Communication – Page 11 – mardihumphreys.com

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

You started out as friends. He came to rely on you more and more and you were happy to support him. You shared private jokes. You made him look good in front of others. You knew what he needed before he did. Now, he takes you for granted. What began as a sweet relationship has turned sour. You want a divorce. I’m not talking about your life’s partner. I’m talking about your work spouse.

Breaking up with a work spouse is neither an easy nor a quick decision. Maybe you were hired because you were friends. Seventy percent of Americans found their current job through their networks. This makes changing your relationship even more difficult. Here are five things you can do to handle the situation with both empathy and respect.

Be Honest and Grateful

Schedule a private meeting with your work spouse. Honestly and kindly communicate your feelings. Be clear and straightforward about your decision. Thank them for the positive impact they had on your professional life and assure them you will continue to support future collaboration. If you need some inspiration, then read the story of how Dolly Parton broke up with her work spouse, Porter Wagoner.

Set Boundaries

After breaking the news, set clear boundaries and expectations for moving forward. You are trying to prevent as much awkwardness and as many misunderstandings as possible. If your former work spouse decides to lash out and go low, then you need to go high. For example, if they start overly criticizing your ideas in weekly team meetings, then come to those meetings prepared to defend your ideas.

Prepare for Professionalism

Think about how you will control your reactions when you see your former work spouse every day. Keep any negative feelings to yourself and commit to remaining publicly amicable. This should help minimize the negative impact of your breakup on your coworkers. They will feel the new friction between the two of you even if you avoid talking about it and they will have questions. Can you and your work ex-spouse agree to deliver the same elevator speech to those inquiring minds? It’s essential to both your careers to maintain a professional attitude. For example, you still have to effectively collaborate on projects every day, but maybe you communicate more through email than face-to-face.

Allow Time for Adjustment

Give your work ex-spouse some space and time to adjust to the new normal. It’s natural to feel disappointed when a close professional relationship ends. Be patient and allow them to process their emotions at their own pace. Meanwhile, you need to adjust to your new single status. Your former work spouse had input into your projects and now they won’t. For example, if you always ran your monthly report by them before submitting it to your manager, now you need a new proofreader.

Make New Friends

Connect with other people on your project team. Grab coffee with someone this week and lunch with someone else next week. Creating stronger relationships will help you get to know, like, and trust each other. Since business moves at the speed of trust, investing in key relationships helps your team work both faster and more efficiently.

What do you do when you need to set new boundaries around a work relationship? Please share in the comments.

The Eye of the Beholder

Photo by Elizaveta Dushechkina from Pexels

I frequently hear various versions of this story from my networks: “Operations told me they assigned a different analyst to our project team because they think we will get along better. I thought we got along just fine, but apparently I offended the last one. I have no idea what I did.” Honestly, efficiently, and politely asking for what you need from coworkers is tricky. The key is authenticity.

Authenticity in the workplace requires consistent and transparent communication, positive nonverbal cues, building trust, and seeking feedback. Here are five examples of what both authenticity and inauthenticity look like at work.

Consistency

You are perceived as authentic when you consistently behave in a way that matches your stated values and beliefs. For example, let’s say you are a project manager who preaches the importance of teamwork. When you are praised for the successful completion of a project, you habitually respond by insisting it was a team effort and list your team’s contributions. On the other hand, if you frequently take credit for your team’s work, then that inconsistency makes you inauthentic.

Transparency

When you communicate honestly and directly, you are often viewed as more authentic than someone who evades tough conversations. For example, if you claim to be a DEIB advocate, then you have a conversation with a colleague who keeps asking you to recruit employees with more diverse life experiences to your department. Open and transparent communication helps you to be perceived as authentic. On the other hand, if you keep avoiding a dialogue with that colleague, then you may be perceived as inauthentic.

Nonverbal Cues

Eye contact, tone of voice, and body language influence your perceived authenticity. For example, if you display positive nonverbal cues in meetings like looking the speaker in the eye, opening your body stance, and taking notes, then you seem authentic. On the other hand, if you look at your phone more than the speaker, cross your arms and legs, or interrupt their report, then you appear inauthentic.

