Take time off, real time off, not “no meetings during the day but catching up on emails for 4 hours that evening” time off, actual disconnected, unreachable, time away from work. And, encourage the people who work for you to do exactly that too.
I wish I could take credit for the line in the title. But, I can’t. It has, however, been rumbling around in my brain for the past couple of days since I heard John Amaechi say it on a recent episode of Adam Grant’s podcast “Worklife” (Go listen to the whole episode, it’s very thought-provoking)
In an episode about how to build an anti-racist workplace, this was the line that sort of stopped not only me, but Adam as well. And, I think it applies to much more than anti-racism.
Sadly, most of the mentions I’ve seen of these issues place the blame squarely outside of the employer. It’s the government’s fault for being too generous with stimulus checks and unemployment benefits, it’s the lockdowns and working from home, it’s the lack of daycare options, etc.
What they all fail to mention, that this article at least starts to recognize, is that there are actually a lot of things employers could do.
As I think about this, it occurs to me that a lot of the things that we think would give away deep fake videos are things that happen all the time in Zoom or Teams calls, right? The video being a little slow, or jerky, or not keeping up fluidly with the movement of people on screen, etc. So it could be harder to tell that the “person” on the call with you isn’t really who you think it is, and then we can begin to wonder who it was, and what information they got from being there, pretending to be someone else.
Are we ready for that?
Look, I will 100% agree with the tips in the article, those three things are the base upon which everything your team does will grow. Get them wrong, and you won’t have much of a team left. But, don’t do them just because you want to run a team. You can say you want open communication, but that requires you to care about what they have to say, including things that are hard. It means caring about how decisions made by the organization are affecting their mental health, their work-life balance, and their home lives.
Too many people in management have not cared about that stuff for too long. Thankfully that is changing. It’s been a long time coming.
Can your business afford to lose talent? I don’t know many who can.