Work. Shouldn't. Suck. (3/15/21)
Providing resources, research, and reflections on human-centered organizational design for thriving workplaces. From the people at WorkShouldntSuck.co // This edition by Tim Cynova.
Did you end up here because your fantastic friend shared this with you?
Can we chat for 15 minutes?
I’m doing research for a new Work. Shouldn’t. Suck. offering and would love to ask you a few questions. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to try and sell you anything.) The offering is designed to assist people who are passionate about exploring and implementing ways to craft human-centered organizations — who know why they're doing it but need assistance with the how. Would you be willing to chat with me for 15 minutes in the next two weeks? If you’re game, please reply to this email, and I’ll send you a Calendly link for us to find a time to talk.
Habits in Life & Work
With the anniversary of COVID being declared a pandemic, I’ve been reflecting on something a guest of our Morning(ish) Show said last April. She was talking about how, in just a little over a month at that point, people were already forming new habits in the way they lived and worked. Now, a year on, those new habits are firmly ingrained in the way we live and work.
Another one of our guests asked:
“If habits are a suitcase, what's one pre-pandemic habit you're taking out of your suitcase and leaving behind, and what's one habit you've added to your suitcase that you're keeping forever?” - Deborah Cullinan
All of this talk of habits reminded me of Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business. (A great book if you’ve not read it yet.) And another book about habits that’s currently in my queue: James Clear’s Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results.
Now that we’re a year in, those once new habits are largely just how we live and work. And, for many, these new habits have presented people with questions they seldom pondered before March 2020. Questions like: How do you decide where to live in the world when not required by a job to be located in a specific city? For those of you who have contemplated this question, I’m curious how you’ve approached it. Let us know in the comments.
Is massive job turnover on the horizon?
When CEOs were asked to rate employee stress on a scale of 1 to 10, their average was 9.1. My first thought: Who are the out-of-touch CEOs amid this pandemic are who pulling down that average?
ResetWork recently published an intriguing article with Dr. Stefanie Tignor, head of data science and insights at Humu. (Humu is the company co-founded by Google’s former head of people operations, Laszlo Bock, and author of Work Rules! Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead.)
In the article, Dr. Tignor drops this insight:
“You have these really high levels of stress and burnout, coupled with really high retention numbers, because people feel like they can’t leave, then the next thing is people start to get a sense of more stability, whatever that means. The second we see that, people will be out the door because they will just be so emotionally exhausted from their current jobs.” - Dr. Stefanie Tignor
Read the article to learn what supervisors, coworkers, team and organizations can do to address this. Related, I was catching up on my podcast listening and found these two episodes of Adam Grant’s WorkLife podcast particularly interesting as it relates to the topic: “Burnout is everyone's problem” and “We don't have to fight loneliness alone.”
Let’s (Not) Be Work Friends
Thinking about the isolation many feel from working remotely for the past year — and the loneliness that potentially accompanies being physically isolated — I was intrigued to read two pieces about having friends at work.
In “The Case Against Having Friends at Work,” Nina Berman explores how workplaces can weaponize friendships and other problematic ways that work friendships can undermine efforts to build anti-racist, anti-oppressive workplaces.
“We’ve seen ways that the culture of friendship at work becomes a requirement for social performance that obscures the mechanics of a workplace and ways that it can create cliques, social pressure, and reinforce hierarchies.” - Nina Berman
And, in “A Year Without Our Work Friends,” Roxane Gay explores how the absence of those day-to-day connections showed us about how we spent our days, and suggests that it’s time to reconsider what normal should be in our work lives.
Hiring Course Adventure: An Update
In our last newsletter, I mentioned that I was creating an online course about how to hire. After a few weeks of filming every day until I lost my voice, I ended up with 100 videos in the can. Following rough cuts, I’m now sitting with more than 4 1/2 hours of video to polish into the final version, followed by creating handouts, and compiling everything into the online portal.
The past few weeks have included a whole host of “how to” internet searches and texting friends, and friends of friends, who have *actual* expertise in the production areas. “Uh, Doug, how do I know that the audio EQ will be what I want when it sounds different in three different headsets?” Or, “Erin, might you be able to check with your film friend about how to planar track in Adobe Premiere?” All searches that don’t relate to the actual course content. I feel really great about the actual course content — thankfully! — and look forward to sharing the course with you in the coming weeks!
Puppy pic, you know, just because.
Thanks for coming along on this adventure! Discover more about organizational journeys in anti-racism, shared leadership models, and entirely virtual workplaces on Work. Shouldn't. Suck.