Decrapify Work or Die (me and Jeffrey ain’t joking)
Cracking the Code
During a conversation about purpose, I suggested that it could be just the latest attempt by management to find a silver bullet for success, after they’d tried Vision and Mission, and then Values.
It struck me later that all of those things are rather conceptual and maybe that’s why they sometimes fail to have an impact. We get lost in our heads playing with ideas and people just can’t relate to it.
One of the things we do all relate to, however, is behaviour. What’s more, we’re really good at reading it and we can all tell when people aren’t walking the talk. We spot misalignment in a second, we can smell a fake.
That’s why I like the Pirate Code, a set of articles that take the values and purpose and translate them into rules about how we behave together. It takes us out of intellectual jousting and into how we are going to be with each other.
That’s not the only reason why the Pirate Code is so powerful.
It’s democratically arrived at, with an open discussion and a vote for everyone. It’s always open for debate and anyone can ask for an amendment.
It’s transparent. It’s clear when someone has transgressed and everyone is empowered to call out misbehaviour. You are monitored, judged and sanctioned by your peers, not by some remote, unaccountable power.
It’s clear and unambiguous. It’s written in simple language so it is memorable. It translates the high principles into actionable behaviours.
The action of creating a code engages people, develops trust and understanding and helps bond the crew. Er, I mean team.
It’s fun and playful, which encourages creativity and reduces tension, diffusing what could be tricky conversations.
It’s important to think about values and purpose, about how we get meaning from our work, but it only adds value when it’s translated into the everyday. The Pirate Code is means of turning that high-minded rumination into practical, everyday actions and behaviours.
And you can celebrate its creation with rum cocktails, another great Pirate invention.
A little more conversation
It seems that those teams and individuals that have continued to perform under work from home, and in some cases even thrived, are those where time has been set aside for informal communication in the team and for regular one-to-one conversations between managers and their people. Those managers who already did this in the office environment (and, in my book, this should be standard) have really stepped up to the challenge and allocated more time in response.
Sadly, this is not how many managers operate and they have had to learn to do this, with varying degrees of success. However, the fear is that as teams return to the office, this newly learnt behaviour will be abandoned, despite the evident benefits it brings. The reason is that these activities were not valued in pre-COVID ‘normal’ circumstances. Managers were rewarded for their output, for hitting their personal targets, not for developing others, mentoring or contributing to the overall culture.
This has to change. Organisations have to make these activities of supporting, nurturing and developing the people and the other capability building actions a key part of what their managers and leaders are expected to do. That means not only allowing time for it, not only training them to do it well, but rewarding and promoting them for doing it as well.
COVID has, through work from home, given organisations a look into the future. The physical separation has shown that a lot of the supervision and micro-management of the past was unnecessary and even unwelcome and that what is needed is conscious investment in relationships, coaching and support. They need to bake those changes in for when they return to the office (to whatever degree that actually happens).
Everybody Dance Now
There’s been a lot of talk about diversity and inclusion over the past few years, with many organisations taking action but being disappointed with the impact. As they agonised as to why they seemed unable to shift the dial, no-one really noticed that one of the biggest problems was actually the office itself.
You see, the office wasn’t actually designed, it just evolved from the factory model. Its founding principle was to get people to fit into a standard space and do standardised, homogenous work. That’s the very opposite of diversity and inclusion. Whilst it has developed from the serried ranks of identical desks (we just kept that for the classroom …), it has become an environment particularly suited to men, especially extrovert and aggressive (and white) ones.
This makes it a sub-optimal space for lots of other people. Introverts, women, people of colour, non-able-bodied, neuro-divergent. Nor does it cater for people with particular health requirements, be those temporary or permanent, physical or mental.
That’s before we consider how the work environment fails to cater for those with caring responsibilities, or women who are going through the menopause (as pointed out in this article about a study being done by Standard Chartered).
Turns out the office was actually crap for the majority of people. Who knew?
It is being said that Hybrid working is going to be very challenging organisations to manage but I wonder if it is less about tech and real estate and more because they are now having to properly cater for the diversity of their workforce and meet those diverse needs on an equal basis?
The upside is that this will lead them to creating a truly inclusive work environment. That’s a challenge worth rising too.
Killing me Softly
There’s been a flurry of stuff about how work is bad for your health, with the WHO/ILO report leading the way.
It found that long working hours led to 745 000 deaths from stroke and heart disease in 2016, a 29 per cent increase since 2000. This particularly affects older men in the Western Pacific and SE Asia regions and the problem is worsening as hours continue to rise.
“Working 55 hours or more per week is a serious health hazard … and can lead to premature death” said Dr Maria Neira of the WHO.
But Goldman have announced an intention to limit hours to a max of 80 a week, so that’s OK.
I despair. Jeffery Pfeffer published ‘Dying for a Paycheck’ in 2018, an excoriating examination of how working is killing employees for no good reason (I haven’t actually managed to get all the way through as it makes me so angry and it would be rather ironic to bust a blood vessel whilst reading it…). The data is clear, yet not enough action has been taken.
I had an uncle who worked in a foundry, shovelling coal into a furnace all day. It was dirty, dangerous, hard physical work and he, and most of his colleagues, never got to draw their pensions. We saw that was wrong and we acted. Just because there isn’t fire and smoke and people don’t work up a sweat, we should not ignore the carnage that is taking place in offices across the world and act to stop that too.