Imagine that you walked into your office on Monday morning and everything had changed over the weekend. The bright lighting, the ergonomic chairs, the height-adjustable desks. All gone.
Instead, lighting is provided by a few scattered candles. Seating is a collection of upturned milk crates and folding camp chairs. Every desk is a wooden bench with one leg shorter than the others. There also seems to be screamo music playing. And you can’t turn it off.
I reckon you might complain. Totally unacceptable. No way you could work. Intolerable.
And yet, psychologically, this is pretty much how we design many of our workplaces.
You see, we are great at designing our world around our evolved physiology and physical limitations. We are terrible at designing our world around our evolved psychology and mental limitations.
If you encountered a triangular steering wheel, you would know immediately that it was rubbish. Yet we routinely accept systems that force tired, distracted human brains to remember, translate, switch, prioritise and navigate far more than they comfortably can.
We’ve all encountered the subscription that takes seconds to join, but a maze and perseverance to cancel. Stay with that subscription cancellation for a moment.
If you saw someone getting anxious and stressed while trying to cancel, would you suggest counselling? Would you send them on resilience training? Offer them a meditation app?
Of course not. You would know the system was badly designed. You would fix the system.
Now keep that thought in your mind and look again at the workplace. You see someone stressed. Anxious. Exhausted. On the verge of burnout.
Do they need counselling? Do they need a break? Or is there something fundamentally amiss with the “system” they are forced to operate in?
What is it about the system they are working in that keeps producing this result?
THE MODERN OPEN-PLAN WORKPLACE
Somewhere along the line, we started looking at workplaces primarily through the lens of efficiency. Open plan. More people. Fewer walls. Hot desks. Even fewer desks.
“Nobody is here five days a week anyway.”
Sounds brilliant. (On a spreadsheet.) Then, human beings arrive.
Human beings who need periods of uninterrupted concentration. Who notice movement in their peripheral vision. Who hear nearby conversations whether they want to or not, and who need some sense of belonging and familiarity.
Remember when people had a desk of their own? You’d see a photograph. A pot plant. A favourite mug. Some weird little toy brought back from a holiday.
People made themselves a nest. It comfortably said: This is my place. These are my people. I belong here.
Now you might arrive on Tuesday and sit at desk 47 beside three people you don’t know, spend half the morning looking for the right charging cable, put your headphones on to drown everybody out, and leave without having a meaningful conversation with anyone.
The CFO would claim an efficient use of real estate. Others might call it destruction of human habitat! And…
… then we add Teams. Slack. Email. WhatsApp. Project management tools. Calendar alerts. Pop-ups. Pings. Buzzes. Red dots demanding attention.
And somehow, we are surprised when people struggle to concentrate and feel overwhelmed.
THEN WE TRY TO FIX THE PERSON
This is the bit that really bothers me.
Someone begins to struggle. They are overwhelmed. Exhausted. Maybe they stop sleeping properly. Their performance drops. Their manager notices.
So, we reach for the individual remedies.
The Employee Assistance Program. A wellbeing day. A resilience course. Some counselling. A mindfulness app. Perhaps some time away.
All of those things can have value. They may even be exactly what that person needs at that moment. They feel better. They return to work.
And we put them straight back into precisely the same conditions that made them unwell in the first place. Same environment. Same interruptions. Same 14 systems all demanding immediate attention. And we act all surprised when they struggle again.
It is a little like treating a blister beautifully and then putting the same stone back in the shoe.
At some point, perhaps we should look at the shoe.
CONTEXT MATTERS
One of the most useful questions we can ask about human behaviour is: “What is happening around this person?”
We are incredibly sensitive to context. Physical environment matters. Fairness matters. Belonging matters. Change throws us off balance.
Yet organisations have traditionally found it much easier to place the problem inside the individual. “They aren’t resilient enough.” “They don’t cope well with ambiguity.” “They don’t handle stress.”
Sometimes the person is having a perfectly reasonable response to an unreasonable environment.
THE LAW IS BEGINNING TO LOOK AT THE SYSTEM TOO
Lately this conversation has become rather more urgent.
Workplace psychological health is moving firmly into the world of workplace health and safety. Now the question becomes bigger than: “Do we have an Employee Assistance Program?”
Organisations increasingly need to look at the work context itself. How work is designed and managed. The physical and psychological environment. The way organisational change is handled. In other words, context.
Because you cannot mindfulness-app your way out of bad design.
WHERE’S MY TRIBE?
Here’s a thing about us humans. We are incredibly social creatures. For most of our history, knowing who belonged around the campfire mattered very much. Literally survival. We knew our group. We knew where we fitted.
Modern work can scramble that beautifully simple human need. We have hot-desks, constant restructures, teams assembled and disassembled around projects. You can be surrounded by hundreds of colleagues and still feel strangely alone and like you don’t belong.
So perhaps one question leaders should ask is wonderfully primitive:
Do people know who their people are? Where is their tribe?
I know that simple connection does not solve every psychological hazard. But disconnection makes an extraordinary number of them worse.
START WITH THE WORK/SYSTEM
If you are wrestling with all of this and thinking:
“We know we need to do something, but we really don’t know what.”
Good.
You are in the majority. No one has all the answers. But you can start by looking at the environment.
Ask your people some candid questions:
- What makes it unnecessarily difficult to do good work here?
- What interrupts you?
- What do people avoid talking about?
Then listen. Really listen.
Do not immediately reach for a training course or send the individual away to be fixed.
Sometimes the most powerful intervention is surprisingly mundane.
Remove something. Give somebody more control. Let people sit with their tribe.
PERHAPS YOUR PEOPLE ARE GIVING YOU USEFUL DATA
Let me leave you with a final thought.
Imagine someone takes some leave. They rest. They feel like themselves again.
Then they return to work and, before long, they are exhausted and anxious all over again.
That tells you something. The workplace is giving you data.
Then the most useful question is not: “How do we make this person more resilient?”
The most powerful question is: “What are we asking this person to be resilient to?”
Your people may not need fixing. Perhaps the workplace needs a service?
