Work-Life Harmony Ideas to Help Slow The Great Resignation: Part 1

This is a two-part blog post originally written for and published by Forbes.com. The second part of the post will be published on Forbes.com and here in January 2022.

The Great Resignation and related labor shortage we are currently experiencing across the country, where employees are leaving their jobs at high rates with no one to backfill, is alarming company leaders who seem at a loss for what to do.

What is causing this shocking phenomenon?

The truth is, there are many factors. Over 750K people have lost their lives due to COVID in the last 16 months and the national birth rate continues to decline. In addition, many people have realized that the way they were living prior to COVID was unsustainable. The forced slow down experienced during the pandemic gave people time to reflect and identify what is important to them. Many have realized they want more time with their families, more time for leisure activities and overall, they want more freedom.

Employees have also learned that they can be more productive outside of the normal work paradigm and so they are demanding more flexibility from their employers. “Work-life Harmony” is no longer just a perk, it’s table stakes. Employees are holding their employers to higher standards whether it be related to health and safety, DEI, or employee treatment (i.e., workload or respect). When they’ve evaluated their companies on these factors, many are simply “refusing to accept the unacceptable.”

Work-Life Balance VS. Work-Life Harmony (Integration)

The problem is the term “work-life balance” creates a false belief that it is possible to keep work and life separate yet equal. The reality, however, is that as a nation, we have now fully embraced technology and the two have not been separate for some time. Technology created a path for work to encroach on personal lives and there was no means to get personal life back. We didn’t adjust. People have been on a hamster wheel – fighting to achieve something that is not achievable – balance. Work-life integration, on the other hand, acknowledges that there is no clean distinction between the two and seeks to help them co-exist in harmony.

The Great Resignation has accelerated technology and as a result, people have realized that work-life balance is a losing proposition. It is very one-sided and work always gets the lion’s share of your time. By necessity, people are now demanding harmony. People want to work in a way that complements their lives. The COVID pandemic has helped them to see that this is possible, and now, they understandably don’t want to go back to a work situation that overtakes their entire lives.

So, how do we, as leaders create a work environment that will attract and retain talent? We need to create environments that promote work-life harmony. In other words, we need to shape business to be more human.

Below please find two ideas that will help you to create better work-life harmony for your employees. I have a total of six actionable ideas, and the other four will appear in a follow-up article that will be published next.

Promote Flexibility & Autonomy

Flexibility allows employees their autonomy. It means they, mostly, can choose when and how they work. This kind of work environment works well with some kind of Management by Objective (MBO) and/or a Management by Exception (MBE) type of leadership.

Coined by Peter Drucker, MBO is management process where goals are agreed upon by both parties. There needs to be some regular cadence to monitoring by the manager to ensure quality and ethical standards.

MBE is mostly attributed to Frederick W. Taylor and is an approach whereby the work is “more self-directed than boss-directed.” The employee is to raise the flag when something deviates outside of the agreed plan.

These approaches give employees a stronger sense of autonomy which allow them to manage the demands of their whole lives or preferences more wholistically.

Hybrid and/or Flexible Work Schedules

Many companies have moved to a hybrid work schedule, however, hybrid and flexible are not the same thing. Hybrid entails the expectation that an employee will work a certain number of weekdays from home and the rest from the office, and its typically still assumes the 9-5, 8-hour workday and includes mandatory anchor days. While this schedule may work for some, many employees are craving more: flexible work schedules.

A flexible work schedule goes hand-in-hand with promoting an employee’s autonomy. Allowing employees the option to work from where they see fit and being flexible with the hours they work can create more harmony between their personal and work lives. If an employee prefers to work from home in the mornings so they can get an earlier start, or work 4, 10-hour days so they can volunteer at their kids’ school or take weekend trips more often, allowing them the flexibility to do so can create an environment in which they can be the most present and productive in their current life state.

As you can see, neither of the options above is easy to implement, and this is compounded by the fact that each speaks to customization, which means complexity will go up. The days of one-size-fits-all are over. While that made managing the masses easier, it forced employees to adapt their lives. Today’s Americans are used to having it their way, and this now extends to how we want work. I have no doubt that those employers who adapt and innovate quickly to offer options that support the way that people want to live will surely win the war for talent.