Trust

This may be the most critical component of authenticity. People have to both know and like you before they learn to trust you. It takes time to prove your reliability and credibility. For example, if you routinely complete assignments by their deadlines, then you are perceived as authentic. On the other hand, if you routinely fail to meet deadlines, then your unreliability makes you seem inauthentic.

Feedback

Feedback is a useful tool for gauging your perceived authenticity. For example, at the end of your next 1:1, tell your manager you are working on being authentic. Say that you’d like to send them an email with three questions regarding their perception of your authenticity. Ask if you can discuss their answers at your next 1:1. Part of a manager’s job is to encourage their direct reports to continuously improve. On the other hand, if you do not ask your manager for specific feedback on how you are perceived, then you may never know. We concentrate on getting work done and not on honing the tools, like authenticity, that make getting work done easier.

Sometimes coworkers have legitimate reasons for their behavior or communication style. For example, maybe your relationship has changed. More on that next week in part two of this series.

How do you demonstrate authenticity at work? Please share in the comments.

Best Stressed

In my role of serving the local IT community, I get to eavesdrop on many conversations. A recurring theme is the challenge of recruitment and retention, as you may imagine. The recent mass layoffs at big tech companies have caused stress waves that are crashing over both employees and employers.

Stress Has Many Flavors

There are different kinds of stress. For example, there are hindrances. These are things you cannot control, like a pandemic. Hindrances cause bad stress. There are also challenges. These are things you can rise to meet with effort, like learning a new skill. Hindrances demotivate while challenges boost motivation. Hindrances make you feel like you can’t get over them no matter how hard you work. Challenges make you feel accomplished when you meet them.

Help Instead of Hinder

In their book, Designing Your Work Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans say that humans have intrinsic, psychological needs: autonomy, relatedness, and competence (ARC). As an employer, if you can meet these needs for your employees, then you will have an easier time attracting and retaining talent.

Autonomy – This is controlling your own life. Employees want to feel like they have the freedom and trust to do their jobs the way they think they should be done. For example, let’s say you’re a manager at a home decor store. You have an employee who has ideas for how the store should be styled. Could you assign them to merchandise an end cap and a display table at the front of the store for one month? If the items on those displays keep getting sold, then you could assign them a whole section next month.

Relatedness – This is connecting to a community. Employees want a squad to belong to. This survey found nearly 57% of their respondents said they enjoyed work more because they made a friend there. For example, let’s say you’re a manager in charge of a fundraiser. You have to bring employees from different departments together to plan the event. If you facilitate a getting-to-know-you conversation at your kick-off meeting, then the diverse group can begin to develop empathy, camaraderie, and buy in for the mission. This not only makes collaboration between teammates possible, it may also start better collaboration between the various departments represented even after the fundraiser is over.

Competence – This is being good at what you do. Employees with a growth mindset look for ways to do more of what they like at work. For example, let’s say you’re the manager of a software development company. You have an employee who is really good at explaining one of your products to small groups of onboarding sales people. You’d like her to develop her onboarding talk into a presentation that she could deliver at an upcoming industry conference, but, she gets stage fright. If you record her next product demonstration, then you’re helping her take the next step in public speaking and you have a video that you can show during your conference presentation.

Motivating employees is a challenge as old as the organized workforce. As an employer, you cannot eliminate stress for every employee. The goal is to give them more good stress than bad stress in their jobs.

What are some ways your manager gives you good stress? Please share in the comments.

Uses Time Wisely

In Kindergarten, we weren’t graded on subjects like math or English and we did not receive letter grades on our report cards. Instead, we had a list of goals to meet. The teacher put a check mark next to the goal if it was reached or an X if it wasn’t. I received an X next to “Uses Time Wisely.” It’s haunted me ever since.

