The “New Normal Of Work” In Teams

Yesterday we spoke about 10 ToDo’s For Leaders In The New Paradigm Of Work - but as you know we’re all about finding ways to bring everything to a team level as that’s where the magic happens.

So while we stand behind everything we said in there, the concept of organisation is a nebulous one and an unactionable one for most of us so it’s tempting to not even think about it or to think of it as someone else’s business and it is not.

There are at least three powerful things that teams can do from the bottom up to help with establishing this new normal and help the organisation build strong foundations:

• A Team Re-launch - a full hands-on exercise where you examine your individual and collective “why”s, you reaffirm the proximity to the end client and how privy you are to feedback, you re-do your team canvas, you look at current levels of Psychological Safety and state what actions you can do to better it and maybe most importantly - you spend time “re-contracting” i.e. reaffirming what actual interactions and behaviours you would like to have inside your “bubble” - meetings, communication, collaboration cues, all up for discussion and realignment;
• Demand Permissions. Once you’ve worked out what your team needs to become or stay Psychologically Safe communicate that to the organisation. Tell them how much autonomy you need, how crucial it is to have firm permission to fail, how important it is that the organisation allows you to grow your empathy, your EQ and your people practice to strengthen the team. 
• A Stories Collection - as you can imagine, going through the major shift that the pandemic imposed on most companies is not an easy moment in any leader’s life so the more we can help with establishing the rules of engagement for this new normal, the better. You can help by collecting examples from your own teams or the teams you’ve heard of where these new practices have made a positive difference then send them up the chain to either HR or execs that are “building business cases” to justify this new reality. When distributed teams did a good job, where remote and flexible was performant, where innovation and growth happened because of happy, Psychologically Safe teams, just any story of where being human at work translated to productivity. 

Stay safe, sane and focused on building the new normal of work with people and Psychological Safety at its very core and we’ll -eventually- be fine.

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Don't send your teams home with a laptop, a Jira and Slack account and a prayer!

Check our COVID-19 Aid offer at www.psychologicalsafety.works/covid-19 or reach out at [email protected] and tell us more about your remote work efforts.