This is Kommon People — the newsletter from Kommon which highlights stories about people, organisations and technology to help you be a better manager. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.
When your colleagues feel comfortable sharing ideas, asking for help, or challenging the status-quo, it’s a great sign of a high-performing and healthy team. You may alread be familiar with this under the label ‘psychological safety’.
If you’re just getting started with this concept, there’s a TED talk here by Amy Edmondson, a leading researcher, with background and some tips from 7:30 onward on how to foster it.
Psychological safety has specific relevance now as you talk to your team about their working arrangements for the rest of the year.
As Edmondson and Mark Mortensen acknowledged in an article this month, discussions of psychological safety have typically focussed on the flow of work. For example, team members feeling comfortable critiquing each others’ decision-making (and yours), or putting forward unsolicited new ideas in meetings.
But over the past year, work and life have become so intertwined that managers increasingly need to have substantive discussions about both.
‘In the past, we’ve approached “work” and “non-work” discussions as separable, allowing managers to keep the latter off the table. Over the past year, however, many managers have found that previously off-limits topics like child care, health-risk comfort levels, or challenges faced by spouses or other family members are increasingly required for joint (manager and employee) decisions about how to structure and schedule hybrid work.’ Amy Edmondson and Mark Mortensen
If your workplace is going to continue offering remote work, particularly combined with an office, these conversations will continue and will only be effective if your team feels comfortable discussing these (sometimes very personal) details of their lives. This also has to come from the team member: both for legal and personal reasons just asking people to formally disclose information about their private lives invites allegations around bias and invasion of privacy.
So how can you as a manager encourage these positive discussions? Well just being aware of the potential sensitivity is a great start but Edmondson and Mortensen also have five suggestions:
By working on open conversations about remote work, you’ll make sure that you have the information you need for your team to be both effective and happy.
Demonstrating your commitment to helping them do their best work at your company might also help convince them that it’s the right workplace for them. Which brings us to our next story…
A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about starting to see tremors in various employee surveys which suggested turnover was going to be a big challenge for teams in 2021.
We don’t want to smugly sit here and say we were ahead of the game, but…
‘I started hearing these stories this year when several acquaintances announced that they were quitting prestigious and high-paying jobs to pursue risky passion projects. Since then, a trickle of LinkedIn updates has turned into a torrent. I tweeted about it, and dozens of stories poured into my inboxes, all variations on the same basic theme: The pandemic changed my priorities, and I realized I didn’t have to live like this.’ Kevin Roose, New York Times
‘I’ve also heard from a dozens of knowledge workers who’ve held on to their jobs over the course of the pandemic and are now dramatically rethinking their futures.’ Ann Helen Petersen, Culture Study
These quotes are taken from two of a range of great pieces published over the past few days about people leaving their jobs this year.
If you want to understand more about what might be motivating your team to think about leaving, they’re all worth a read. Kevin Roose talks about how high saving rates in the pandemic (admittedly only for some) will encourage people to quit their jobs in search of adventure (what he calls the YOLO economy). Anne Helen Petersen focuses on seeking relief from mental health challenges. Dror Poleg on not bothering to invest in careers which look outdated anyway.
Ok you might say, that’s all very well and good, but what do I actually do about this?
As our first story pointed, start by leaning into these conversations to demonstrate how you’re prioritising your employees’ welfare after the past year, and want them to feel comfortable sharing their circumstances with you.
Leadership coach Lara Hogan has also helpfully consolidated her advice for managers in what she calls ‘Your Q3 Roadmap’. Whilst there’s guidance on sabbaticals and time-off, as she herself acknowledges, the real game-changer is adjusting the amount of work. Where possible don’t just assume business-as-usual. Delay feature launches, don’t take on new clients, loosen up customer-service response times.
‘What’s more risky: losing the people you’ve invested in and needing to start up a lengthy hiring and onboarding process which will cost you a ton of time, or slowing down the pace and creating more breathing room?’ Lara Hogan
Talking of prioritising your employees’ welfare and wanting them to feel comfortable sharing…
Yes, unfortunately we’re going to talk about Basecamp.
