Measuring the HumanDebt™

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In the last few weeks, I’ve been sharing my fear of the upcoming talent exodus if anyone should attempt to mandate going back to the office full time in the technology business. In that same breath in which we interrogate “how” work is done, we have to think of the “why” and of the “who” a lot more intimately. Namely, take this occasion to find ways to be brutally honest about how much HumanDebt™ there is.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we elevated the “nice place to work” indexes to a true reflection of what an enterprise really is like intimately, at the core of its culture once you are in? In case it’s not clear to anyone - I’m a big fan of obtaining data. It’s why we make what we make at PeopleNotTech- we firmly believe that unless you can forensically measure each behaviour leading to a healthy team dynamic, you can’t isolate the ones that could do with an intervention to improve. 

Having spent the last two years refining what must be measured to gain more Psychological Safety through the components of our Dashboard and having landed in a place where our client teams are seeing value and change in each of those categories, I almost feel like I can now turn my attention to dissecting the HumanDebt™ and I’ve been mulling over what the best ways would be to accurately build any type of audit so we know what we are dealing with. I’ve been speaking to some awesome people who have their hearts in the right place (shoutout to our client teams, the DevOps Institute, The Agile Mindset Training on Clubhouse, the Happier at Work Podcast) and it has caused me to wonder how is it that we could best check how much HumanDeb there is to be paid off.

If we’re willing to be brutally honest - the measurement that makes the most sense and is the truest is “How much fear is there in the organisation?” because it includes toxicity, insecurity, impression management, politics, backstabbing, bullying, systemic racism and sexism, lack of true care, lack of empathy and respect, no trust, you name it. Each one of those behaviours stem from fear and the fear was learned in the moments that caused the HumanDebt.

But how would we effectively measure that? And as ever, sterile ideas no matter how just, are not my thing so what can we include in it so that it actually makes a difference?

In my definition of the creation of the HumanDebt, I include all the moments that have caused the big themes of “respect”, “safety”; “happiness” to remain unsolved. The well-intentioned projects that only lived to dance one summer or one exec’s tenure; the initiatives and programmes that were a lot more about lip service than action and faded to nothing; every instance when the human topics were allowed to be thought of as “second-grade citizens” of the workplace; every time each of us “did the robot” and believed that being devoid of feelings is the “professional way”; the millions of surveys that were either completely sterile with no results communicated or punitive and feared; every action or lack thereof that left D&I up in the air; that reduced “satisfaction” to a “would you recommend us?” and lost any true channel of communication with our people. The million cuts that have resulted in today’s extreme disconnect and disenchantment that exist in many organisations in far greater quantities than we are willing to admit.  

But even if we were all to agree those are indeed the collection of moments that created any one company’s “bad culture” and therefore their HumanDebt, how would we ever audit how many there were and what good would reminisceing do anyhow? 

So if looking back to see what brought us to this sorry state of affairs is inefficient, what works?

Evaluating the big themes with extreme honesty, bridging between DevOps/Agile/IT and HR/Business and completely changing our viewpoint by putting the human work before any technical or delivery work in very practical and actionable ways. I think that will tell us more about how much there was but more importantly, it will help us move forward.

To reduce waste in case it was already covered, I’ve started collecting a few of the more solid studies that are keeping it real in terms of measuring how employees really feel of late and I came across this one, the 2021 Gartner Workforce Resilience Employee Survey that I think touches on the main themes above as it evaluates what they call “workplace health” by asking 20,000 workers about work-life balance, psychological safety, burnout, collaboration, innovation and responsiveness.

Let me start by saying that this “workforce health” concept they are implying is in a sense, the counterpart of my HumanDebt concept. The higher the level of workforce health, the lower the existent HumanDebt. They also seem to break it down into "individual health" vs. "relationship health" and "workplace health" instead of using “self-care”; “team dynamic and behaviours” and “culture” but the exact terminology is as ever, less important as long as we speak the same language.  

Psychological Safety First

While I am over the moon that they first and foremost mention Psychological Safety, I am somewhat concerned with their definition and their findings alike. 

“Healthy Relationships: The disruption of the pandemic has led to 41% of employees having lower trust in their teams and 37% having lower trust in leadership.”

For one thing, this phrase seems to suggest they are chiefly measuring it as “trust” and while it is of course not apples and pears, the truth is that PS is trust but at a team level, -trust as a group behaviour if you wish- not personal 1-on-1 trust investments and if they formulated their questions to interrogate the latter, the extrapolation to the team is questionable. 

And then they offer -almost sans comment- this finding “Among the employees surveyed, 30% experienced limited or no change to their psychological safety. Another 34% experienced a decline in psychological safety, while 36% reported significant improvements.” which really isn’t worth dissecting or interpreting as we know nothing about the variation - aka what was the baseline of these reported feelings pre-Covid, we have no event of this magnitude to compare it to and more importantly, we don’t know the level of understanding of the self-reporting employees. 