5 Tips for Organizations to Maintain an Inclusive Culture During the Holiday Season

As we come to the end of 2021, organizations can put their DEI strategy into practice. Holiday parties should be about coming together, celebrating all cultures, and highlighting the successes over the year. Here are 5 tips on how to create an inclusive celebration where no one feels excluded.

The Name of the Event Matters

Be intentional, celebrate the diversity of your team. Have a “holiday celebration” that focuses on time together, laughter, and the celebration of getting through another year in a pandemic.

Decorations Have Meaning

Be mindful of decorations and what they represent. Avoid having a theme that represents only one religious’ practice.

Holidays Are Celebrated Throughout the Year

Be inclusive when planning the day and time of your celebration. Avoid celebrating with food and libations when one or more of your employees’ religious practices require them to fast or stay home on that day.

Food Represents Culture

Be conscientious of food choices for all your employees. Have a potluck so people can bring food that represents their culture.

How to support employees who opt-out of the celebration:

Be thoughtful and don’t put pressure on your employees to participate in the celebration. Given another full year of video conferencing, some employees may want to spend time at home or in nature unplugged!

Happy Holidays!

5 Ways Leaders Can Better Promote Inclusion in the Workplace

When it comes to DEI initiatives many organizations find that the “I” is the hardest part. Leaders striving to create a more inclusive workplace quickly figure it out there’s no magic policy, program, or check list that can make employees feel recognized and included.

To help you walk the talk, we’ll breakdown what workplace inclusion is and share with you some of our top tips for embedding inclusiveness into all parts of your organization.

What is inclusion?

There are a lot of definitions of “Inclusion” out there, but here is one we feel does the concept justice:

Inclusion is a collection of actions, practices, and behaviors that both promote and result in people feeling safe, accepted, valued for who they are across different dimensions of diversity and for what they bring to and contribute within the workplace. This definition comes from Inclusive Leadership: Transforming Diverse Lives, Workplaces, and Societies by Bernardo Ferdman.

Actions are necessary, but what we are really after when we talk about inclusion is ensuring that all people in our sphere of influence feel that they and their contributions to the workplace are highly valued.

What does inclusion look like in the workplace?

Ferdman states in his book that if “people who are different in notable ways” do not experience inclusion, they might “be less likely to fully engage, participate, and contribute.”

If a workplace has a truly inclusive environment, then every person will feel equally welcomed to fully engage, be themselves, and contribute at work. An inclusive workplace offers space to acknowledge, honor, and discuss differences in perspective from people of all different backgrounds, ages, ethnicities, etc. This kind of work environment ultimately increases performance.

Without true inclusion, companies miss out on employees’ engaging their full, authentic selves within the workplace, which leads to missing out on employees’ best contributions and ideas. So, how do we make inclusion a reality?

5 Ways Leaders Can Foster Inclusion in the Workplace

Model Authenticity

Leaders pave the way for an inclusive work environment by showing up as their authentic self, so that others begin to feel safe doing so, too. We can do away with office politics by being truer versions of ourselves and showing up ready to welcome and embrace others in the same way.

In order to show up authentically, leaders can better align their “work persona” with their “home personas”. One way to do this is by showing your employees it’s okay to make mistakes. No one is perfect, and there’s no reason to act like that isn’t true at work. Owning your mistakes increases the sense of physiological safety in the workplace and encourages more authentic interaction with employees.

Include Your Team in Decision-Making

Seeking out your employees’ ideas and taking them seriously increases their buy-in, retention, and overall employee engagement. Not to mention, it’s also better for your business. Diversity of thought coming from people with different backgrounds and experiences “leads to better decision-making”. Try using surveys to gather feedback or even call a meeting with your employees to brainstorm solutions and set the standard that “no ideas are bad ideas.”

Now, many decisions cannot be made with your employees, but if you stay transparent about which decisions can solicit their input and which cannot, then you can keep the spirit of inclusion alive and well within your decision-making processes.