At this point, we imagine you’re either asking ‘what are they talking about’ or doing an epic eyeroll which pleads ‘not more of this’.
For the blissfully unaware, this week Jason Fried, founder of workplace/project management software provider Basecamp, published a blog post outlining various changes to the company’s operations. These included discouraging political discussions at work, removing what he described as bureaucratic committees (a DEI effort was singled out in particular), and stopping 360 performance reviews.
After an investigation by journalist Casey Newton, it subsequently emerged that the announcement was in reaction to several weeks of discussions about a list kept by the company of ‘funny’ customer names, some examples of which seemed inappropriate and even racist.
As the debate progressed, one employee pointed out that the way we treat names is impactful, and dehumanization which begins with small actions like this can culminate in events like the recent Atlanta shootings. David Heinemeier Hansson, Basecamp’s other founder, disagreed with this framing in a message visible to the entire company. Two other employees then filed HR complaints against Hansson for his reaction. As Newton notes with his tongue firmly in his cheek, ‘HR declined to take action against the company co-founder).
Less than two weeks after all this, Fried announced the changes discouraging political discussion and other activities deemed detrimental to Basecamp's work. (Hansson has since released further details of the message he published to the company, and the HR complaints).
Needless to say, it did not go well.
The reaction isn’t surprising. Fried’s post is a tour-de-force of lazy management practices, flagrant privilege and self-centred posturing, shot through with a lack of self-awareness and a heavy dose of high school politics.
(But apart from that, it’s not bad).
Perhaps the most telling reactions are those of various Basecamp employees who were clearly upset by the changes.
The hosts of the company’s podcast about ‘the better way to work and run your business’ even put the show on indefinite hiatus in a two minute episode where they struggled to articulate their discomfort, particularly with the hypocrisy of their show tagline.
If you're wondering whether this is likely to have an impact on retention at the company, here's Newton again:
"Based on my conversations over the past day, I expect Basecamp’s workforce to shrink meaningfully as a result."
This in a company of only 58 people.
So beyond gawping at the car crash, what can we learn from this?
Despite our many thoughts on this topic, we thought very hard about not including the story in this newsletter. Our focus is on helping managers get to grips with the fundamentals of the role, and hopefully that doesn’t include telling your team that ‘the martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone’ (yes, that happened).
But often when we ask people how they learned to be a manager, they speak about their own experiences of being managed. Both the good managers they’ve been inspired by, and the bad ones that made them feel a certain way that they vowed never to inflict on their teams.
So we’d really recommend reading the Basecamp post (and Newton’s reporting and Hansson’s response if you have time) and taking stock of the things that make you cringe and why. Both in terms of the actions the Basecamp leadership are taking, but also how they’re communicating it. Put yourself in the shoes of employees reading the post but also the leaders faced with the situation. How would you have handled it?
Your instincts will probably point you to valuable lessons for what not to do in future. If you’re unsure and/or want to verify your takeaways, perhaps use it as a starting point for discussion with a peer manager, or you can always talk to us.
This may shock you to find out, but endless back-to-back video calls are stressful.
Anecdotally this has been very obvious over the past year or so, but now there’s some research to back it up.
Microsoft convinced 14 people to allow the company to monitor electrical activity in their brains whilst they conducted four 30 minute video calls consecutively on different subjects. In one test, the four calls were back-to-back, whilst in the second test, the group was forced to take 10 minute breaks between each call.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, those doing the calls back-to-back experienced significantly higher levels of stress, which built up as the calls were conducted. Stress spikes were particularly heightened as the calls ended and the next one began, potentially due to the strain of context-switching. Moreover, when on the calls, the participants were much less engaged.
In contrast, when breaks were enforced, participants had time to reset, and showed much lower levels of stress across the four calls, higher engagement, and smaller stress spikes between calls.
Hopefully you’re doing this already, but the findings really reinforce how important it is to take breaks between calls for you and your team to do your best work. If this isn’t best practice on your team yet, try and set the example. Your team (and your own brain!) will thank you for it.
Subscribe via RSS