Right to disconnect

I keep running into leaders who say “I choose to do a lot of my work after hours and send lots of emails at night or the weekend. I don’t expect my staff to respond, but they do.”

If you do this it will set the expectation for many of your staff to respond, even if you explicitly state that you don’t expect them too. Expectations come from many sources:

• Notifications - if someone has their phone around them all the time, and notifications on, at the very least, they’ll see the message come in. Even if they choose not to respond, it will be on their mind.

• Standards - You are working after hours which sets an expectation that others should too, especially if you hold a senior position.

• Boundaries -  Some people and cultures have difficulty saying no to others. If you breach their boundaries, they’ll respond. 

• Old ways - It used to be said ‘never leave the office before the boss’. It’s changing, but it’s an enduring idea. If you are working any hours, it easily morphs to ‘don’t knock off before the boss’.

• Behaviour - You may not expect a response, but if you get one, do you respond again? This draws staff into an after hours discussion that your behaviour reinforces, even if you say you don’t expect it.

The new legislation is likely to get some leaders in strife for after hours emails like this, regardless of what they say about expectations. There’s a dead easy solution. All email platforms have a timed or delayed send feature. Learn to use it! Write your emails whenever it suits you, then set it to send during working hours. Simple, cleaner, better.

Which Why?

A senior leader team I was working with this week spent time sharing their individual “User Manual”. Some great insights about how and where people work best, their preferences for information, building trust, working hours and more were shared. Super valuable. A common theme was that for them to commit time, effort and resources to something, they needed to know why. Makes sense - few if any of us like wasting time on work that doesn’t seem relevant. Whole books have been written on “why”. But which why? Those leaders articulated 5 different types of why:

• Large, audacious ‘change the world’ vision/mission why

• Large organisational purpose why

• Personal mission why

• Tactical ‘how does this relate to the rest of my/our work?’ why

• Unrelated to the organisation whys like family, health, travel, personal growth, freedom, balance, choice.

All the leaders wanted to know why. They all agreed that knowing why was fundamental to alignment of effort. But not all of them wanted to know the same why. A challenge to alignment is we tend to articulate importance through our own why and huddle with others who share that perspective. An effective leader works to understand the different whys in their team and works with people to align effort with the why that most interests them.

There’s a good chance that most of the whys you work with are in the list above. There’s also a good chance I’ve missed some. What would you add?

Compliance is not enough

Monday’s ABC Four Corners program "Don't Speak" has cast a spotlight on the critical issue of workplace bullying and the harmful culture of silence that persists in many organisations. People sometimes ask for clear examples of the kind of behaviour that the Psychosocial Hazards updates to Work Health and Safety legislation cover. The 4 Corners “Don’t Speak” program gives many clear examples across the full spectrum. It serves as a stark reminder of the devastating consequences when these risks are ignored, including severe mental health impacts and, in the worst cases, loss of life. We need to do better!

Organisations are already starting to see action based on the new laws. But guess what - changing legislation on its own, won't change behaviour. 

As in physical safety, exemplar organisations have already embedded culture which supports speaking up, asking questions, encouraging diversity, respect, and valuing contribution. They go way beyond compliance, embedding psychological safety and responsibility as key ingredients of high performance.

There’s many practical ways to do exactly that. What does your organisation do about it?

If you’d like a hand with it in your teams, let me know I’d be delighted to assist.

Police or Purpose

Many moons ago I was a Youth Worker. I once saw a great act of policing. There was a group of young people from a country town visiting Freo. They had gathered in a car park drinking around a mate's ute. They were loud and dropping empty cans/bottles everywhere, but not causing any harm.

A couple of local cops turned up and the older of the 2 leant on the back of the ute and had a yarn to them about street drinking, noise and drink driving. He politely asked them to chuck all the empties into the back of the ute, identified a guy who hadn’t been drinking, eyeballed his licence and then said, “My partner and I are off on patrol, when we get back it would be great if you had cleaned up the cans, and moved you and the ute back to wherever you are staying. If we come back we might need to write some cautions”.

He could have technically thrown the book at them and been much more pushy in his approach. His explanations and requests made sense, and had the group immediately on side. If he’d taken another approach it could have easily escalated with undesirable outcomes for all.

Workplace policy and procedure is similar, I reckon. As a supervisor, employer, or business owner you know that they have their place. From there you have 2 choices:

1. Use them to ‘police’ behaviour and productivity. This approach usually has lots of black and white compliance, criticism, right and wrong involved. The problem is that it rarely motivates people to do a great job. It’s more likely that they’ll adhere to the minimum standard, and/or hide stuff that will draw attention and heat.

2. Tell people about the purpose of them. Involve them in discussions about why they exist and what ‘good’ work looks like in your context. Get people focussed on a good job, not just a compliant one. They’ll be more likely to follow your lead, get excited about doing great work, and evolving great procedures to do it.

Socks and Psychological Safety

One of the most embarrassing moments I’ve had as an adult happened a number of years ago when I bought some new socks (that wasn’t the embarrassing bit). I left them sitting on our kitchen bench for many days. One day, I was short of socks, so I went to the bench to find them. They weren’t there. I assumed my dear wife had cleared them up and put them somewhere. I asked her where they were and she said she had no idea. Then it got embarrassing - I got cranky and started asking her how the hell she could forget where she had put them when she had clearly moved them. It wasn’t my finest hour, and at the time I found it really hard to let it go. Some time later it got even more embarrassing when I found the socks and discovered that it was me who had moved them, and me who had forgotten where. It took a while to repair our relationship after I had acted so poorly.

I was thinking of this incident recently when working with a team who have some fractures in their team culture right now because people aren’t behaving at their best. Like me back then, they have been treating each other in less than ideal ways. It’s pretty human to want to avoid admitting and taking responsibility when we haven’t behaved at our best. It’s also pretty human to want to fire back, rather than extend grace and forgiveness when people treat you poorly (even more so if there’s zero justification for it). It can take a team quickly in a downward spiral where defensiveness, blame, and sniping become the new norm. It gets in the way of both productive effectiveness and team cohesiveness.

One simple principle is “Play the problem, not the person.”