We Are STILL Not Okay

Today’s article was meant to be on a different topic but as I was researching for my new book yesterday I came across a new study that claims?

“Nearly half (46%) of employees say they wouldn’t recommend their company or their profession to their children or any young person they care about. An alarming 38% of global workers (46% in the U.S.) say they wouldn’t wish their job on their worst enemy.”

Not on their worst enemy! Just let that sink in. How much hardship and mental strife is behind that answer? Sheer pain and suffering, let’s stop sugar-coating it. So I can’t ignore it and this video is again addressing the fact that we’re in the midst of a mental health crisis and that ignoring the trauma the pandemic represented for all of us is compounding the crisis.?

People didn’t walk into the pandemic happy as Larry with no care in the world and super engaged only to then lose all that due to the stress of Covid alone, of course not. We started off already burned out by extreme demands, learning imperatives that never ceased, living with VUCA’s ambiguity and overall rather anxious and burned out already. Disengagement isn’t a new problem either. What the pandemic did do, as the horrid shared reality that it was, was exacerbate each and every one of these factors and flood every brain out there with a tsunami of stress hormones while their work demands only increased.?

When trauma happens to the human brain it leaves marks which have extremely adverse reactions in particular in cases where said trauma overlays on top of pre-existent conditions. The way to mitigate the effects of the trauma and diminish or prevent PTSD is by diligently talking about it, rationalising and processing it so that individuals can then safely “put the issue to bed” so to speak in their minds. Only then can they heal and move on. This all-important last step is completely missing in the workplace following the pandemic so as a result, people simply have to keep their extreme discomfort -that is so intense they wouldn’t wish their jobs on their worst enemy!- under wraps with only serves to further compound the issue.?

It’s almost as if HR and Leadership expected humans to be so astutely resilient and self-aware that they would be self-repairing almost by magic and with no support from their side which is utterly presumptuous and arrogant if you stop to think about it. We need people in the best psychological and mental shape possible to achieve our business goals but we are unflinchingly lip servicing engagement and employee happiness while they feel this way and try to deal with this trauma themselves. It’s a rather tragic situation and I put it to all of us that it is not sustainable and we will see a worse crisis than the Great Resignation and the wave of Quiet Quitting coming along.?

As we said yesterday, the answer is Human Work both at an individual and a team level but the permission and support for this work must come from the enterprise and it must do so “yesterday”. This is a public health crisis that will play out at work in ways that will burn even the deepest of pockets when we start brain haemorrhaging. ?

It starts with admitting no one is ok and with commencing the processing. Look in the mirror with extreme honesty and figure out how you feel yourself and then look around and encourage others to be as honest. Then find ways for all of us to do the human work with regularity till the processing is done with - the self-care, the open and psychologically safe teams, the extreme honesty about how we truly feel, all of these are necessary steps and if we then manage to support our people with resources and tools to have this emotional and intellectual runway then we can hope to start being all right. Until then I don’t wish any of our fates on our worst enemies.?

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At?PeopleNotTech?we make?software?that measures and improves the well-being 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