Let Psychologically Safe Teams Build Their Own Hybrid So They Stay

Anti-Impression Management new practice: I wrote a book called “People Before Tech: Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age” and you can find a discount for it at the bottom of this page, and we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams. If you care about it- come talk to us.

Last week in my other newsletter called “The Future Is Agile” I wrote a piece about the “Upcoming Talent Haemorrhage Crisis” which is a clear and present danger to any and all companies that remain oblivious to burn-out, unwilling to ask the big questions and demonstrate themselves to be effectively completely tone-deaf to the new reality of hybrid. Please read it if you have not because it’s the biggest risk ahead. History won’t take kindly to anyone who hasn’t taken this time to redefine the way they work to focus on their humans. 

The solution? If you’re in any position of power or involved in any way in the decision making concerning the future of work in your company and the way hybrid will unfold, -and realistically, even if you are not and you’re “just a peon” but you see your enterprise starting to lose their all-about-humans-North-Star and start to focus on policy, not common sense - pull the alarm signal chord. 

People expect a new better reality and they expect it to be hybrid. Anything less will not do. They will leave. If they won’t leave, let’s face it, they weren’t the ones you desperately should have retained. 

Once the alarm signal is pulled - stop and rethink. Do one of the Team Re-Launches we keep talking about. Ideally, do it at the same time as you do the “Rehumanizing” aka do it in person. 

It’s not too late to do the hard graft of figuring out what work means to your team in particular. To understand what “good looks like”. What you’re after as a team. How to organise around outcomes and success not location or the time of the day. How to learn to always delimitate between individual work and group work. How to create and uphold firm limits in your individual work designed to protect your sanity and your mental working space. How important time management and self-care are. How time should be spent intentionally working on the dynamic of the team. How cultivating good behaviours in how we interact with each other is essential. Why we do what we do. What our purpose and impact are. What organisational permission we need to demand be it of time or resources. 

Those are all practical steps, not theoretical discussions. Make them into open questions that need a team agreement on a specific way of work answer and then record it somewhere so you can revisit it in a few months. 

Ideally, you work in an enterprise where you’re fortunate enough to have already been sent some form of information about all of the team-specific decision making they would like you to do. I’ve seen a few of the “Right y’all, how do we do this? What we as an enterprise are thinking of offering are drop-in office and meeting spaces, work tools and a budget for those we haven’t offered, a brush up on what all are guardrails and regulatory needs if they apply to your team. What would look like the ideal working solution in terms of timing, space, volume, outcomes, needs and success indicators for your team? Design that and let us know” emails. 

Companies speaking to their empowered teams make up of team members won’t be leaving anywhere as they feel included and valued and can carve their own path so they stay performant. Needless to say, those emails are few and far between and those companies are the exception. 

The norm is the confusion and the fearful and process-and-convention-obsessed expectancy -perhaps as a direct result of an overwhelming need for command and control?- and increasingly, the norm is a worrying tendency to say “when we get back to before” or “when we return to normal” or, even worse “when we get back to the office”. All of these are extremely dangerous.

Even before the pandemic, teams that lacked in healthy behaviours and Psychological Safety were not lasting and their top people kept leaving. Talent always chose working environments where they were free to speak up, devoid of limiting beliefs, fear and avoidance of failure. Where they could be themselves authentically and could offer their best. According to studies (such as Yanchus et al, 2014 that interviewed 11.726 healthcare professionals) the presence of Psychological Safety was a direct predictor to employee retention. So the safer and happier a team, the more likely they stayed. Not brain surgery or breaking news, no but if that were the case before, it is 10x the case now post-Covid if the future of hybrid is precarious and ignoring it is bankrupt. 

Unfortunately, it is the teams with the lowest amounts of Psychological Safety which will -as ever- suffer the most. They won’t have had a team relaunch; they haven’t felt free to express their real views of how work should be; they haven’t felt called upon to have a valuable and firm opinion; they won’t have had the courage to speak up and say they need these conversations; and on top of everything, they typically subsist in organisations that would have happily taken advantage of their silence and thrown a “return to the office” policy at them that stunned them back into even further disengagement and disenchantment. The question for them is - how long will they put up with it?

At PeopleNotTech we live and breathe Psychological Safety for teams and we have been advocating a need for empowered teams to craft their own hybrid for over a year and since then, we have seen empowered, healthy teams that have done their Team Relaunches from the plays in our Dashboard thrive in the period after that and watched their behavioural indicators go up so we know holding the space and offering the permission of this “what is work to us?” exploration is essential in building together and ultimately staying together at this particular time. 

Like I was saying last week: Anything short of “I see you, I care about you, no one needs to “come back to the office” - let’s build this hybrid future together so that both you and our end-customers are happy” won’t do. 

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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are: Understand, Measure and Improve

Read more about our Team Dashboard that measures and improves Psychological Safety at www.peoplenottech.com or reach out at [email protected] and let's help your teams become Psychologically Safe, healthy, happy and highly performant.

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