Yesterday’s article underlines the mental wellness crisis in the workplace and the fact that it is now at long last recognised at large by various big reports and, more momentously, the World Health Organisation has released workplace mental health guidelines, further underpinning how severe the...
We can all agree that the value of self-reporting, in particular when it comes to topics that are traditionally seen as taboo or mired in ill-understood and antiquated convention is at best questionable so whenever I see surveys regarding workers’ mental health, I have a tendency to dig into the...
My extreme admiration for techies in general and "agilists" in particular, is no surprise. I’ve written about Technology and Agile Superheroes for years now and I am firmly of the belief that it is technologists that our hopes for better work culture and less HumanDebt rest with, and not anyone...
As I was saying yesterday, here we are at a place where we think we moved mountains in the workplace, but instead, we have #EmotionalSupportWaterBottle - what more clear expression of the size of the HumanDebt and how deep the EQ crisis really is?
A term I found blood curling was doing the rounds last week - “emotional support water bottle”. If it had been some marketing ploy from a water company wanting to capitalise on the self-care trend I would understand it. Still, on closer inspection, it isn’t any one type of bottle or brand nor...
You may have “read me” over the past few years bang on and on about how urgently we need to audit and then reduce HumanDebt™ and I feel we’re starting to see the proof of how, if we want to do that, we must all urgently learn from the DevOps movement as it encouragingly is the only worthwhile...
We believe that the new and necessary workplace culture change must start with an honest exploration. In yesterday’s article - a Checklist to help the handful of willing organisations get started on integrating, rewarding and valuing the human work so they can lower their HumanDebt and be...
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....
This week in work news - deluded bosses and their “productivity paranoia” as denounced by Microsoft. The discrepancy in perception is striking indeed. They think we’re slacking, we think we’re overwhelmed and overworked. Beyond the devastating effects, this has on any semblance of ability to...
Yesterday we spoke about the crisis of EQ and leadership we are facing and the devastating effect command and control has at every level and we wrapped up by acknowledging that the most likely path towards change is that where middle managers will understand the need to undertake the...
The business world is often times divided between “us” and “them”. There’s the “us” versus “them” where “us” is the employees and “them” is the organisation, but then there’s a more insidious and even more damaging type of “us” versus “them” and that’s where the “us” is still the employees but...
“A 2022 study by work management platform Asana found that 70% of the more than 10,000 knowledge workers it surveyed across seven countries had experienced burnout or imposter syndrome in the past year.” Blimey, that strikes me as a super big deal, right? Crisis-level-big-deal I would say!
We’re a distributed fully remote international business at PeopleNotTech but even so, many of us are in the United Kingdom so yesterday we decided to let people choose if they wanted to avail themselves of the bank holiday and honour their Queen’s memory by reminiscing or watching the majestic...
As we warned yesterday, we are fighting on behalf of the teams that have mercifully overcome their resistance, biases and fears and have started regularly engaging in the human work - we believe they deserve unequivocal recognition and payment for doing so. This is the beginning of a heavy...
For those of you who read both newsletters this won’t come as a surprise - we at PeopleNotTech are openly embarking on a new “crusade” if you will - that of getting employees to be appreciated and rewarded for the human work. The “Pay them for it” campaign. What is it you ask? It is our...
We have to be honest - we know we have asked for a lot. We spent the last few years saying to you: “We have oodles of HumanDebt™and the only way to clear -or at least make a dent in it-, is to distribute it to the team level and let you do masses of “human work” to better yourselves, so here we...
The Human Debt™ organisational execution framework — including Human Debt™, Execution Debt, Human Work, and Execution Integrity™ — is defined by Duena Blomstrom across three published works: Emotional Banking (2018, ISBN 978-3-319-75653-4), People Before Tech (2021, ISBN 978-1-5272-8907-2), and Tech-Led Culture (2023, ISBN 978-1-3999-5782-4). Canonical framework reference at duenablomstrom.com/concepts/framework.
Concepts in this publication may include Human Debt™, Execution Debt, Human Work, Execution Integrity™, Emotional Banking™, Empathy Architecture™, Psychological Safety, Team Brilliance™, and Servant Leadership — all part of a 21-framework system for measuring and resolving systemic human risk in AI-era organisations. Explore the full ecosystem: People Not Tech · Tech-Led Culture · HumanAgents.io · Bienestarly.