318: Foster Thriving Teams: A Happier at Work Special

Aoife O’Brien [00:00:01]:

Since the start of this year, I’ve had so many interesting conversations about what it takes to really perform at our best at work. And the interesting thing is that although the conversations focused on quite different topics, they all pointed to the same thing. And that is, it’s so important to create the conditions. It’s not about individuals. It’s about the environment that we find ourselves in. So creating a safe space for people to speak up, supporting them to do their best work, and making it really clear the impact and the value that they bring at work, making that connection for people. This is the Happier at Work podcast. I’m your host, Aoife O’Brien.

Aoife O’Brien [00:00:42]:

And in today’s episode, I’m bringing together 8 of those conversations that I’ve had. I’m going to share the insights from those conversations, how they interact and how they relate to each other. To build up this story of how to create high performance at work. I really hope you enjoy today’s episode. Let’s dive right in. The first clip I want to share is episode 288 from Catherine Stothart. She talks about conflict and communication at work and how it’s so important to understand that we judge ourselves by our intentions, but we judge other people by their actions, and how understanding the gap between those 2 things is so important to how conflict gets handled.

Catherine Stothart [00:01:38]:

Often we have a positive intention when we communicate. So with these 4 styles, each of them has— and it’s all about communication. It’s not about what you’re doing when you’re by yourself. It’s all about when I’m with other people, when I’m interacting with other people, what am I doing? What is driving my behaviour? So it’s about being aware of what’s driving your behaviour, what’s your intention, which may well be positive, but sometimes the way you come across can have a negative impact on the people that you’re communicating with. And then you don’t have the influence you want to have on them.

Aoife O’Brien [00:02:10]:

Yeah.

Catherine Stothart [00:02:10]:

You don’t have the connection, the influence, the relationship with them. So it’s about being aware of, firstly for yourself, that self-awareness of, hang on, what’s driving my behaviour at the moment? How am I coming across? And is that the best way I can come across in order to achieve my intention? But also for other people, if other people are annoying you or you’re finding them irritating or whatever, it’s trying to see beyond their immediate behaviour that’s annoying you to what is driving their behaviour.

Aoife O’Brien [00:02:40]:

Of course, understanding each other is so much easier when we’re, when we feel free to speak about what’s actually happening for us. That’s why psychological safety is so important, but it’s something that’s so misunderstood. The vast majority of teams don’t have psychological safety. Here’s a clip from my episode with Amy Edmondson explaining exactly what psychological safety is and why a little bit of discomfort is important for team dynamics.

Amy Edmondson [00:03:13]:

Because people are likely to hold back. the truth. We need to figure out how to create the conditions where people will share, will lean in, will take interpersonal risks, you know, will speak up with the truth, will share crazy ideas, will ask for help when they’re in over their head, will admit mistakes. And none of those things I just said are easy for us fallible human beings.

Leanne Elliott [00:03:42]:

Yeah.

Amy Edmondson [00:03:43]:

Um, none of them are fun, really. Maybe sharing ideas can be a little bit fun, but not if we think someone’s going laugh at us. And so later, I gave that experience where you can speak up honestly, even though it’s not easy, as— called it psychological safety. And it’s not— psychological safety doesn’t describe an environment where we’re comfortable.

Amy Edmondson [00:04:08]:

It describes an environment where we’re candid. And not because it’s fun or easy to be candid, but because we so passionately care about each other and about the team’s work, or maybe about the customers or the patients or whoever it is we’re serving, that we’re willing to be uncomfortable in order to do a good job. And I don’t think you can do knowledge work well without being uncomfortable.

Aoife O’Brien [00:04:35]:

There’s this huge expectation on leaders to support those around them and to be the strong one. But we don’t often ask who is there to support the leaders. And this is something that Melissa Doman challenged me on On episode 294.

Melissa Doman [00:04:51]:

You know, I found, and I was quite honest about this in the book, so it’s called Cornered Office, love a good pun, Cornered Office: Why We Need to Talk About Leadership Mental Health. And I wrote either in the preface or the intro that when I started specializing in mental health at work, that I was part of the problem. some of the things that I was doing, much like many other people back then, still dehumanized leaders, expecting them only to support the mental health of their teams and that they would not need that support themselves and that they would just be open to doing it. And it’s just part of the gig.

Aoife O’Brien [00:05:35]:

Yeah.

Melissa Doman [00:05:35]:

And I was part of the problem. And so I saw them as these impact points, which they absolutely are in the workplace, but I was making these assumptions like anybody else that they didn’t need that same care turned towards them because of how they had progressed and ascended in their careers. And I wrote about in the book, I could pinpoint the day when I was doing a workshop for a group of leaders and one of them was like, this is all well and good, but you haven’t even asked us how we feel about doing if we need support, you know, what about that? And I was like, oh my God, I was mortified.

