The name of this blog comes from our mission at INFLUENCE: “To empower people with clarity and confidence.”
Our objective is to provide brief but meaningful topics (under 500 words) that inspire, educate and empower leaders through resources both inside and outside of INFLUENCE. This week’s edition is provided by David Salmons.
While many employees struggle with burnout as a result of the pandemic and “great resignation,” they’ve been loudly advised by experts – and in many cases, their own managers – to seek more me-time. Examples of this include suggestions that employees take Friday’s off, dismiss emails dubbed as non-critical, or say no to the impromptu meetings which have risen exponentially since work-from-home became normal.
Laurence Lock Lee recently published an interesting article about this. Lee’s response to these me-time suggestions is the same as any employee with an ounce of accountability and a sense of real-world cause and effect: how is disappearing the solution when it produces an avalanche of unfulfilled responsibilities?
It’s his thoughts on the topic that we’ll explore today.
First, he points out that, well intentioned as the me-time advice may be, it can create more crisis, not less. And to be clear, Lee doesn’t view self-care as a problem. Self-care has obvious merit. He just views it as a limited and perhaps over-emphasized idea when, from his perspective, a more comprehensive solution is required.
Lee’s reasoning is as follows: “In reality, few of us are islands in our workplaces. If we were to carve out a good portion of our time to go offline, it is going to impact someone else — and potentially with disastrous consequences for the organization as a whole.”
That said, he suggests looking to research that indicates the best functioning teams manage stress through workplace cultures that emphasize trust and co-worker concern. More specifically, he speaks of research confirming that an increase in trust amongst co-workers turns destructive stress into challenging stress – THAT being the kind in which coworkers continue to thrive.
This may be difficult to visualize, so to provide some examples, here’s his thoughts on recent research.
“The high-performing teams… invariably spoke about the understanding they shared among their fellow team members… We heard of remote and distributed teams developing a team charter, either formally or informally, to cater for the unavoidable absences of a team member. We heard phrases like ‘we have each other’s back’ to describe how the team can flexibly adapt to members’ absences. The levels of trust developed were high [and] team social capital ensured that there was no free-riding.”
In addition, he noted that the kind of trust that creates high-performance environments is often developed outside the confines of workplace tasks. For example, organizations have been creating digital communities that provide “safe places to connect and share support.” And while these communities may offer shared insights regarding work-from-home efficiencies, they also welcome insights regarding food, pets, children, plants, etc., in part because work-zones now involve all of these elements as potential stressors.
The key point here, Lee emphasizes, is that the topics involved are important to the degree that they support the members’ sense of connectedness as well as well-being.
And there it is: an organizational stress strategy that has less to do with “self-care” and more to do with “us-care”. All because, according to Lee, building a high-trust culture is an approach that creates teams with the flexibility and productivity to thrive in situations that otherwise could lead to system collapse.