How do you determine your level of productivity at work? You compare yourself to your coworkers. You worry that everyone is using their time more wisely than you are, especially if you’re remote or hybrid. By the beginning of Q4 2020, I stopped saying that I work from home and started saying that I home from work. Technology allows us to work when and where we want so we work all the time. This phenomenon is the autonomy paradox. For example, how many times have you replied to work emails on your phone while waiting in line at the grocery? (Asking for a friend.)

Asynchronous work makes you very susceptible to what Brigid Schulte, Director of the Better Life Lab at New America, calls time confetti. These are the minutes scattered throughout your week spent on unproductive multitasking. Alone, the spent time is insignificant, but it adds up pretty quick. For example, would that PowerPoint presentation you’re working on be done right now if you had closed your direct message app for a couple of hours?

Even if your app is minimized, hearing the notifications breaks your concentration and now you know that someone is waiting for you to do something. Your brain is distracted by wondering what it is and figuring out how, when, and where to get everything done. It takes time to mentally shift from one task to another and back again. Before you know it, your time has shredded into confetti. How can you prevent being buried in it?

Protect – When you have a project that requires deep focus, schedule it on your calendar, close your door and put a “Do Not Disturb” sign on it, and turn off direct message and email alerts. Notice how quickly you get it done.

Train -You not only have to set boundaries, you have to show people where they are and hold them when people try to cross them. For example, those who contact me between 7:30pm and 8:00pm EST Monday – Saturday do not reach me. Jeopardy! is my boundary. I do not answer calls, emails, or texts during that time. I have communicated and held that boundary so many times that our daughter bought me a T-shirt.

Forgive – Don’t berate yourself for failing to complete every task on your to-do list every day. We treat time like it’s something we can control, and, to a certain extent, we can and should. However, days have varying rhythms. Stuff happens and we have to roll with it. Think about how many fire drills you have in a week. Checking off every task on your to-do list is not using your time wisely. Giving your best effort is.

What do you do to minimize time confetti? Please share in the comments.

Terms and Conditions

I serve the technology community and they use many industry-specific acronyms in conversation. I’m often asked by non-technologists to define these terms. Plus, recently multiple episodes of Jeopardy! have featured contestants who worked in tech and categories about technology. It struck me that some tech terms are now used in mainstream conversation. So, here are seven acronyms that you can add to your vocabulary.

2FA: This means two-factor authentication. You will also hear MFA which is multi-factor authentication. These are security protocols that protect sensitive information. For example, when you want to access your bank account online, you may enter your username and password, then receive a text message with a code to enter before you are granted access. Here is a resource to learn more.

AI: This is short for Artificial Intelligence. It’s a computer that acts like a human.When you are on a website and someone pops up on the screen offering to help, that is an example of AI called a chatbot. You ask a question and the chatbot can direct you to appropriate areas of the website because it has learned from visitors who came before you asking the same or similar question. Here is an explanation that may interest you.

BI: This acronym stands for Business Intelligence. It is the process an organization uses to collect, cleanse, and present data. This could include filtering the data to answer a question and visually presenting the results in a graph. Companies use a data management tool (software) that provides a dashboard where they can filter the information to see specifically what they need to know to make decisions. Here are examples.

BYOD: Or, Bring Your Own Device, is when the organization you work for allows you to use your phone, laptop, etc., for business purposes. Here is information on the pros and cons of BYOD.

ERP: This is shorthand for Enterprise Resource Planning. It is a software platform (there are many) that everyone in an organization uses to manage their work. For example, both Human Resources and Accounting can use the same ERP, but for their own specific purposes. Here is some useful information.

NFT: A Non-fungible Token is a digital asset that represents real-world objects, like art, that were created, and only exist, online where they are bought, sold, and/or traded. Here is a more in-depth explanation.

SaaS: This is an acronym for Software as a Service. Instead of installing software on each of your devices, you access it from the cloud through the internet. Then you can use an app and connect to the software on all your devices. You no longer buy the software every time you need the new version, you pay a subscription fee usually monthly or yearly. Some examples of SaaS are Gmail, Spotify, and Dropbox. Here is a comprehensive look at Saas, including PaaS (Pizza as a service).

