written by Leanne Holdsworth, co-author of Human Work: Five Leadership Mindsets for Humanising workplaces
It impacts us all
At the absurdly young age of 27 I made the decision to throw in the towel on corporate life. The year before I had won the Young Chartered Accountant of the year for Auckland/Northland and so had what seemed to be a stellar career in front of me. But I couldn’t stand another morning of getting into the lift at the office and leaving most of me in the lobby to pick up on the way back down. I didn’t get how the leaders didn’t understand that if all of me were welcomed in the workplace, if I was invited to contribute, was listened to, I could add so much more value to the business and feel more true to who I was. It didn’t feel very human. And I thought it was just me. Until I had a lightbulb moment a few years later where I realised that this was a systemic issue - it wasn’t personal at all!
What if we could make our workplaces more human I wondered?
Nearly 30 years later, I’ve spent most of my career supporting organisations to make their workplaces more human and their organisations more sustainable.
An average person spends 80,000-90,000 [1] hours over their lifetime at work - more time than we do any other thing other than sleep. By default, those 80,000 hours have a significant impact, not just on those 80,000 hours at work but also on who we are in the rest of our lives.
If we put ourselves in the shoes of someone we love; an adult child, mother, brother, good friend, ourselves, what sort of work experience do we want for them over those 80,000 hours? And is it possible that this might be possible for all our fellow humans?
Leadership mindsets for human workplaces
For the past three years, my co-author of Human Work; Five Leadership Mindsets for humanising the workplace and I interviewed business leaders from around the world who are intentionally creating human workplaces; ones that supports people to be at their best at work, whatever that means for them, for the benefit of every aspect of their lives and the achievement of the organisation's purpose.
Many organisations make helpful moves toward humanising their workplaces like Wellbeing initiatives, DEI policies, hybrid work policies. All these help. And it is not the same as being intentional about creating a human workplace. Policies are part of humanising a workplace and at it’s core a human workplace has an intentional decision by the Executive to move in this direction, including practising their way into the mindsets that support human work.
What we learnt was that rather than there being a checklist of the top 10 things to do to create a human workplace, that there were mindsets that enabled leaders to create the conditions for humans to truly thrive.
Let’s just take one of those; learning and growth. Here we heard from all leaders, rather unsurprisingly, that leaders doing their own developmental work was crucial to creating a human workplace (vertical development). Here we are talking specifically about developing more sophisticated ways of thinking, and self knowledge which is different to the way we often hold development which is about adding more skills, knowledge and capabilities.
And how does a learning and growth mindset make a workplace more human? Have you ever come across leaders in organisations who don’t know how to listen deeply to others? Or don’t seem able to think reflectively about their own behaviour or who focus all on the task and very little on relationship? Who are blind to the impact they have on others? A human workplace makes sure that learning and growth is just the water we swim in here. In a workplace that leans heavily into this mindset, you could walk around the workplace and ask anyone what their learning edge is (the place at which you don’t know what to do next, or what decision to make, or how to think about something) they are working on right now and they would be able to tell you.
Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey in their book, An Everyone Culture; becoming a deliberately developmental organisation, help us understand the cost of not taking this mindset on as an organisation:
“In most organisations nearly everyone is doing a second job no one is paying them for - namely, covering their weaknesses, trying to look their best, and managing other people's impressions of them. There may be no greater waste of a company’s resources. The ultimate cost: neither the organisation nor its people are able to realise their full potential.”
With a learning and growth mindset, it is safe to not have it all together; to mess up and not get it right the first time.
Why should organisations create more human workplaces?
This is the easy question. There are so many reasons and they fall into three main buckets:
It’s good for the individual
It’s good for the organisation
It’s good for our communities
For the individual
Levels of workplace stress and burnout are high. In New Zealand, 47% of the New Zealand and Australian workforce experienced stress during a lot of yesterday [2].
A human workplace not only looks to reduce high levels of stress and burnout but also creates the conditions for:
More connection and understanding
More devolved leadership
More belonging
Greater connection to organisation purpose
More human systems
Stronger self awareness and empathy
For the organisation
Just 23% of the New Zealand and Australian workforce are engaged at work [3]. And engagement is not contentment. True engagement means your people are psychologically present to do their work - they understand what to do - they have what they need and they have a supportive manager and a supportive team. They know why their work matters. They are work ready.
Then the rest of us are either quiet quitting (just putting in the least effort), while 11% of us are actively disengaged [3].
And at the same time, 43% are watching for or actively seeking a new job [3].
And all of this costs us as an organisation in lost productivity and recruitment costs.
And here although we are talking about the costs of toxic culture, which is clearly at the other end of the spectrum of human work. In March 2022, MIT Sloan Management Review published the research of Donald Sull, Charles Sull, William Cipolli and Caio Brighenti on factors causing the Great Resignation in the USA. Toxic culture was the biggest factor pushing people out the door during the Great Resignation (10.4 times more likely to contribute to attrition than compensation). And what toxic culture means to people was ‘disrespectful’, ‘non-inclusive’, ‘unethical’, ‘cut-throat’ and ‘abusive’ [4].
One of the leadership mindsets for humanising work is Belonging. And what we know is that employees with a lower sense of belonging have a 313% stronger intention to quit compared
to those with strong social connections and a 34% lower goal attainment at work [5]
For society
With 60% of us believing our jobs are the most important factor influencing mental health [6] and believing our Managers have just as much of an impact on people’s mental health as their spouse (both 69%) — and even more of an impact than their doctor (51%) or therapist (41%) [3] we can use our workplaces to turn this global mental health epidemic around.
We all have experience of ourselves in how we show up at home when we are working in unhealthy or toxic workplaces or for a manager who just doesn’t get human workplaces compared to how we show up at home with good workplaces. Imagine then the positive ripple effect on families and communities if all our workplaces were truly human workplaces.
What can you do to humanise your workplace?
Ok, so we have a sense of what a human workplace is and why it’s important that we move in this direction. But what can you do in a practical sense to nudge your organisation in the direction of human work? Well chances are you are already supporting this move in some ways. If you were to take a systemic approach to humanising workplaces, then choose a few of these actions.
Build the business case for humanising workplaces. Use the statistics in this article as a start and feel free to reach out to me for more - there is a tonne.
Use all your influencing skills to ensure the Executive are engaged in their own vertical developmental leadership work. So they can walk the talk of a learning and growth mindset.
Find others in the organisation who care about this - even outside of HR. You won’t be on your own. And then keep talking about it together, supporting each other in your nudges.
Make your own growth edges more visible
Ensure human work is included in your leadership development initiatives
Look for creating more agency around when, where and how people work
Keep championing authentic moves toward DEI and wellbeing
Make organisational purpose real for people. Ensure everyone knows how they contribute toward purpose
Make sure people feel seen
Ensure listening to learn [7] is a way of being
Look for ways you can walk the talk of humanising work; not unintentionally excluding others, listening to learn, acknowledging others
Use every interaction as an opportunity for someone to leave feeling better about themselves (even in tough conversations)
Review your systems against the human work mindsets and see where you might be able to amend policies or systems (formal and informal). For instance what policies might be working against creating the conditions for trust in the workplace?
Complete this organisation human work self assessment
Conclusion
Human workplaces support both the organisation to achieve its purpose and the individual to be at their best for the benefit of their whole lives and the benefit of our communities. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to work in an organisation with an Executive team that “gets” human work.
But even if we are not, we, each of us, have the capacity to make our immediate work environment more human by the way we show up.
What is a mindset that you might be able to take on that might nudge your team toward being more human?