Embedding the Foundational Human Work

We announced something this week that we hope will help make some start-ups/scale-ups fly. 

A super deep discount to our software so they can start on the human work early and make it a pillar of their culture so they don’t amass any HumanDebt™. One of the things that were clear was that there is no founder who won’t recite TED-talk level ideas when it comes to what it takes to run a modern tech company - Agile to the bone with happy people. They know all about vulnerability, compassionate servant leadership, giving people the space to grow and making sure they are heard. Any founder at all would pass any theory test on what the ideal culture should contain if you want to succeed. Needless to say this knowledge rarely if ever translates into practice. 

Part of it is how insane of a ride building a business is and take it from me, it is utterly centrifugal and trade-offs are made every day. The other part is how the best of intentions when it comes to people never do translate directly into action without effort and just knowing this stuff is utterly insufficient. And then it’s the way that new companies start - in a flurry of survival needs and continuous dread from all sides. It’s tense, nervous energy and a desperate battle to keep your cool and simultaneously keep as close to principles as possible while fighting to draw air. 

So remembering what counts, what really really counts and then acting on it, is extra hard. The main thing founders can do is surround themselves with others who can be guardians of the principle because if they should slip and become enchanted by someone’s CV that doesn’t translate into a human with the needed attitude, then the new hires can easily come as a package with antiquated business practices and processes from the years they’ve worked in waterfall shops complete with the command and control and the lack of care for the teams that usually packs. 

In other words, in the founding team, you need everyone to have that same crystal clarity and extreme obsession with “Agile and people” and if they don’t, then they’ll default on what they learned in business school in 2000 or what they’ve done in other shops before and those practices and ideas will simply never work to lead a modern company to success. 

But even with everyone’s heads and hearts in the right place, the problem of HOW to embed the human work to arrive at a place where it takes place habitually at a team and individual level remains. After all, there is little in terms of practice but even less in terms of tools to offer a workspace and a guide to this work. 

Ours was created to ”fix” the issue of low Psychological Safety in teams. It stood to evident reason that if anyone wants to be as high performing as the teams who have it and have the freedom to speak up, collaborate and innovate fearlessly at all times, then that’s the key aspect that needed sorting and fast. It’s why we worked so hard to build the algorithm and find the smartest and most engaging way to measure it and then why we worked even harder to devise ways to have the teams use the data themselves and utilise the plays in our Playbook with no assistance to form the basis of their continuous improvement work. 

And it’s from this intense need that all our other lessons and discoveries followed: the crucial nature of having to close the feedback loop to instil and restore trust; the fact that teams are perfectly capable of the human work as long as they have the right knowledge and tools; the evident joy they find in being able to better their dynamic and all the other ways in which our client teams taught us something. 

It led to what the software is today - a much bigger space for growth predicated on psychological safety but so much wider and more complete, a platform for the human work in the making. In time we’ll add other bits and we’ll show you what the bigger vision is but for now, essential, primal - the need to establish the human work as necessary across the board for all organisations big or small. 

For the “big” ones we were already helping in that we can kit any team with a way to start paying off their own HumanDebt today and in how we have a super collaborative approach to enterprise trials and internal business case construction, but for the “small” ones it felt like we weren’t doing enough to ensure they get in at the ground level of the human work hence the “20 No Human Debt Start-ups Program”. 

We make no secret of the fact that we make software and interact with the hundreds of teams using it and that’s what powers our voice in lieu of a theoretical-only exploration as the topic of humanity in the workplace is for others. 

We do that because we know beyond any doubt that when it comes to the Human Debt talk really is cheap. Needed, a step above the silence but cheap nonetheless. And we know, we do a fair amount of it ourselves. It may create blessed “a-ha!” moments, it may dissolve some of the objections and opposition and it may add to the general chatter which will one day hopefully translate into firm organisational permission for true change but it is still not in itself moving any needles. 

The only thing that can and will be transformative, the only sustainable new effort worthwhile is making the human work a regular priority and that rests with our people themselves. Our teams. That’s where the work needs to be distributed. And we need to do so openly, by getting true buy-in from the humans we ask to do this work, by paying them for it and by being caring and compassionate enough to limit their WIP, create the space, give them the tools and reiterate that commitment. 

Hard as it may be to feel this way from within the belly of some of the beasts you are in today - the world of work has completely transformed over the past few years accelerated by the insane volatility of the global situation. Agile has well and truly “arrived” and this part, embedding the human work into every day should have maybe been done to begin with, but perhaps it needed the structural shake-up first and its turn hadn’t come yet but it has now - it is today utterly and truly high time to make it a priority to sustain and propel us further. 

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At PeopleNotTech we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams. If you care about it- talk to us about a demo at [email protected]  

To order the "People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age" book go to this Amazon link