I have a habit of rattling off acronyms and industry terms. KPI, PIP, and WFH come to mind. On occasion, this makes communicating unclear. So, if you ever stumble over any shortcuts in my articles, feel free to DM me. What acronyms have you run across lately that I did not mention? Please share in the comments.

Be Quiet

Welcome to the final installment of the It’s so Quiet series. We’ve talked about Quiet Promotion, Quiet Quitting, and Quiet Firing. All three have some things in common. For example, The absence of reflection, unaligned expectations, and lack of communication. What would the quiet situations feel like if those issues were resolved?

Groundhog Day is this week. In the movie of the same name, the main character is stuck in the same day over and over doing a job he doesn’t want to do. What would a Groundhog Day look like for you if you were in the right role, using the right processes, working for the right organization? You would be Quiet Thriving.

What Is It?

Quiet Thriving is when you do your part to be responsible for engaging with your work. If you steer your tasks toward the things you like to do, remind yourself there are aspects of this job that you really like, and have a good friend at work, then you may be quietly thriving.

What Can You Do?

Document: You took this particular position because something in the job description interested you. What was that? Are you doing that? If not, can you start? Pull out your “Atta Baby!” file. What do the things that people praised you for have in common? Did you get satisfaction from those duties? If so, can you do more of those? If not, what are the barriers to doing more of the projects you enjoy?

Communicate: Time for a 1:1 with your manager. Managers are usually tasked with motivating employees. It’s much easier to motivate someone who enjoys their job. You offering to do more work makes their life easier. Respectfully discuss how you can use that phrase “and other duties as assigned” in your job description to receive assignments that you like. Any task that makes a positive contribution, especially if it makes and/or saves the organization money, should be welcomed.

Strategize: The questions in the Document section above are meant to help you craft the job you want to do. Do you have the agency to craft your job? If so, try to spend 20% of your day doing the tasks that energize you. Can’t think of what those tasks would be? That’s not surprising since we’ve been in crisis-mode for three years. You need creativity to solve problems. Dealing with crisis after crisis after crisis drains that. To recharge your creativity, can you journal? Maybe write your perfect job description. Or sketch what your perfect job would look like, or bullet point work you see others doing that you’d like to do. Can you make a friend at work? This survey found nearly 57% of their respondents said they enjoyed work more because they made a friend there.

Thank you for your feedback on this series! I appreciate both your point of view and your relentless respect. Let’s keep the conversation going in the comments. What do you do to quietly thrive at work?

All Fired Up

Welcome to part three of four in the It’s so Quiet series. We’ve already talked about Quiet Promotion and Quiet Quitting. This week let’s look at Quiet Firing.

What Is It?

Quiet Firing happens when management slowly takes away your responsibilities and freedom over time. For example, you have not received a pay raise for years and/or you are turned down for promotions multiple times. You may be getting quietly fired if:

You receive a “Does not meet expectations” evaluation of your job performance at least three times
Coworkers with your same job title receive perks (e.g., WFH days) that you are denied
Everyone in your department receives an equipment upgrade (e.g., mobile phone, laptop, etc.) except you
You are intentionally and repeatedly left out of email threads that are crucial to your duties
You asked for feedback from your manager multiple times and they refuse to give it to you
You signed up for the company’s leadership development program more than twice and are still not accepted

What Can You Do?

Quiet Firing may like feel like gaslighting because the treatment is typically subtle. It is management’s passive-aggressive strategy to encourage you to resign. It makes you ask yourself, “Did what just happen mean what I think it means?” In a LinkedIn News poll, 35% of respondents said they faced Quiet Firing. How can you decide if it is happening to you?

Document: Open up your Atta Baby! files from the last three years. (DM me for a definition of the term.) Use them to create a What’s Up With That? file. For each item in the Atta Baby! files, note what your manager’s reaction was to it. For example, if you saved the company $18K in 2021 by catching a typo in an invoice and still received a “Does not meet expectations” in your annual performance review that year, make a note of that.

