Resilience as Hygiene and Happiness as Sustainability

There’s good news and there’s bad news. Let’s start with the latter to get it out of the way. 

The size and duration of the catastrophe are still unclear and all the terrible questions are still swimming through our minds. Is there going to be another major lockdown? Only the one? Will we eradicate this thing before we have to wrestle with the economic disaster or have to do both? How bad will the recession be? How many millions will be unemployed? What will become of the social unrest? Will we have seised the opportunity and done anything with all the impetus behind the race and climate issues or are we “woke washing”?

And those are only the macro ones when let’s face it, we’re all struggling with a myriad of personal ones. Will my family come out at the other end unscathed? Are we safe? Will all of the people that matter to us avoid this altogether or will one of us catch it even when it looks like we’re out of the woods? Will I lose someone? Will I lose my job? Could I find another one in this economy? Does my boss think I’m working enough when I work from home? Are my kids going to be ok going back to school? What long term effects will this have had on them? Am I burning out? Can I take much more? And so many more which we try hard to ignore and not let them get us down.

These big questions are why we see so much in the last few weeks about the work/life balance. It reflects how we are collectively low on resilience reserves and how, while we have invested superhuman levels of courage and hard work into traversing this, we are all running on fumes living in constant fear and uncertainty. 

On the plus side, life is obstinately trying to return to a semblance of normal in most industries as we wrestle with masks and screens and attempts at getting on with to-dos remotely. In most places, barring another big crisis, most of the cuts have been done and the people who had to be let go have been -sadly- told so. 

Which is perchance, hopefully, what is freeing people leaders and managers of all denominations to do some of the deeper thinking and may well be why we see all the articles we see lately, with the very out of the box thinking where roles and ideas are being discussed and the future of the post-COVID new world is discussed. The ones wondering about the role of HR going forward or the ones about whether two CEOs are better than one. The ones about building agility and resilience into the fabric of the enterprise supported by the ones chock-full of statistics of what the dangers are should we ignore how the crisis makes all our employees feel. 

Most of all the ones about reimagining work. 

You know how we feel about the latter it is necessary above all to allow anyone to weather the upcoming recession and to do so you only need to follow these 4 simple steps: 

1. Focus relentlessly on teams; 

2. Obsess about Psychological Safety; 

3. Do team re-launches;

and 

4. Question and measure everything to arrive at your own definition of truly flexible work. 

Simples.

Aside from resilience which is undoubtedly the theme that most stands out in the chatter about people right now- and rightfully so, as it’s what has carried us through and what we’re likely to need even more of-, the discourse is tempered if not muted when it comes to employee happiness and even engagement. It feels frivolous and untimely.

As if employees don’t feel they have the permission to ask for anything in these difficult times. Or say “no” or focus on family and self-care, admit they need time or help or even bring up anything at all. So they take on more and more and burn out. 

As if managers don’t feel entitled or brave enough to go to battle for redefining process or getting scraps of an unclear budget to go to making their teams happier. So they stay silent. 

As if HR has been bogged down with writing WFH policies and communicating redundancies. So they are too busy to fight for what’s needed. 

As if leaders don’t know how to imagine a strategy and calculate a budget to support it that includes any “fluffy, human betterment” topics. So they leave them out despite how they know in their heart of hearts that’s wrong. And it all increases our “human debt”. 

If in the “before-times” this “human debt” of ours was only vaguely morally unpleasant and most organisations could just live with it, going forward it will prove to be fatal. That’s not an exaggeration but a realistic possibility. It is entirely possible that 3-5 years down the line, the only organizations remaining in the game after this, will be the ones who were (or became) instantly Netflix or Google-like - with their thinking that is out of the box, their market response that is eternally fast and innovative thanks to them being fully digital and agile, and with their teams that are psychologically safe and therefore highly performant. 

The ones that cared about both the resilience and the happiness of their people. One for hygiene, the other one for sustainability and performance. The ones who put the 4 steps above ahead of anything else. That’s who. 

In tomorrow’s video, we talk more about this. It’s high time we roll our sleeves, denounce inaction and demystify the topic. All of us. Everyone can play a part. This doesn’t need to be complicated. Or mired in new terminology, acronyms or fluffy, nebulous language. We need the courage to use plain and clear language, the bravery to walk away from all status quo and unexamined convention and the goodwill to work on our teams and our humans’ wellbeing. 

Only then will we be happy enough to be resilient and resilient enough to be happy. 

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