ll likely get to think of and analyse what cultural norms and processes contribute to the status quo where employees are never rewarded for any of the emotional and behavioural work.?

We will discuss the topic of performance reviews and reassess sources of data and feedback loops as well as their occasionally maddeningly subjective nature.?

We will speak about productivity versus performance and what they both mean in the context of the actively disengaged quiet quitters.?

We will touch on the?idea of career paths, the ability to grow, and the role of learning.

We’ll get real about personality tests, yearly surveys, 360s and all other tools employed today.

We’ll question and discuss the role of “soft rewards” - the peer-to-peer recognition tools applied by some HR departments as a plaster over the gap of having to genuinely dissect the mechanisms behind benefits and compensation.

We’ll bring up bonus systems and the new worrying trend of pay-by-location and with it the entire topic of merit and value at work.

We’ll question if people are accepting payment in meaning as discovered eons ago by the famous “pay them less but make the work matter” Google adagio.

We’ll show that having individual and team well-being that stems from the human work itself is ironically genuinely becoming a currency the enterprise should employ.

We will have to evaluate how much of the HumanDebt stems from unrewarded and unsupported HumanWork, we’ll speak to Superheroes and ask them to come to the white and empty sheet of “How do we show we value our employees' investment and trust?”

We will have to again speak about “what does true flexibility mean?” simply because it’s the shortest route to having to discuss outcomes and results in lieu of presenteeism.

We’ll tell you the stories of the smart ones that already pay people for their learning, their goodwill, and their willingness to be better.

Ultimately, wherever this exploration takes us, whoever needs to gather around for brainstorming, whichever leaders need to admit there is vast HumanDebt in particular when it comes to allowing, empowering and supporting their people to be the emotional human beings that they are, or however many of the terms such as “compensation”, “remuneration” or “rewards systems” we bandied around, it will all boil down to one essential question: “What behaviours do we want to encourage in this day and age in the new workplace?” and if any of the answers mention “collaboration”, “high performance”, “fearlessness”, “empathy”, “higher EQ”, “feeling engaged” or even “having a happy and fulfilled work life” then we will have to acquiesce we need our people to put in serious work to arrive there and then we have to pay them for it.?

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At?PeopleNotTech?we make?software?that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams, come see a DEMO.

“Nothing other than sustained, habitual, EQed people work at the team level aka “the human work” done BY THE TEAM will improve any organisation’s level of Psychological Safety and therefore drop their levels of HumanDebt?.”

To order the "People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age" book go to this Amazon?link