We Need Large-Scale Cultural Change

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 technologies) I find myself questioning the decision because after all, while I know some of you read both newsletters -thanks for that!- the intersection is never complete and this week’s message needs all the eyeballs it can get.

This week in the Chasing Psychological Safety newsletter we spoke about the fact that the crisis of mental health and wellbeing in the workplace is now so great that WHO themselves have issued an unprecedented set of guidelines and recommendations to try and reverse it and we were saying that despite how we live and breathe people, we were so performance-focused that we had underestimated it ourselves:

“In hindsight, there was no way we would have presumed it was doable if we saw the mental wellness crisis and the lasting traumatic effect the pandemic would have on everyone. Should we have known about the burnout pandemic we are traversing, we wouldn’t have been surprised at the resistance to the human work. Who wants to be high performing while in survival mode? This is why we’re being so bullish these days to admit it because in the absence of the work we need to pay off some of the HumanDebt and to heal this acute crisis, none of the habitual individual and teamwork that will make us high performing and truly let us be our best despite the speed and uncertainty demands of VUCA, will be possible. So we need to sort this out first.”

And we go on to talk about the studies and the guidelines but we also call out the fact that there seems to be an artificial demarcation between industries and types of workers when it comes to what we imagine needs to be done. Not only that but all the suggestions are really quite reduced in scope and timid. Long are the days when this can be fixed by throwing an extra day of coaching a month or a longer lunch break. It will take a whole lot more than lip service and minor change. In fact, chances are that:

“We need basal interventions at a great scale that will urgently improve the status quo and change mindsets and we need true and intentional cultural transformation in most enterprises.”