"Remote" is not "Flexible" - Do the Thinking Work

First of all, thank you for reading us! This is the 100th newsletter we wrote in this, our Chasing Psychological Safety series and we are approaching 50k subscribers. (Which is amazing but still, we are all collectively but a drop in the ocean when we exceeded 1 Billion workers in the knowledge economy last year). We are truly grateful to each and every one of you and you are all making a difference, it is because you care enough to read this today and do the thinking and have the courage, that the lives of many at work will be eventually better and that teams -yours and others- can become healthy, happy and Psychologically Safe! 

Like we said yesterday, we all have some -more!- work to do. As we are exiting the pandemic (hopefully) and entering a period of high anxiety and grave uncertainty which will transform, undoubtedly into an economic downturn, we watch organisations have to let go of some people and having to hold on to others. While we think there are compassionate and intelligent ways to do the former, the latter needs more work than we imagine.

In this video, we reinforce what are some of the practical steps we believe companies should take to protect their best asset: their people. 

https://youtu.be/CscSOTLOPqk 

Chief amongst them - an honest, open and forensic investigation of not only the “where” but the “why and the how” at work, aka an exploration of the difference between “remote (or hybrid) working” and “flexible working”. The latter implies we understand the notion of high performance in our people. That we allow them to do their best work whenever, wherever and however they choose when they perform individual work and that they do it as they chose collectively as a team when it is collaborative. 

To achieve this at a team level: 

• Team launches - holding the space for the team to do some much-needed forming after these turbulent times and ahead of the ones coming to increase their resilience and make them fit for high performance. A space where they affirm and re-affirm their purpose and contract the interactions and behaviours they want to see happen to be at their best.

On the other side of this, at a company level - the work needs to focus on two elements:

• Understanding outcomes-based work and what they mean for the organisation by throwing all convention and status quo about the work (the way it was performed and when) out the window; and 
• Comprehending what good looks like - Measuring - not with the punitive intent of old but with the well-intended mindset of servant leadership. Not at an enterprise level for the sake of sterile data but at a team level for the sake of deep understanding and betterment. Not to punish or to report but to aid and to help. 

Organisations who do these three things will be sustainable, those that ignore them are playing with fire because a WFH policy on Mondays is simply not going to cut the mustard when competing against others that have achieved true flexibility when it comes to work and are running fast in Agile tech shops. 

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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.