Communicate: If your research indicates that you may be getting quietly fired, then it’s time for a 1:1 with your manager. Respectfully share what you found, how you interpret it, and ask if your impression is correct. If your manager gives you specific feedback for areas where you can improve your job performance, then you are probably not being quietly fired. If your manager’s reaction is neutral or dismissive, then it’s time to strategize.

Strategize: Should you stay or should you go? If you want (or need) to stay at your organization, then ask your manager for a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan). I realize this could be a humbling experience, but watch your manager’s reaction. It will be very revealing. If they are impressed and excited that you took this initiative, then there is hope that you are not being quietly fired. If they reject your request for a PIP, then it’s time to find other employment.

Have you ever been quietly fired? Please share what signs to look for in the comments.

Hush Money

Last week in part one of the It’s so Quiet series, we talked about Quiet Promotion. This week let’s look at the Quiet Quitting trend, particularly focusing on how it may impact your income. Can you afford to quiet quit? Can you afford not to?

What Is It?

Quiet Quitting is meeting the minimum expectations of your job requirements and feeling psychologically detached from your work. If you avoid leading a team of your coworkers or you refuse to work overtime, you may be a Quiet Quitter.

What Can You Do?

Job descriptions are living documents. They expand and contract with both the company’s needs and the employee’s abilities. Level setting expectations on a regular basis is vital to shaping both your work and your engagement. Here are three things you can do:

Document: Make a list of duties you were asked to do that are outside of your job description. Are they housekeeping tasks? For example, taking notes in every team meeting, typing them up, and distributing them. Or, are they responsibilities that will make you visible to leadership? For example, presenting your department’s Q4 statistics in the partner meeting. If they are housekeeping, then no wonder you’re discouraged. But if they are responsibilities that put you in front of the people who can further your career, then rethink what may be going on behind the scenes.

Communicate: Whatever your documentation reveals, it’s time for a 1:1 with your manager. Present your list. Politely state you’ve noticed an uptick in duties. Ask if these assignments are intentional. If so, and they are housekeeping, is it because of your status in the company? (E.g., You are a junior member of the team.) If the assignments are more high-profile, are you being set up for promotion?

Strategize: After documenting and discussing, think about where you want to go from here. If the assignments you received position you to advance, then the extra work benefits you in the long run. However, the rise and grind culture leads to burnout. If you are expected to go above and beyond your job description with no end and no reward in sight, then do you really want to stay at your organization? Particularly if you work in Big Tech. Seventy-nine percent of the workers laid off last year had another job within three months. Things to consider when making your decision:

Do you have an emergency fund with $1200 in it?
Do you also have six months worth of expenses saved?
How will the coming recession impact your portfolio, mortgage, and/or loans?
Do you have a side gig that you can ramp up to second-job status?
Do you have an alternative for healthcare coverage? (E.g., through your spouse’s employer)
Does your current employer offer benefits (e.g., working remote and/or flexibility) that compensate for the extra duties?

You could also keep quietly quitting, but that can lead to Quiet Firing; more on that next week.

Have you ever quietly quit a job? Please share in the comments.

The Rise of the Quiets

COVID spotlighted the Greats: the Great Retirement, the Great Resignation, the Great Reshuffle, the Great Rethink, etc. Now, the transition to post pandemic is highlighting the Quiets: Quiet Promotion, Quiet Quitting, Quiet Promoting, Quiet Thriving, etc. Just like the Greats were in play with or without COVID, the Quiets are not new. It’s just that now employees feel empowered to discuss them openly and employers are pushing back. We’re going to devote the next four weeks to exploring the rise of the Quiets. First up: Quiet Promotion.

What Is It?

A Quiet Promotion happens when you are given more tasks and/or responsibilities beyond your job description, but no increase in compensation. It can be tricky to spot because going above and beyond your job description is the traditional path to a genuine promotion. You typically have to prove you can do more before you are given more (especially if you identify as a woman; don’t get me started…). Here are a few clues that you were quietly promoted:

You have the same job title as your colleagues, but you have more work than they do
You have absorbed all the duties of a coworker who left and there is no end in sight
Your manager asked you to be a “team player” and you don’t feel like you can refuse

If these sound familiar, you have a couple of options. One is to ask for a real promotion. The other is to get another job. Either way, these three ideas can help.

