Resisting the Human Work - the Greatest Challenge in the Workplace Today

We have to enter a continuous development mindset. As Gustavo Razzetti of Fearless Culture puts it “When it comes to culture, strive for evolution not revolution”. We have to comprehend that the human work is eminently necessary and that it will never be done. Neither of these points is an easy pill to swallow and the resistance sees us at the forefront of the fight having to repeat the same things over and again like broken records.?

Let me be clear: this resistance to the human work is the biggest problem the workplace has today. Almost every ailment ever contained in the HumanDebt?that we sadly all have, is directly attributable to how some work could have been done but it hasn’t. Whether it is an abandoned project or just too much superficiality to have gone deep enough to clear an issue and grow, whatever form the lack of human work has taken, it’s the direct cause of the increase in debt.

While it's universally clear that most of this is "the organisation's fault" it's important that we wonder how do we, as individuals, add to the HumanDebt by exhibiting high resistance to the human work. These are some of the times when we do it and chances are we neither of those instances is intentional or evident before we start becoming aware of our own behaviour:

• Every time we thought of the work as “too fluffy”;
• Every time we thought “it’s not in the job description, I am not going to do any of this extra work”;
• Every time we thought “I’m not a psychologist, what do I know about emotions”;
• Every time we didn’t pay any attention to how we feel, and how our teammates feel;
• Every time we (as managers) were unable to escape the conditioning of command and control and we couldn’t be the servant?leaders our people needed;
• Every time we elected to remain silent or when we impression managed and were fearful of being authentic;
• Every time we didn’t emotionally connect to the team and open up;
• Every time we allowed ourselves to disconnect from the purpose and the team and become “checked out” or “quietly quit”;
• Every time we shied away from big talks;
• Every time that we were overworked or overwhelmed and we just powered through it;
• Every time we didn’t honestly ask for what we needed;
• Every time we haven’t engaged with the few tools they gave us;
• Every time we haven’t invested thought and time into how we feel and how does around us do; when none of that curiosity existed so we were not empathic;
• Every time we didn’t feel empowered but didn’t clarify or demanded clarity on structure and purpose or when we didn't call for respect;
• Every time we sacrificed the time set aside for any of the human work in favour of a non-human-work related task;
• Last but not least - every instance of fear, self-sacrifice and lack of willingness to put in the work to understand emotions and dynamics.

Many people we meet when we speak to new clients seem to think they would have been more than open to the human work but the organisation has presented them with none of the tools or the contexts they would have needed and they haven’t had the chance to try their hand at it. This may well be very true. After all, no one contests that the enterprise is the culprit for most of the HumanDebt and that they should have given people the means, the encouragement, the rewards and the support to do this work, but that doesn’t absolve us of personal responsibility as some of the resistance needs to be tackled at an honest individual level and we all have to recognise when we contribute to the problem by engaging in it.

Don’t get me wrong, this tone-deaf model worked for tens of years in the workplace. This generalised illusion that humans can “do the robot” and check their emotions at the door as they punch in. This obsession with the separation between the two where our “private” lives are far removed from our “professional” lives. Where we are machines that deliver replicable and dependable results while devoid of needs and humanity.?

This model is dead in the water though and has been so for a while but it isn’t until we had a collective brush with extreme VUCA (the pandemic) that we had the chance to show it is and start challenging it. Unfortunately of the many unanswered questions of the workplace where the “why”, the “who” and the “how” were most important, the only one that got picked up and has been -relatively- explored is the “where”. A small victory but a victory nonetheless.?

What this brush with VUCA showed is how crucially important it is that we admit that the antiquated robot-like stance can not serve us in a world where speed and collaboration are of the essence. We know we need processes and philosophies that aid us to move fast - hence why the world has turned Agile- but we ignore that we need a completely new human paradigm - we need to do the work. Creating things fast requires high-performing teams with solid EQ, good communication and a willingness to invest in themselves by doing the human work both at an individual and at a group level because the new ways of work are predicated on these attributes and people’s ability to be open, empathic, inquisitive and willing to invest into the “people work” with regularity. There’s no escaping this and there’s no shortcut.?

As organisations, we have to reaffirm this need for continuous self and team improvement aka “the human work”. Once we do so, we also have to obstinately make space for it in people’s schedules and help them form a habit of doing this by remunerating them for it, as smart companies such as Novartis (who measures how much time people spent learning) or Zappos (their HERO awards are often predicated on human work) do.

Some would say we just don’t have enough numbers to substantiate the need for the human work but of course, that’s erroneous with the global numbers of burnout, the great resignation and active disengagement combined topping hundreds of Bn every year in figures that are public knowledge, but what we have less of is numbers to see how much we would gain from doing the right thing by our people and helping them with the human work because there are so few places that can be observed doing the right thing but there are those numbers too. We need only look at Google to see that a people-centric organisation thrives and (as a reader kindly pointed out last week) in his 2003 study "Firms of Endearment: How World Class Companies Profit from Purpose and Passion", Professor Raj Sisodia studied 72 companies with what he described as ‘humanistic cultures’ - essentially those with high Emotional Intelligence and recorded that those companies enjoyed 10.5x more growth than the S&P 500 (over a 15-year period).

Come back tomorrow to see my dialogue on the topic with Ffion Jones and meanwhile, here are a few more instances where we’ve been on and on (and on) about this - the most urgent of needs of the workplace - legitimising and normalising the human work:

Overcoming Team Resistance?

Resisting the Human Work - New Plays and Empowered Teams

CBT for Teams by Teams

Laying Solid Foundations for the Human Work

Doing the People Work is a Big Deal

Empower Teams to Avoid the #GreatResignation

A Crisis of EQ

Democratising the Human Work

The Biggest Anti-Pattern of Them All - Retros Without the Human Work

Re-Launch Your Team For the Right “How” and “Why”

——————————————————————

At?PeopleNotTech?we make?software?that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams, come see a DEMO.

“Nothing other than sustained, habitual, EQed people work at the team level aka “the human work” done BY THE TEAM will improve any organisation’s level of Psychological Safety and therefore drop their levels of HumanDebt?.”

To order the "People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age" book go to this Amazon?link