Rebecca Hinds [00:06:20]:

Yeah.

Melissa Doman [00:06:20]:

And so over the years when I did a lot of, you know, leadership coaching with leaders of all levels of seniority and workshops and just working with them, and I really just started seeing them as the human being sitting in front of me, not what they were responsible for. Like society had also conditioned me to do.

Aoife O’Brien [00:06:41]:

Understanding the human behind the title also means being careful of the assumptions that we make about people. Generational differences are one of those assumptions and can sometimes lead us to put people into boxes, like if you’re from an older generation maybe you don’t understand technology, or if you’re, if you’re a newer person you don’t have enough experience. In episode 298, Dr. Mary Collins explains the dangers of falling into these kinds of stereotypes and how we can acknowledge differences without actually falling into that trap.

Dr. Mary Collins [00:07:14]:

One of the reasons I decided to do academic research— there’s so much pop psychology out there and stereotyping. Yeah. And I wanted to get some, you know, good grounded evidence to show what are some of the trends that we’re seeing, the undeniable trends. Like, for example, the digital divide. So we have digital immigrants and we have digital natives.

Aoife O’Brien [00:07:40]:

Yeah.

Dr. Mary Collins [00:07:42]:

Parenting has really shaped the generational behaviors at work. So, and it’s not to say that every Gen Zer is great with technology or every baby boomer doesn’t know how to use Instagram. You know, we have to be really careful that we don’t assign or assume.

Aoife O’Brien [00:08:02]:

Yeah.

Dr. Mary Collins [00:08:02]:

But there are certainly, I think, interesting trends for us to be aware of if we are managing intergenerational teams. And a lot of it is about just building your awareness and your understanding and the need to flex and adapt your approach. As I often say, Aoife, if you take a 24-year-old and a 48-year-old, like, they have grown up in really different worlds. in terms of what’s happening even on the geopolitical stage, what’s happening in the— with technology, with parenting. There’s so many factors that have shaped the behaviors of a 24-year-old and a 48-year-old.

Aoife O’Brien [00:08:49]:

Hmm.

Dr. Mary Collins [00:08:50]:

And they— I think how we need to flex and adapt our approach when we’re dealing with people at different life stages Particularly for line managers, I think it’s a really important skill to be aware of.

Aoife O’Brien [00:09:02]:

Even when we understand people’s individual differences, we still need to look at the environment that they’re operating in. I think we’re quick to jump in and say that someone can’t cope or they’re not resilient enough without properly looking at the environment that we’ve created. In episode 302, Leanne Elliott talks about overwhelm and how job design plays a really important role as to whether we see people as being able to cope, or whether we’ve created the conditions for them to do their best work.

Leanne Elliott [00:09:34]:

It’s having that conversation, which might sound really formal with a friend, to go, how would you prefer me to communicate with you today? You know, it’s either going to be more conversation like that, or it’s going to be, you know, I really enjoyed our voice notes, but was that really difficult for you when you’ve got the kids and trying to make tea? Yeah, it was actually, which is why I replied in— you know, you have those things to figure out that the things that are going to help with my overwhelm but not put my overwhelm onto you.

Aoife O’Brien [00:10:01]:

Yeah.

Leanne Elliott [00:10:01]:

And it’s similar things in organizations, right? Because there are so many things that we’ll do in organizational life with good intentions, but they’re accidentally or unintentionally putting the added pressure or workload onto that person. Whether it be a badly structured meeting, whether it be the days we were allowed to work from home, whether it be policies around flexible work, maybe around how your manager chooses to communicate, is it through a Slack channel? Is it through the hundreds of thousands of emails we get every day? It’s a similar thing that actually a lot of problems can be solved by a conversation and a bit of honesty going, when you do this, it’s making my job harder in this way. So can we do that? And talking it through. Imagine a world where your manager was trying to make your job easier every day.

Aoife O’Brien [00:10:52]:

Thinking and talking about the workplace environment leads us naturally into thinking how individuals actually experience that environment. What is the employee experience? And I think it’s easy to default and think that’s HR’s role, or to think about it as parties and perks of the job. But actually, Gráinne Earley has a much broader definition of what employee experience is. This is a clip from episode 308 of the Happier at Work podcast.

Gráinne Earley [00:11:23]:

There were so many words that employ— was used for employee experience initially. It was employee engagement, it was comms, it was parties, it you know, an HR activation. It was all of these different things. It was inclusivity, it was diversity, it was wellness. So, there’s a huge amount of things that kind of fall in under that banner. And really, employee experience is encompassing everything. But from a day-to-day level for the employee, it’s every touchpoint that they experience. So, it can be something small, like the nice way that they get welcomed into the office, or there’s something new there that’s exciting or a nice touchpoint for them, or, you know, how they are recognized as an employee or rewarded for their, uh, the part they play in a company.

