Checklist to Start Rewarding the Human Work

When we announced our “Pay your people for the human work FFS” campaign we did think it was a tall ask but we had no idea what height we were talking about. Over the last few weeks, every conversation seemed to reiterate a hard-to-swallow truth: we’re aeons away from being ready for the message. After years of having repeated ad nausea “You have HumanDebt. To compete in a marketplace that puts people at the centre so that they can create technology as fast as possible, you have to lower it. The only efficient way to do so is to “outsource it to the edge” - i.e. distribute it to the employees both as individuals and as teams and effectively ask them to better their behaviours and emotions through human work” that message is only now starting to reluctantly land but the next logical step of “… and since they’re expected to do that human work you must think of ways to recognise and reward it” seems to represent yet another immense logical leap.

As ever, interrogating the “why” of it is academic and largely unuseful, but chances are that the reasons are part of that same debt - how organisations don’t think of their people topic cohesively and at a strategic level and how, the pockets of care, while some times located at the HR level as an exception, are really mostly resting with technology leaders having to really show delivery excellence and being unable to do so because of their HumanDebt and yet having no say in the de facto processes that affect their human capital. It’s a vicious circle most don’t even recognise leave alone can they attempt to break.

Of the companies we have spoken to that are receptive to the crusade, most have done something already. At the very least they have considered what it is that can and should be included in the human work and are commencing the exploration regarding the ways that would make the work stick the best. They are asking what behaviours they want to incentivise and what skills they have to grow. Those are good questions.

Learning - and in a sense curiosity- is the easiest to quantify and underline so many companies are starting to find ways to measure it fairly. That’s one of the many things that people have to demonstrate and that they can improve through their human work efforts. Some leave it there as they don’t have a genuine burning desire for change and it gets harder after this level but others leave it as they don’t know what else to query or reward.

So what if you’re a genuinely open-hearted organisation wanting to transform towards being a true human-centric organisation with a solid culture free of HumanDebt? Where should you start in this exploration of establishing if the human work is happening and how to reward it?