Career

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    Linked: Forget Flexibility. Your Employees Want Autonomy.

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Autonomy is understanding what needs to be done and having the freedom to decide the best way to get it all done. Managers can still contribute, they still set the priorities, they assist with roadblocks, and they are the ones who communicate what needs to be done, but when they start to go much further than that, employees feel that loss of autonomy, and they don’t like it.

    Over the last couple of years, managers have been forced to sit back and let employees have autonomy. Much like my own experience, you can’t possibly expect employees who were successful and productive with that autonomy to just give it back for no reason.

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    Linked: Making workplaces better for people struggling with mental health will make work better for everyone

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    The reality is if you allow people to be flexible and get their work done in the way that makes the most sense for them, individually, they will all benefit from that decision. There won’t be a fairness issue because of some accommodation because everyone is getting the accommodation they need to do their best work.

    What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that what management says they want?

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    Linked: The Term ‘Bullying’ Doesn’t Easily Fit the Workplace

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    It’s true, what we define as bullying among school children with no option to simply leave school doesn’t really fit when talking about the workplace, though it is the height of privilege to not recognize that many low-paid workers don’t necessarily have that same level of freedom to do so.

    But, as the quote points out, it doesn’t matter what we call it, unprofessional behavior that hurts coworkers and employees has no place in the workplace:

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    Linked: Women in the Workplace

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    This is an acute problem for many of us, who want to participate in doing the work of promoting diversity and inclusion but are still getting measured by everything other than that. And, as the survey points out, it is oftentimes women who take on this work, in an effort to help other women and minorities achieve.

    But, as much as the C-Level folks talk about the importance of this work, it is not a part of the job performance, nor is time and effort really allocated for it.

    How many of you volunteer to take on this work, running an employee resource group, putting together presentations, leading group discussions, often at the behest of top management, and then when it comes times for performance reviews, the only thing that matters is time spent on bringing in revenue?

    The message seems to really be, “It’s great that you want to do this work for us, but make sure you do it on your time because your productivity will be measured against the people who don’t spend any time at all doing this work”

  • Quick Thought – Should we Expect Employees to Always be All-Stars?

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Over the weekend, the wife and I had BBC World News on the TV while we both were catching up with the virtual world in our living room, and they were doing an investigation into maternity and paternity leave in European countries as opposed to the US.

    I’m not getting into that debate, but there was a point where they were interviewing a Dutch mother about her career, and the leave she took both pre and post-birth. What made my wife and I both stop what we were doing was her admission that she didn’t see why it was necessary to always “excel” at her career, but that just being OK was enough. She didn’t consider being outstanding at her job to be anything that was all that important in the grand scheme of things.

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    Linked: Work burnout rises despite company investments in mental health

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    As I’ve said before, many employers did the easy stuff. They invested in some mental health tools, promoted using employee assistance programs, talked more about mental health, heck they even gave people more time off or at least pushed people to actually use the time off they hadn’t been. And yet, here we are. Why?

    Because they haven’t yet done the hard work of making the workplace not the place that hurts mental health to start with. There’s no easy fix for that. It won’t happen in a few weeks, but if you don’t start looking at it, you’re going to find yourself without many employees to keep going. Because in 2021, people have options, and those options are only going to keep growing as younger generations make very different decisions about their careers than those of us in older generations are used to.

    The workplace will change one way or another. If your’s doesn’t want to, it will be killed.