This Silicon Valley’s Sauce is Not So Secret Anymore

“Contribute to fostering a culture of psychological safety, inclusivity, collaboration and continuous improvement within the team through participation in retrospectives and feedback.”

This phrase featured in a run-of-the-mill ad for a senior front end developer that l saw last week from a Fintech company and it made my heart sing. They are not a Silicon Valley darling but a London based company. Not one of the unicorns with silver spoons in terms of the way they understand people topics, a growing scale-up in a crowded area. Like it, over the past few weeks, others had asked for similar things. 

This is, undoubtedly, very encouraging. It means that two years after the Accelerate report revealed it to be foundational for any company with technological ambitions and a few years after the Google Aristotle findings that showed it to be paramount to any team’s chance to be highly performant in the digital world, and tens of years after academia first spoke about the topic, it is starting to matter at scale. That this Silicon Valleys secret sauce is not that “secret” anymore. And what great news that is for all of us!

Furthermore, this is not on the “what you get” list of the job ad but on the “what we need out of you” list which means the respective organisations recognises it not as a nice-to-have perk or add-on but as a sine qua non requirement to have a highly performant team. 

What does this mean for the developer though? Likely nothing - when else have they been exposed to such a requirement? Chances are they don’t even know what it means and that they will find it a bit of a strange fad at first. That it will take that new team’s habits, conviction and knowledge to demonstrate the company’s commitment to the idea. That’s if they exist, if it’s more than just PR theatre and it probably is, they are of the new wave of startups “woke” enough to know that their profit and success hinge firmly on their ability to do the human work from hereon. 

If we look around, at the lessons we learned in this nightmare year and at what is coming ahead from the Damocles’ sword of the upcoming global economical downturn to the terrifying prospect of the effects of burnout and declining mental health on the working population, we have to be bullish about what we can affect and how and we have to roll those sleeves. To stop ignoring any of the above. To stop hoping the need for people interventions will go away or that the HumanDebt™ will take care of itself. No more procrastinating and excuses. 

The unicorns know it, now the start-ups and scale-ups know it too. If they’re not careful, the horses (incumbent big organisations) will find themselves in the middle caught up with or even overtaken by these two categories of competitors as they forge ahead and create faster and better products and solutions their clients will love more, because they have high performing teams that have Psychological Safety. And what a pity that would be when the horses had had both the knowledge and the resources to not let themselves become chased out of the race by their own inability to become truly and deeply focused on their people. 

When all it would have taken, would have been that they understood the importance of the human work, elevated the topic of healthy dynamics in teams, offered real and true permission slips and removed blockers from the way of their people by getting them the human and digital resources they need to measure and affect cultural change. And then started empowering their hundreds of thousands of superheroes such as the ones I was thanking last week in this article to execute on the long-awaited change of taking their teams from neglected to highly valued, healthy and happy - therefore productive and highly performant. 

If you read nothing else this week read this article that Ryan Holmes posted where he polled 1,7M people over 6 months and see further proof that these topics that we’ve been repeating ad infinitum are true:

• Hybrid is the only way forward;
• People feel more productive WFH;
• People have literally been killing themselves by working extra hard during the pandemic while WFH so burnout is coming;
• Most places are still nowhere near prepared for distributed, non-colocated work and sent their employees home nary any support;
• There’s real need and thirst for tools and measurements to change the culture and manage productivity.

Have you asked the same questions? 

If not, chances are that the ads coming from your company don’t say -or mean- the same things as the one above. Is Psychological Safety firmly on the map with your organisation? Answer this poll here so we get a better idea, come talk to us while the New Reality of Hybrid Offer is still out and stay tuned for a big announcement next week. 

Meanwhile, stay focused on the human work and start smiling broadly, the end of this nightmare is at long last in sight and Christmas hasn’t been cancelled!

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Don't send your teams home with a laptop, a Jira and Slack account and a prayer!

Get in touch at www.psychologicalsafety.works or reach out at contact@peoplenottech.com and let's help your teams become healthy, happy and highly performant.