Work to Eliminate Bias

In HBRs Inclusive Leadership Assessment (ILA) of more than 400 leaders rated by more than 4,000 people who surrounded those leaders, it was found that the most important trait in fostering inclusivity was “a leader’s visible awareness of bias.” In order to work towards eliminating bias in the workplace, leaders must first not be afraid to identify it and acknowledge it publicly.

Once you are able to acknowledge personal and organizational biases toward certain approaches that stem from those with different perspectives and backgrounds, then you can work to diminish this bias. We can honor and lean into diversity truthfully by acknowledging and questioning our own biases.

Get Comfortable with Uncomfortable Conversations

As leaders, it’s important to lean into conversations that challenge us. It shows employees that we are serious about celebrating and embracing diversity within the organization and that we aren’t afraid to work through differences together in a respectful way.

Having conversations where our assumptions and perspectives are directly challenged feels very personal and emotional, so it’s wise to set aside specific times to have these conversations and prepare to go into them calmly and with an open mind. Try to focus on facts rather than feeling and make it clear to your employees that you are committed to finding a solution together.

Keep Yourself and Others Accountable

Inclusion may be part of your organizations core values, but does it really happen within your workplace? In order to make inclusion more than just a buzzword, leaders must be willing to hold others accountable. This means taking an active inventory of your business and assessing whether inclusion is happening day to day. If not, then it’s important to call it out and hold your organization to a higher standard.

On the flipside, when we, as leaders, fail to uphold our standard of inclusion, then we must work to improve. Ask for honest feedback from employees, and don’t response defensively when you’ve fallen short. Rather, ask how you can increase feelings of inclusion and always follow up to ensure you are growing.

The goal of these practices is that employees would feel safer, appreciated, and valued. As you continue to work toward creating a more inclusive work environment, ask your employees to join you and encourage them to share ideas.

Where you can’t implement their suggestions, come up with meaningful, alternative ways of achieving the same outcomes regarding inclusivity that their suggestions spotlighted. Ultimately, it’s our responsibility, as leaders, to change the organization’s culture toward greater inclusivity, but we must look to our employees to determine if we are succeeding.

3 Tips for Applying Equity Strategies to a Hybrid Workplace

With the ever-changing landscape of our employee workspace, creating equity within the workplace is more than a popular topic or initiative, it’s a necessity. Equity can have a lasting impact on an organization like increasing retention, internal promotions, and fostering dedication from employees to their jobs and their company for the long haul.

With the new challenges remote and hybrid employees are currently facing, many employees don’t feel that they are getting the treatment they deserve and are leaving their jobs at record numbers. So, how can we create a more stable and predictable workplace for our employees—one that aligns with the core values of a company, but also with the overall business goals? Managers must learn to effectively manage the dual zone: the hybrid and remote workforce.

It’s not an easy task, especially when, whether we like to admit it or not, remote workers face a greater challenge in avoiding biased perceptions from co-workers and managers simply because of the nature of their unsupervised workspace. This is something we must intentionally address and work to fix within our own spheres of influence.

Here’s 3 tips to ensure your workplace is an equitable one:

1. Use Duties Rather Than Employees as Your Guide

Companies who once operated solely in person now have the difficult task of deciding which roles can be fully remote and which roles require a hybrid work format. The best way to avoid bias in this decision-making process is to first look at the job description of each role. Then you can determine which tasks within that job description are better suited for in-person work versus remote work. When you make it about the tasks rather than the individual contributor, previous judgments about that employee are less likely to cloud your judgement.

What do we mean by clouding your judgement?

Well, naturally, a star employee may be trusted to work remotely more than an average performer, or managers may tend to want to connect more in person with staff who are easier to manage. These biases, often gone unnoticed, can easily creep into the decision-making process when determining which kind of work format an employee will follow.

Tip Impact: When we are intentional about mitigating biases up front, employees are more likely to feel a sense of autonomy and predictability in their work life and the decisions around their workspace (i.e., remote or hybrid) are a result of fair assessment.

