They Say You Can't Spell "Hero" Without "HR"

Today’s video is appealing to HR and it is straight from the heart. People need a people hero to establish the need for the human work and they need them yesterday.?

https://youtu.be/-WKT4vkLs5o?

Over the past week, the terrifying events at Twitter (and Meta) are a lot worse than meets the eye. This calls for a major reaction. We have to urgently find ways to carry the “We must all do human work routinely” message immediately in every enterprise because otherwise, we risk the window of opportunity for the people topics to have closed altogether.

A year ago it was inconceivable that we would ever return to a time where being physically present was a work prerequisite and where eyes roll around “fluffy topics. No one was accused of being a snowflake for mentioning self-care. The mental health crisis in the workplace was starting to be affirmed and studied and people were being clear about their disenchantment with the workplace either as part of the great resignation or by quietly quitting and being actively disengaged whenever polled.

This vaguely resonated with even the oldest of old-school command and controllers leaders and they recognised this as part of that annoying eternal adagio of “We must put people first and empower them, keep them safe, help them grow and have them happy or they won’t be high performing” they kept hearing from he “woke” side while the big consultancies still reassured them that “No, we just need to revamp the recruitment practices program and say we are more diverse” in fancy slides.

A year ago, we were on our way to the “POC of remote work” aka the pandemic to have truly delivered us collectively to a shore where human emotions and workers’ (including leaders!) wellbeing was paramount not out of moral imperatives alone but because it makes good economic sense in this day and age.?

Today we are not there anymore. All of that hard-earned progress is under threat when we are in denial about the effects of the pandemic, we see these big insane moves from the tech world darlings that embolden antiquated thinkers and hold the enterprise back and when we fundamentally changed nothing in how people are being supported regarding their emotions and the new demands of their work.?

Work has fundamentally changed. Knowledge workers first but slowly every category of employees is no longer called to deliver on a preexistent set of theoretical skills and past experiences but are instead asked to base most of their progress on their ability to interact with other people - communicate and collaborate.?

This fundamental change is technology-driven hence my new book being “Tech-Led Culture” - as, in the history of knowledge work, waterfall allowed for slow and sequential individual work, agility does not. Agile needs people to introspect, learn, continuously improve and above all, be fearless, interact and have healthy team and individual dynamics. To achieve this what do people need? Higher EQs. Servant leadership that gives them education and tools. Empowerment, tools like ours and the protected time to do the human work. And last but absolutely not least, to be valued and appreciated (read "paid") for doing it.?

As this video says, my?love-hate relationship with HR is no secret but I find myself having more and more empathy and compassion for the people function in particular now when it has clearly been ignored when they must have attempted to intervene and avoid the layoffs-handling-scandals. Obviously, no one at Twitter listened. Clearly, very few at Meta did or their messaging and resolutions would have looked a lot more like AirBnB and Stripe than the reputational and trust bonfires they proved to be.

But if even HR isn’t able to be a people champion that stands up to the occasional mad dictator in the Valley, how are they to speak up and step up to leadership of FTSE 500 institutions? And if they won’t, then the window will be closing even faster and true change towards respect, happiness, flexibility and ultimate productivity will simply never come.?

So as the video says, I appeal to every HR professional reading this or seeing it because it must be your time to shine - you can help save the world of work and help secure this change towards humanity in a sustainable and permanent way instead of letting it go to waste and disappear by pulling up a chair at the table and saying “Right, we need to do something urgently- we need to communicate and empower the need for the human work at the team and individual level so we have a hope for all of this change to leave us better off, I need X resources/organisational permission/time/mandate/people/money/43 purple balloons/whatever it is that is needed to land it."?

In an effort to help, we’re announcing today we’ll build a couple of “HR Specific Plays” in our Dashboard for HR teams only to help with understanding how to dismantle the impression management at the top that holds back so many execs; how to communicate hard topics (such as this one of the needs for the human work, numbers around engagement, etc) in ways that would help leadership understand and not fear them; how to increase empathy and kindness. (On a side note I’ve seen a whole “Science of kindness in the workplace” course run by the Surrey University and a lot of the people commenting were HR so kudos to them for knowing no one is infallible when it comes to empathy and care.) We will do this because we know HR are hurting too and in some ways even more so than the rest of the employees because theirs is the plight of knowing too much and the cognitive load of knowing what’s right while not being able to do it is incredibly taxing and painful and it explains the high turn around, burnout and subsequent lack of candidates in the industry.?If anyone in the AgileHR or HackingHR communities wants to help design these plays please get in touch - we aim to distribute them for free to the teams that need them. Equally, if you're an HR team that knows they need to put on the Superhero cape let us know and we'll kit you with the software for free to help.

So there you have it, we're in a precarious moment. Enter HR. They are the heroes we need. IT and DevOps will be suggesting the human work they’ll know its value and they’ll trial it but they won’t fight for it at an organisational level and without having it there as a fundamental pillar of how we respect our people we will not have these people at all. And the ones we will keep, we wouldn’t really want this broken and defeated anyhow.?

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At?PeopleNotTech?we make?software?that measures and improves the wellbeing and Psychological Safety of 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