The People Work Needs Doing

I debated with myself whether I should open this next can of worms or not, but it’s unavoidable: last week someone important in the community said something on Twitter which was deploring the” commodification of human decency”. Sounds relatable, doesn’t it? We all wish there was a magic wand to make everyone do the right things and simply be a decent human and therefore see all workplace interaction go perfectly well and so that we can focus on the technology and be productive without having to deal with it, but guess what? That magic wand doesn’t exist. The simplistic view of the world where we could talk about repositories or databases and dismiss the people work is what got us into this much “Human Debt” to begin with. The navel-gazing and exclusively academic conversation that never really translated into concrete people actions that would better people’s lives is what made us amass the “Human Debt”. We were going to rely on “human decency”, “common sense”, some kind of magic. 

We didn’t put in the hours, the money, the thought and the effort to change what we can in the negative behaviours of our teams and encourage the positive ones. We didn’t measure. We didn’t search for data or true dialogue or were intentional about empathy or resilience. We expected others to do it, or no one to need to. 

Unfortunately, much as that’s a catchy soundbite on Twitter or in an article, the premise is horrendous and harmful because “Wanna be a better leader?” - “Just stop being an a-hole!” and “Want to have high-performing teams?” - “Just make them happy and psychologically safe” is not just good enough and is leaving teams to fend for themselves and continue being mistreated and neglected. 

I find it hard to believe that the people who were enthusiastically agreeing with the “yeah, let’s leave the people-work to common decency” were being true to themselves and what they know to be needed to create tech services and products and I wonder if their stance wasn’t in a sense just a reaction to how exhausted we all are from the fight. I put it to us that despite the twitter nuggets, they do plenty of this work themselves when you pop the hood. That they are intentional about the feelings of their teams, that they spend time listening to them, that they don’t leave any of this to a sterile, academic discourse level and actually have rolled sleeves that make a difference in making their teams happy. At least I hope they do. How else would they be successful? So don’t read any of that and take it as further permission to leave the people-work last, they don’t mean it. 

We’ve been saying this over and again but here is some more reading to take your mind off the second wave and the elections and focus you on this - the hardest and most important of works you’ve ever had to do - it won’t take care of itself, we won’t succeed if we give in to the temptation of not putting in the effort.

Putting a Number on Psychological Safety

Psychological Safety - What it is NOT

Psychological Safety from Theory to Action

Psychological Safety is Not Just Common Sense

Invest in People AND Tech to Beat the Recession

Tips to Supercharge Your People Practice

Mini-Bag of Psychological Safety Tricks

10 To-Do’s for Every Leader’s “New Work Reality” Sprint

To avoid boring my crossover subscribers, there is usually a separation between topics that I cover every week in the Chasing Psychological Safety Newsletter versus the ones we do here in the Future Is Agile one, but today that separation isn’t wise as the offer we’ve been toiling on and that we detailed in our “Stop the excuses, do the human work” article on Monday and this video on Tuesday is all about this community and it’s all about the proudly commoditised work on humans. Call it the “Forget “Human Decency Will Take Care of It” and Just DO More For Your Teams” Package.  

https://youtu.be/pimaDZb_zOs

In short, we designed an offer containing both software and theoretical free help that removes some of the “oh yes, we’d love Psychological Safety for our teams but….” blockers for shops that announced they are moving to remote only or permanently hybrid. 

We had to have a very cutting “What do our teams honestly tell us they need” tone to our feedback appraisal part of the design exercise for this offer because realistically if the COVID nightmare taught us anything is that there is more commonality than there is a difference in how teams have perceived the transition to remote, the change of focus towards human issues and the depth of the dialogue on the meaning of work. The exposure our first COVID offer gave us, was mind-blowing in its variety. We got to speak to -and often onboard on our software- companies of every size imaginable in multiple industries and with immensely different perspectives from banks to mom and pops shops, from huge consultancies to schools, from Pharma conglomerates to local emergency services. Of them, indubitably, the most clued in about the importance of the work - DevOps teams which if we are honest, our favourite. Their sheer grit and resilience and their understanding of people topics - unmatched by other areas of other businesses as of yet, and always a lesson. 

Their understanding is so deep, that you would think the “Aid with Awareness Creation” portion of our offering - the part where we are offering a company-wide free training on Psychological Safety and Impression Management and the bit where we hand over a Playbook for human interventions in the software or the part where we help create business cases for happy teams that achieve magical (Agile) KPIs- should almost be redundant. But it isn’t. 

This is chiefly because, much as we may not like to admit it, the pockets of true DevOps are few and far between. The humans who get this in their heart of hearts, without tiring of repeating it ad nausea, without losing focus or determination are not many. The ones who tirelessly are courageous enough to admit this work is the only work that counts and they are consistently better off to choose reducing Human Debt over reducing Technical Debt is a choice comes are hard to find. 

It’s a daily choice and for the most part, it makes for ingrate work for most DevOps Superheroes to keep pushing the “but the humans count more” ideological boulder up the organisation’s Sisyphus path. As we saw at the beginning of this article, they falter at times. It’s immensely hard. Every time they choose to ask how their developers feel - they make the uneasy, unsafe necessary choice. Every time they wonder about the team dynamic. Every time they benchmark against common sense servant leadership. Every time they are open, empathic, curious, human and focused on the people in their teams is a decision to do hard work instead of retreat to the comfort of a million other tasks that are on the to-do list and are technical or operational and routine enough to be comforting. But these are people who know in their heart of hearts that would be lazy, disingenuous and ultimately bankrupt for their teams. 

It is to help them that we packaged so much in this offer from the software for free for a few months to all the training, certification and consulting that others would charge an arm and a leg for in particular as these are the companies that have already declared their hand at permanently-remote or permanently-hybrid. It wasn’t to de-commercialise anything, all the people work should, on the contrary, be quantified, intentionally designed and invested in if we want to see a direct improvement in the lives of our employees, it is to offer hands-on help to the burned-out heroes out there. 

We hope you find the strength and courage to not give in to excuses but keep anchored in DOING the people work to reduce the Human Debt and to make your teams happy and Psychologically Safe ahead!

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

THE NEW REALITY OF WORK OFFER

If you work in a company which has announced a move to Permanent Remote or Permanent Hybrid get in touch as these are the hands-on pieces of support we are offering to remove some of the mental and practical blockers that stop team productivity and performance:

• 3 months use of our Psychological Safety Team Dashboard software license free that comes with
• A Playbook containing examples of people interventions and team actions that any team can use to see better data in their team dashboard;
• 1 x free “What is Psychological Safety and Impression Management?” live cross-company webinar/training course;
• Free buy-in help: if you’re a team leader - help to map and present it to the organisation- if you’re HR, L&D, Tech, Ops, etc - help to present it to the leadership team and to build a business case
• Free Certification/course for Coaches

Get in touch at www.psychologicalsafety.works or reach out at [email protected] and let's help your teams become healthy, happy and highly performant.