2. Remote Employees Need Impromptu Touchpoints Too!

Leaders are responsible for and should be mindful of granting equal access to their remote and hybrid staff. Those who are fully remote consequently don’t get the privilege of natural, impromptu relationship-building moments. Things like lunch breaks, hallway conversations, and the three minutes before a meeting starts all serve to build connections between coworkers and managers that lead to greater trust and a healthy and cohesive team.

How is this possible with remote employees?

If you have remote employees, you’ll need to be more intentional about relationship building time to simulate an in-person experience. These relationship building interactions may need to be inserted into your schedule to ensure they take place. You can build time at the beginning or at the end of meetings for people to share personal moments like binged watch shows, recent sporting or outdoor events, funny family or pet moments, etc. These moments can strengthen a sense of connection and reduce the feeling of isolation by your remote employees.

Tip Impact: These micro-relational deposits can add up to big gains over time. When employees feel a greater sense of trust with their manager, constructive feedback is received more openly. As an extra bonus, employees who have good working relationships with their manager are more likely to feel comfortable communicating their needs, which are important to understand especially since remote and hybrid employee needs are often different.

3. Visibility…A Primary Ingredient for Equitable Opportunities

Your remote and hybrid employees should always receive the same development and promotion opportunities, but there are challenges fully remote employees face in receiving a fair shot. Visibility is the main culprit in the disproportionate promotional opportunities remote employees tend to receive. Oftentimes, remote employees’ work goes unnoticed because their daily efforts go unseen. And though it’s not intentional, unlike hybrid employees, it can be harder for them to gain access to impromptu development opportunities.

How do I level the playing field?

Leaders must find ways to maintain high visibility of remote employees daily. One way is to be intentional about acknowledging their successes in group meetings and publicly recognizing notable contributions they make. When you praise employees out loud, coworkers and managers are more likely to remember their efforts and accomplishments.

Tip Impact: The clearer the path to success, the more committed employees will be. They’ll know that their goals are being acknowledged and will be able to see their future with the company and how to achieve it.

The three tips described above are some of the essential ingredients needed to be successful in cultivating an equitable workplace for both your hybrid and remote employees. If you, as a leader, can set-up your employees for success by being agile and having the necessary resources to meet the individual contributor needs, your teams will be successful regardless of the workplace they inhabit.

How To Create Psychological Safety In A Hybrid Work World

Originally published in Forbes

Creating psychological safety is a foundational step in cultivating a high-performing team culture. Dr. Amy Edmondson, a pioneer of the concept of psychological safety, characterizes this term as a “climate of openness” where team members feel comfortable sharing ideas, admitting mistakes and challenging the status quo. When this kind of safety exists in the workplace, you can imagine that there is room for growth, for innovation and for teams to thrive collaboratively.

In a hybrid work environment, there are clear challenges to creating psychological safety. Hybrid teams don’t have the direct access to one another that in-person teams do. Without as much day-to-day communication, opportunity for calibration and relational comfortability, psychological safety can be harder to build. If you want to foster an innovative, high-performing culture within a part virtual, part in-person team that’s threatened by distance and abnormal communication patterns, you have to be proactive.

Below are four ways leaders can create psychological safety in a hybrid work environment.

1. Create socialization opportunities.

To foster an environment of trust and safety in the hybrid workspace, you must be purposeful about socialization by providing intentional opportunities for your team members to be heard and seen for who they are as people.

In person, you have the opportunity for quick hallway conversations, personal catch-ups in the elevator and other unplanned, yet relationship-fostering interactions. The lack of these human-to-human interactions in a hybrid environment can create a disconnect between people, sabotaging their ability to feel safe with one another.

To create space for these kinds of connections, try:

• Baking in five extra minutes into each hybrid team meeting for catching up

• Implementing regular out-of-work hangouts such as happy hours or team dinners

• Intentionally checking in on remote (and in-person) team members just to see how they are doing

Simply providing an opportunity for your team members to be heard and seen can positively contribute to the collective sense of psychological safety.

2. Communicate effectively.

To promote psychological safety, communication must be a top priority. Only when employees feel heard and included will they feel confident enough to speak up, ask questions and provide valuable knowledge that can propel performance forward.