Document

Update that “Atta Baby!” file on your desktop (DM me if the concept does not sound familiar)
Keep a daily activity log including what you did (especially the extra duties), when, and approximately how long it took
Note (with statistics, if possible) how what you do (especially the extra duties) moves the organization closer to their goals and aligns with their mission

Communicate

After gathering your documentation, schedule a 1:1 with your manager
Prepare for it as you would a performance review
Begin the conversation with a curious mindset. For example, lead with something like: “During several weekly reflection exercises that I do to self-monitor my job performance, I noticed something interesting…” and present your case
Note your manager’s reaction. It will be very revealing

Strategize

If your employer just lost a major client, or your company is in a hiring freeze, then no one is getting promoted. If you can be patient, do. It allows you to accumulate more documentation and contemplate whether this job and/or company is still the right fit for you. If you can’t be patient, the documentation you gathered sure looks good on a resume.

By the way, the phrase “other duties as assigned” is included in most job descriptions. That can be a good thing. You want your job description to iterate. It allows you to grow and advance. The problem comes when an organization uses the phrase as a loophole to assign an employee responsibilities beyond minor tasks related to the employee’s position.

Have you ever received a Quiet Promotion? Please share your experience in the comments.

Something’s Burning

Last month we talked about burnout and how, as employees, we can both recognize and minimize it. On the other side of the organization, what can employers do to help extinguish burnout?

Why is Burnout the Employer’s Problem?

Because employees who burn out quit their jobs and replacing them is expensive. In their 2020 Recruiter Nation Survey, Jobvite found that retention is the second highest recruiting priority according to the HR professionals who participated. And according to Legaljobs, 45% of employees in the United States are job hunting. Turnover can cost an employer up to one-third of an employee’s annual salary due to lost productivity as well as recruiting efforts.

What Can Employers Do About It?

Set Reasonable Boundaries – For example, if you send emails at 7:46PM on weeknights, texts at 9:12PM on Saturdays, and/or direct messages at 6:12AM on Independence Day, then you are assigning someone a task. A valuable employee is at least going to stop what they are doing and reply no matter how many times you type, “No rush.” Even if you don’t expect the employee to do anything about your request at the time, you are still imposing a mental load on them. Now they have to remember to remind you of the thing you wanted them to do when you contacted them outside of normal work hours. Establish rules around communication. Include acceptable hours, expected response times, and appropriate modes. For example, if there is an emergency requiring their attention outside of normal work hours, then you will call them instead of email or text. Reiterate these boundaries once a quarter. BTW, most email platforms have a feature that allows you to send your message during someone’s normal business hours. Please use it.

Reevaluate Productivity Goals – Are pre-COVID KPIs still in place? Should they be? How reasonable are they? The workforce is moving toward a productivity model where job performance can no longer be measured by when, where, or how many hours employees work. Consider normalizing flexibility. For example, in performance reviews commend the employee for taking their earned PTO instead of praising them for perfect attendance. Best Practice: Leadership models taking time off, flexible work environments, and/or remote work days.

Communicate – Listen with empathy to your team on a regular basis. Can you set up in-person office hours or a virtual coffee once a week to bond with your team? Find common ground. Support and encourage self-care and mental health. Record a 30 second video on your company’s instant messaging platform and send it (during normal hours, please!) to your direct reports. Remind them that the intense project they’re working on will get done more efficiently if they rest their brains for a few minutes every hour. In 1:1 meetings, invite employees to discuss challenges outside of the job that are negatively affecting their ability to work. Is the solution something the company can provide as part of their benefits package?

As we approach the holidays, I hope both employers and employees get some rest from their work. Maybe in front of a roaring fire in your fireplace or, like me, a fireplace online. Please let those embers be the only burnout you allow.

As a manager, what strategies do you use to ease employee burnout? Please share in the comments.