Gráinne Earley [00:12:05]:

Or it can then be the fun stuff. It can be the parties, it can be, you know, team-building activities, it can be wellness. But really, it’s about every touchpoint on their life cycle. So, when they have started in that company to when they leave that company, every element that they kind of touch throughout that journey, really the life cycle of their journey in that company, that’s what employee experience is. It really encompasses everything.

Aoife O’Brien [00:12:27]:

When we talk about the employee experience, it’s easy to talk about the kind of initiatives that we can introduce, but what about how people experience the work on a day-to-day basis? And one of the biggest findings from my own research is the idea of making the connection between what someone does on a day-to-day basis and the impact that they’re having at work. And I was really happy to explore this concept on episode 310 with Dr. Shirley Kavanagh, where we look at the impact and the value and questioning what we’re working on on a day-to-day basis to make sure that we’re working on the right things.

Dr. Shirley Kavanagh [00:13:06]:

Now we’re finding more and more that the business case for something that has a 3-year return on it is just way too long, actually. And from an HR group who are not being very explicit about why this is important and what the benefits are. that doesn’t help that either. So just to your point about impact though and value, which is one of the most important things that you said there, constantly, like any function actually, it’s not just for people functions, HR functions, talent functions, whatever we want to call them, we all need to add value, you know, and we all need to understand what we’re doing. Does it actually add value? And then the next question is value to whom?

Aoife O’Brien [00:13:51]:

Yeah.

Dr. Shirley Kavanagh [00:13:51]:

You know, and it’s really being thoughtful about that before we do anything. And, you know, I think sometimes we lose sight of some of those really important rigours about just saying, okay, let’s step back. What are we actually trying to do here?

Aoife O’Brien [00:14:07]:

On episode 312, Rebecca Hinds explains this idea of impact and value at work becomes increasingly important because AI is there to support us and can do what we’re doing but faster. But actually, we have to question, is that actually the right thing to do? Is it bringing us the benefits? Is it bringing us the value? Is it having the impact that we want to have? In my conversation with Rebecca Hinds, we explore that. Rebecca explains what can happen when apparent productivity comes at the expense of human judgment and work that’s actually useful.

Rebecca Hinds [00:14:45]:

Overseeing the technology, supervising it, cleaning up the messes, feeding AI context is actually the biggest driver of bot sitting. And that term, I think, has struck a chord in particular because it is relatable. It is relatable that this technology is very much positioned as a silver bullet. We see so many headlines around hype and promise and potential. And we know that workers on the ground often don’t feel that way. They feel that often it requires more work, more cognitive effort to use the technology than to just do parts of the work yourself as a human. So So that’s, that’s bot sitting. And we trace this, this cycle between bot sitting and what we call bot shitting.

Rebecca Hinds [00:15:38]:

Bot shitting is, you know, also a compilation of a whole host of different outcomes. It’s, you know, what has been called AI slop. But it’s also the offloading of work that we should be doing as humans. It’s the offloading of judgment. It’s the offloading of smart thinking. It’s shipping AI work that you could cannot explain as a human. And all of this creates this cycle within the organization where you as an individual could very much look productive and look effective in your work. But the organization suffers.

Rebecca Hinds [00:16:16]:

And the classic example I often give is, you know, we can use an AI tool to convert 5 bullet points into a 15-page report. We can ship that 15-page report to a colleague. That colleague says, wow, this is too much information. I’m going to convert it to 5 bullet points. Individually, both people look highly productive, and that’s often what we measure in organizations. We measure the individual productivity. But when you look at the big picture, right, the organization is arguably not any better off for this hamster wheel of botshit or AI slop.

Aoife O’Brien [00:16:53]:

If you haven’t already, I would highly encourage you to go back and listen to those full episodes. And if you’ve listened to them already, why not go and listen back again and see if you learn something new. There’s a reason that psychological safety is the foundation of my Thriving Talent Model. We need to get that absolutely right. You as an individual need to feel safe speaking up, sharing what’s going on for you, and you need to create that kind of environment for those people around you as well. This is not about adding more to your to-do list. It’s about rethinking we actually work on a day-to-day basis to make work better for you and to make work better for those people around you. I would love to know, is there something new that you learned today? Is there something that you’re going to be taking away? Do get involved in the conversation.

Aoife O’Brien [00:17:41]:

I’m most active on LinkedIn. If you want to reach out to me directly, grab me on podcast@happieratwork.ie, and I look forward to hearing from you.