For remote workers, communication can be especially challenging and with the physical disconnect, they may even experience feelings of paranoia. They may start to read into things that aren’t there or feel that they aren’t doing well enough — that their job may be at risk. There are a few ways to combat this hybrid environment communication challenge. Try:

• Setting clear expectations for timelines, goals and benchmarks for remote and in-person employees alike

• Offering regular employee feedback (positive and negative) to cultivate a sense of security and confidence

• Conducting team calibration by doing regular project check-ins to help eliminate the chance of miscommunication and allow for course correction on the spot

3. Model receptivity to feedback.

Feedback can be a touchy subject, especially for those you don’t often see in person. Working remotely may make receiving feedback from one’s leader seem like a bigger deal than it actually is. To normalize receiving feedback, it should first and foremost be modeled by leaders.

As a leader, recognizing when you’ve made a mistake, asking for productive feedback and implementing that feedback will go a long way in showing your team that you’re serious about creating psychological safety. Because psychological safety is largely about how people are treated when things go wrong, taking responsibility for your own mistakes and showing that it’s acceptable to do so will set the expectation for how your team should react to their own mistakes. This can dismantle the fear of making mistakes and normalize accepting feedback.

4. Practice your awareness.

When leaders are under too much pressure, this threat can trigger the fight or flight reflex resulting in poorly reacting to situations, assigning blame or transferring stress to others. If these responses are occurring frequently, psychological safety cannot thrive. Leaders must be able to slow down enough to become aware of how their stress may be entering a conversation and how their team’s stress is being communicated.

When you’re talking to an employee, pay attention to the effects of your actions, words and non-verbal cues. Observe their body language to determine in the moment if what you are saying is being well received. This may be harder to do with remote employees, but doing regular video check-ins rather than phone calls can help you read their reactions much better.

The challenging part about creating a psychologically safe work environment is that once it exists, it needs to be actively maintained, otherwise it will be short-lived. That’s why, in order to maintain psychological safety in a hybrid work environment, you need to recognize and own when there has been a breach in psychological safety. Seek to understand and apologize for any part you may have played in violating it, and actively work to reestablish it. It won’t be a perfect journey but being open and honest along the way will only reinforce your desire to create a safe environment for your hybrid team.

Activating Resilient Leadership

Resilience is not about being untouched by adversity
or unruffled by difficulties. It’s to play an active role
in how difficulty transforms you.
Kelly McGonigal

Leaders have always been resilient

Especially in these times of a pandemic, seismic cultural shifts and global volatility. Leaders need an extra strong dose of this capability to continue to lead themselves and their organizations. I find guidance from Joshua Cooper Ramo who predicted this kind of environment when he wrote his book, The Age of the Unthinkable in 2009. He offered some important perspectives from history that encourage us to engage in being resilient enough to take more risks to uncover more opportunity and follow the pattern of winners who have always engaged in more change.

How can we get ready for more complexity and adaptation?

We are living examples of our ability to recover from adversity and pursue our goals despite challenges. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that we are more resilient than we give ourselves credit for. Perhaps this happens because we have a natural instinct to focus on problems instead of what is working. Our brains are hardwired to pay attention to differences in our environment and therefore, we experience disruption as a threat.

Resilient leaders say “Yes” to 5 Questions

In my workshops I often ask people to think about a time in their lives when they faced adversity and restored their resilience. Over many years a shared pattern has emerged where they describe actions that affirm each of these following questions.

Did you make sense of what was happening in a meaningful way?
Did you go beyond your limits?
Did you take direct action on things that you could control?
Did you calm your body and mind?
Did you feel connected to and supported by others?

Most often they indicate that a number of the above responses were taking place, often at different levels of awareness and engagement. This exercise validates a “map” of five mindsets/practices/approaches that have been shown by research on people who have sustained their courage and stamina to regain their lives and those that thrive through the life cycle.

The 5 C’s

I represent the 5 capabilities of resilience as the map at the top of this post. Viewing this as Resilience Land encourages the spirit of adventure and complexity in navigating complex environments. Each of the 5 C’s represents a territory with its own challenges and set of approaches. All of these competencies are important to sustaining resilience as a person, team member and leader.

