There’s a funny thing humans do when they build companies. Humans found companies, humans run them, and the resulting products and services are typically made for yet more humans. Humans, I think we can agree, are absolutely necessary to the existence of companies.
And yet many companies operate like the difficult challenges and unexpected issues of human life (y’know, their employees’ lives) are a monumental inconvenience.
Companies are designed without tolerance for deviation from an always-on, optimally productive ideal. This is not reality.
This “inconvenience” is most noticeable in small companies, where everything is magnified, both the good and the bad. Small companies have fewer bodies to know and do things, so the effects of deviation from the robotic corporate ideal results in scrambling to fill gaps and recover.
I’m not sure when this started. Maybe in the Industrial Revolution when we starting trying to replace people with machines? Maybe when Henry Ford and his assembly lines took it to a new level?
A team member gets sick or has an emergency. Someone needs to cover for them. But small companies have fewer bodies in general, let alone ones who can do the job. Spread people across time zones and it’s even harder.
But everyone gets sick some time. Or their kids do. But how many companies, especially small ones, really have concrete backup to make covering for team members seamless?
Backup requires having enough bodies. Backup requires someone to own the work of creating and managing policies, capturing and maintaining knowledge, and ensuring cross-training.
The benefit to the company is undeniable when you can flip a switch to auxiliary (human) backup power, so to speak, when someone’s felled by the flu and there’s a looming deadline (not least because it helps prevent a sick person from coming back to work too soon and infecting everyone else.)
A team member goes on maternity leave. Now a knowledgeable, full-time employee is gone for months (or maybe permanently) and you have to fill that role. Having the system mentioned above will help you know who you need to hire or promote, and they’ll get up to speed faster.
People having kids is hardly a rare event, so you’d think we’d organize things so it’s not so disruptive. But I’ve been on some teams where folks get seriously bent out of shape toward a team member taking mat leave(s). The replacement doesn’t always get fully trained or integrated, either, which isn’t really fair.
Seems kind of warped to treat the continuation of the human race as an inconvenience. And let’s not even get into the career price women pay for taking time off to have families. Or how rare it still is for men to take comparable leave.
A team member’s not getting their work done. At small companies it tends to affect a bigger portion a team, product, or operations. Sometimes it means the person’s an incorrigible slacker and needs to be “invited to seek other opportunities.” But it could also just be that the person’s going through some life stuff. Or is in a bit over their head regarding skill set and could use a hand.
Everyone is going to have times when they’re not gold star-calibre performers. They’re tired, getting sick, worried about something, or just don’t quite have the skills at the level they need for this particular work. But all too often people who are struggling fall through the cracks, or feel that they will be penalized, not supported, for admitting it.
It should be okay to admit you need help, and “I don’t know” should be an opportunity, not a confession. A knowledge gap shouldn’t be a major inconvenience. It should be a chance to learn, to develop rapport with team members who can teach, and maybe find others who didn’t know, either, thus filling further gaps.
Embracing “I don’t know” has to start at founding and be practised and encouraged all the way through the ranks.
Plus, let’s face it, if someone inconveniently doesn’t know how to proceed on a project or is missing key skills/knowledge to do their job, whose fault is that, really?
A team member has become an unhappy, toxic presence. The infection spreads further, faster in a small company. This might be addressable by a manager sitting down with them to find out what’s up. If they’re willing to talk, if the issue can be addressed, and if they trust that the response won’t be retaliatory.
Yes, inconveniently, people issues can take a lot more time and effort to sort out. But it also sends a strong message about what the company values. Sometimes unhappy people are a canary in the corporate coal mine.
Unfortunately, in my experience, by the time someone’s toxic behaviour is affecting the team, they’ve often already checked out and the behavior is intentional. That said, if you know what soured someone so badly, you can potentially take steps to prevent it from happening for someone else in the future.
These are just a handful of examples, but they’re common, and such inconvenience happens to all teams, and all companies, from time to time. Because, again, companies are full of humans. Building a company without a safety net of flexibility and resilience to account for inconvenient human messiness is dangerous.
In companies’ early days when resources are super tight, building this culture and safety net usually seems like a luxury we can’t afford and a drain away from key projects. But perhaps we just think we can’t afford it based what or who (an investor?) is influencing our priorities.
If a company’s vision is entirely outward-facing from the beginning, and external pressures are the only things deemed critical and urgent, an inward focus on its culture, values, and people is unlikely to develop later.
It’s been well proven that we don’t tend to account for what we don’t see or experience. We don’t design or build for those not at the table. If your company sees its humans – or a particular subset of its humans – as inconvenient, perhaps it would be a good idea to take a hard look at who’s been at the table until now and how their perspectives and values have shaped the company and culture.
Because, let’s face it, being treated as an inconvenience (or not being considered at all) doesn’t just discourage potentially great people from wanting to work with you. It may also discourage a lot of potential customers whose values and needs aren’t reflected by your company and products. More and more people and companies are shopping with their wallets and ethics.
Building culture, values, and policies that accept and embrace the inconvenience of humans is a lot easier than retroactively trying to drag big, established organizations into a more human-friendly future.
To start small, we just have to remember that being human means, by default, that we’re all in this together.
M-Theory is an opinion column by Melanie Baker. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Communitech. Melle can be reached on Twitter at @melle or by email at me@melle.ca.
