Flex is not an entitlement
Entitlement: it’s not a label any of us want to have attached to us. Some of us do, we might just not realise it yet.
Uncomfortable, isn’t it?
One thing we’re risking at the moment, when it comes to flexible and hybrid work, is that the needs of the individual overshadow the needs of the wider team and even the organisation as a whole. It undermines the high-trust culture that we all want to experience when it comes to flex.
It isn’t sustainable and it isn’t the way forward.
We don’t need to swing the pendulum fully in the other direction either. Without thinking of what we need, personally, individually, from our work arrangements we put ourselves at risk of being ‘always on’, which is not high-trust flex either. I’m the first to celebrate the personal benefits we get from working more flexibly. These are really important and we need to keep exploring them, revisiting them and making sure we know how our work patterns need to evolve as we evolve.
We also need to think about what else and who else we need to factor in before we make our flexible work decisions and arrangements. That’s the route to avoid the entitlement label and shift to the high-trust culture we really want.
One way to do that is to consider our teams as a healthy ecosystem, reinforcing the good of the individual alongside the good of the whole. At the moment, some of our teams are operating more like a parasitic ecosystem, where the health of the individual comes at the expense of the whole. Ultimately though, over the long term, we all suffer when the team suffers, because we value the connection and healthy team culture that brings out our creativity and sense of belonging at work. None of us can create that for ourselves alone. We need each other.
If you’re hybrid working, this is particularly difficult at the moment. Leaders can see that their team members aren’t making connections with each other as well as they used to, sharing information, offering to help each other, or welcoming and bringing in new members of the team.
Our focus on short term delivery is part of the problem. Jarrod Haar’s recent update on the burnout risk in Aotearoa shows that we’re stalling in our progress to reduce our burnout risk, following the tough times of the pandemic crisis. One of the biggest issues is workload. If we expect too much from people, they don’t have time to connect with each other, even if they want to. If we take on too much work, we get stuck in short-term delivery mode and forget that connecting with others in our teams is just as important as part of our job, as it is to tick off the to-do list.
As managers, we need to challenge ourselves to consider what is a realistic work programme if we want people to value spending time together, connecting, sharing their information and problem solving together, rather than alone.
As team members, we need to check in proactively and regularly with what other people around us need or expect before we make our flexible work decisions, if we want to avoid the label of entitlement following us around and instead enjoy a culture of high-trust flex.
As with anything based on trust, we all need to do our bit and make sure we’re getting the mix right so everyone is getting what they need.