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Anti-Impression Management new practice: I wrote a book called “People Before Tech: Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age” and you can find a discount for it at the bottom of this page, and we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams. If you care about it- come talk to us.

This week is one unitary theme, so for those of you who already read the other articles in the Chasing Psychological Safety series, this is more of the same but as usual, with a more cutting and real tone. For those who have not, one of them is explaining the theory of it here and the other is focused on practical tips on how to accomplish it here.

If you go researching it there isn’t much although I found an Oregon small team that had been tackling it already in the workplace and a Wikipedia entry (related to a specific D&I related study I then went down the rabbit hole of researching after and it is fascinating and totally worthwhile!) which defined it as “the process of rehabilitating one’s way of perceiving the other(s) in question in one’s mind and in their consequent behavior.”

I arrived at it from Basecamp’s David’s letter trying to explain (or “excuse” if you’d rather) the debacle where he practically hints that their workers have veered more towards being keyboard warriors than true teammates because they’ve never before gone this long without meeting in person. And if we leave aside all other -big theme- aspects of that particular situation as I will here, the claim that the pandemic isolation has even hurt companies that were well versed in being online is immediately obvious and should make us all pause.

What happens next, if we are to “return to normal” or “step into hybrid”? Do we carry on as nothing happened, or do we acknowledge the loss of emotional bond and rebuild it?