People want to grow. They want to learn, and they want to develop the skills necessary to remain relevant in industries that are going through constant change. You can provide them with opportunities, or they will go somewhere else to do those things. Those are genuinely your only options. Change happens way too fast now for you to sit back and not help your people change with the times. Career stagnation is career death.
It’s all the remote equivalent of sitting at your desk later than your coworkers to show you are hard-working. That never told anyone who was getting the most work done, but it rarely stopped bosses from using it as a proxy and rewarding people for looking like they worked hard. It’s been an issue in the workplace for years, and remote work finally allowed us to get rid of it forever if we chose to.
Or we can just keep doing it and never make any improvements.
I’ve seen this fail so many times I can’t even begin to count them all. Mostly where they fail is that the career path is designed by someone who got where they are by taking path “A”, and so they design the same path for everyone else to follow. This is short-sighted for two reasons:?1. Not everyone is you. Not everyone wants to do the same things you have done or do now. (Over time those things you did 10-15 years ago may not even be relevant.)?2. That path winds to your job, so unless you are leaving, it has a dead-end built into it. Dead-ends cause retention problems.
There has been a lot of progress, but I fear management has made that progress and ticked the item on the checklist as “done” without really making sure they’ve hit the mark. Yes, they rolled out a mental health benefit or two, but have they done the work to train managers? Have they understood how employees feel about that relationship and whether they trust their immediate manager? That is where an employee needs to feel safe talking about mental health. If that safety doesn’t exist, all the extra benefits in the world will not help.
So many organizations are looking for the next piece of tech that will improve their workflows and make their team more efficient when they could easily get the same boost, or more, by training their people to use the tech they already own.
But, here it the real world, this doesn’t always work out very well. You really need the culture to be one where everyone is used to working asynchronously and checking the public channel for chances to help out the team. It sounds like that is both the expectation and the reality at this company but for a lot of us the reality is very different. Posting something in a public channel where no one gets a notification that a message is being posted generally means no one sees it. So we go back to using private channels or tagging people in the public channel in order so that we purposefully interrupt them. We haven’t developed a culture where asynchronous communication works and I suspect it’s because we don’t really want it. We want people to respond to us now. We don’t trust them to get back later and, to be fair, we don’t give our peers reason to trust us because we spend all of our time putting out fires and frequently forget to get back to people.
In many cases, it’s a humblebrag. “Oh I saw your message but then I got involved in important things because I’m an important person and never got back to you”.