I wasn’t going to write today as I’m heading for IT Masters in Mexico City followed by a mini, overdue honeymoon but as the Mr is sat next to me in the lounge having had to log in to his own company’s system and check on an incident (perils of being married to a director of Microsoft...
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...