One thing we can count on though, and a big one at that, is that irrespective of how they asked it and irrespective how each employee translated the question in their mind based on their own level of familiarity with the concept, 36% felt *something* was better. Despite the burnout. Despite the huge workload. And the stress of the external environment. So the remote work deniers can take a seat and stop being silly about the fake news that teammates can’t get tighter online.

“Emotional Bond” vs “Connectedness” vs “Relatedness”

Gartner also claims a significant pearl here- that the connection between employees and their degree of “tightness” makes it more likely they can keep healthy. “Highly cohesive teams have a 37% higher likelihood of sustaining workforce health” and goes on to suggest a surprising method to increase it - more meetings. 

What constitutes “cohesive teams” though? Call it what you want as long as you don’t call it “engagement” because while it really is that,-i.e. how engaged one is with their team-mates in their team bubble, how engaged they are in their sense of togetherness and how invested in their bond-, the term of “engagement” in itself has been hijacked by years of HR looking for it in all the wrong places from the interminable and useless survey dark alleys to the translation into insignificant and largely irrelevant numbers like the NPS. 

Make “purpose” great again

“When employees believe that their work is personally relevant, there is a 26% increase in the likelihood of the organisation to sustain workforce health”

There used to be a time when motivating employees was all the rage so the concept of “purpose” cropped up and it -timidly- reappears periodically. 

The trouble with “purpose” is that at marble-hallway-corporate-plaque level -aka when it’s all about company vision and mission- it’s meaningless, even at function-level or department-level it’s meaningless - we know that transformation matters to the business so it stays competitive but that doesn’t get us out of bed. We have to connect personal goals and perspectives of what matters to what we do. This lack of connection powers the disconnect to the customer ultimately. It’s why they are left behind when we are not allowing ourselves to think of either impact or personal gain. 

The greater the divide between personal purpose and work purpose, the less likely either powers us to high performance, so it stands to reason that if we want healthier and more resilient employees, we have to rethink "purpose" and make it truly matter.

Empower teams and give them autonomy - but not for the sake of it

“When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, leaders offered employees more autonomy, believing it would improve health by speeding decisions and reducing frustration. “While autonomy can have a positive impact on key elements of workforce health, it is a capability that needs to be built over time,” says Tipps.”

If organisations will finally understand bigger satisfaction and motivation drivers such as Seligman’s Characters Strength work and its impact on “the zone” and joy as well as the basis for the need for autonomy which is the “self-determining” theory, then we can be assured they are doing it for the right reasons. But of course, this assumes they are capable of doing away with the micromanaging and controlling middle managers who rely solely on command and control.

In a strange finding, Gartner research reveals that increasing autonomy as workload increases seriously degrades workforce health. For the 83% of employees who are operating at, or above, capacity, increased autonomy diminishes their chances of having good workforce health by more than 30%. I believe this to be because empowerment needs enough believable and sustainable organisation permission and requires extreme “structure and clarity” a la Google’s Aristotle and takes time to build, it isn’t a hands-off-the-handlebar exercise of leadership throwing caution and participation alike to the wind. 

“Leaders lead”

I’m leaving out the part about leaders outlined in the Garner research. Since we have had our “PS in the team is the business of the entire team not the team leader alone” revelation at PeopleNotTech, I stay away from “leader advice”. At most, we can talk about it at the macro overall organisational level, as that’s where they need to make offering true “organisational permission” in mentality and actions, but discussing it at a personal level seems less important to me. 

Who here, reading this, doesn’t know that leaders have to model? That they have to lead with empathy? That they need to be brave enough to be vulnerable first? Or show gratitude, spend time understanding the emotions of their employees, removing physical and mental blockers and ultimately serving them? All important and all lessons everyone talks about incessantly.

Does it mean that most individual leaders do any of the above? Even when it is as clearly spelt out as “say “thank you” more often” or “acknowledge”, “facilitate more turn-taking” or “open up first whether about mistakes or feelings, lead by example”?

We all know the answer to that. And my theory as to why not, is because they themselves suffer from a lack of organisational permission to put all those in practice and an acute lack of Psychological Safety too. 

All in all the study matters less, what we have to take from it, is that resilience had to be interrogated and to remember is that all this “fluffy stuff” is measurable. That the perceived intangibility needs to dissolve in clear concepts spoken in blunt and real language and analysed in continuous, open-hearted measurements. That we need to get a grasp of just how much HumanDebt we have to pay off and start doing so.

If you want to help with this exploration tell me about your innovative ways to determine what your total Tech Debt to tackle is, as I am willing to bet the farm the same ways can and should be used to check and reduce the HumanDebt as well.———————————————————————————————————

The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are: Understand, Measure and Improve

Read more about our Team Dashboard that measures and improves Psychological Safety at www.peoplenottech.com or reach out at contact@peoplenottech.com and let's help your teams become Psychologically Safe, healthy, happy and highly performant.