Coherence, Control, Centered, Challenge, Connection

The Discovery of Resilience Land

My research began with a curiosity to explore what primary care physicians do to overcome burnout and stress in high demand environments. I drew on prior research on hardiness, burnout and stress prevention and risk reduction. The focus initially was on enhancing stress management skills and practices and buffering individuals to cope more creatively with high demand situations. All that time the environmental conditions/structures in which they worked was not actively considered to be involved or a target of change.

As my experience with organizations grew it became clear to me that the interaction between the environment (culture, practices, policies, leadership) and the levels of stress in the professionals was connected. My practice shifted from “buffering” the individuals to engaging more systematically with leaders to shift the working conditions/culture as a vital source for change.

5 C’s serve as a Personal and Organizational Compass

Over the years these 5 C’s have served as a useful framework for leaders to increase their personal capacity and assess and prioritize ways to navigate strategic redirection and enhance renewal and transformation for their teams and organizations.

Applications for Individual Resilience

Resilience can be built, like a muscle, overtime with practice, attention and feedback. Individual leaders can use the 5 elements as a framework to articulate developmental areas and acknowledge unidentified capacities.
Applications for Resilient Leadership

Each of the 5 elements that support individual resilience can be used to create the conditions for teams and organizations to thrive. They give guidance for balancing and buffering areas that are impacted by turbulence and provide a way for the leader to focus on actions that will provide renewal and resilience.
Coherence-Understand your strengths and acknowledge what you have already accomplished. Own your history. Begin to create your future capabilities. Identify milestones that will indicate success and satisfaction for you. Reframe past and current experiences as opportunities for growth and purpose fulfillment.
Coherence– Talk about the future in a way that makes sense and has a way for everyone to participate. Describe what you see ahead, share milestones to indicate what is worth working toward. Give others the time to make sense of what is happening. Affirm core values connecting to past performance. Engage in redefining what success and satisfaction would look like, reset expectations.
Control– Identify areas that you can and can’t control, experiment with exploring possibilities for influence. Reestablish patterns that help you create momentum and a sense of accomplishment. Make choices where you can and participate to explore options. Deepen your self-care practices.
Control– Talk about what has not changed, reestablish patterns, rhythms, and workplace rituals. Identify what you know, what are the opportunities for choice, involvement and participation. Help to focus on what can be done now, with the choices available. Identify what they can count on you for.
Challenge– Identify your self-limiting beliefs and reframe positive outcomes. Stretch your capacity to see options and experiment with being uncomfortable. Build momentum with step-by step actions with thing you can do better. Acknowledge your increasing confidence and support others to do more of what is working.
Challenge– Encourage stretch in areas of strength, build on what is already working. Support risk taking in the direction of where adaptation is needed. Identify opportunities for improvement and innovation, build confidence and comfort for trying and learning.
Connection-Acknowledging others who have helped you along the way. Recognize and affirm the importance and impact of other support and encouragement during challenges. Repair and rebuild relationships that have been disrupted, express your appreciation and gratitude for others.
Connection-Affirm shared experiences and express your appreciation and gratitude for others. Make time to connect with others before jumping into work talk. Acknowledge what has brought you together and listen to their concerns. Cross functional boundaries to create relationships to gather useful insight and feedback.
Centered-Having the capacity to calm your body and mind when confronted by complexity and volatility. Practice being able to shift mental and physical experience in face of threat and stress. Know how to access calm and balance in mind, body, feelings when clarity and empathy are needed. Having a set of self-regulation practices to use in the face of threat and stress.
Centered-Encourage others to shift their mental and physical experience in face of threat and stress. Support others to access calm and balance in order to create time to find clarity and empathy. Engaging others in practices that help them pause, gather, settle and focus to find realistic optimism.

Resilience is the new core competency for leaders

The capability of resilience has long been an underlying marker for leaders who create success over and over again. Resilience can be learned and developed to provide a strong framework for making choices for personal and organizational actions. The synergy of connecting the resilience of the leader to create a positive impact on employees and organizational culture is emerging from our current experience and can be passed on to the next generation of leaders.