A truly caring workplace watches the waves

Over the last few years I’ve spent quite a lot of time reflecting on burnout, workplace trauma, and how we think about “how things are going” at work. And I’ve concluded our mental models - of project challenge, of team capability and capacity, and of individual resilience - are often unhelpful because they’re too static.

I’ve a slightly different way of thinking about it all - and the few people I’ve shared these concepts with recently have found it helpful - so I’ve decided to share more widely.

Challenge wave

I think of work projects as oscillating waves. Over the course of any given project, the difficulty rating of the challenge in hand will vary - some days it’ll feel set to beginner level, other times it’ll feel like it was switched to pro.

I’ve developed a habit of taking on quite challenging projects - I imagine the whole oscillating wave being shifted up a few units on the difficulty scale. The easier days are intermediate level at best, and on the hardest days the work is so tough the challenge surely must have been set to “wicked”. In those troughs there are stretches where the pressure is high but it feels like every turn is into a dead-end, every day spent banging your head against a wall - and then you have a bit of a breakthrough, clarity emerges, progress is made, optimism returns. It can be quite the adrenaline rush.

I love working on the complex problems we find in public sector digital transformation. This type of work is innately tough and in intractably complex contexts, and I’ve chosen it nonetheless because it’s meaningful and, when we’re successful, intensely rewarding.

Capacity/capability wave

In my hardest projects, I become aware of another type of wave. Let’s describe it as a combination of capacity and capability. At its peak, you have everything you need to absolutely smash it. The confidence, the knowledge, the skills, the time, the access. You have a great team around you - you’ve been working together a while and now you’re high performing and all on the same page. If this team can’t take on your challenge and succeed, no-one can. You feel unstoppable.

At the trough of the wave, though, you’re in survival mode. You’re constantly operating at “the seat of your pants”. You are too short-handed to get things done, and too short on time to recruit and properly induct new team members. Spread thinly, you spend so little time together that in reality you’re all operating independently - there’s not enough time to strategise and plan together, to align as a team, to become greater than the sum of your parts. Eventually things turn around - new joiners arrive, the team starts to coalesce, and the wider system pressure that was sucking up all available capacity reduces. You have time to think once more.

Constructive interference

When these waves are in “counterphase” you find capacity and capability are at their highest just as the peak of the challenge is kicking in - that’s where truly amazing things are achieved.

The problems come when the waves are aligned or “in phase”.

Most of us can manage a high-performing team feeling a bit bored and restless and wanting something hairier to work on.

But if your team is in survival mode when the project hits “wicked” level, you’re in trouble. That’s when the waves combine to create a super-wave of pain.

Hidden waves

There are also other, hidden, waves that we need to attend to. Whether we recognise it or not, the ups and downs of our personal lives play an important role in our ability to cope with what work throws at us.

Often, yes, people are in a good place and can absorb the extra pressure. But bosses shouldn’t rely on that. The ability of any one person to suck it up and push on through is far from constant.

Lives can be chaotic. Caring responsibilities come with practical and emotional complications. Our physical and mental health waxes and wanes. Looking at the next five years in my own life, I’ll be dealing with bereavement and raising teenagers while going through perimenopause. Clearly there are going to be ups and downs in the emotional bandwidth I’m going to have available to cope with my tougher work days. And there’s nothing unique about me: everyone around me will have their own waves too.

We might not be able to see what’s going on behind the scenes, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to act like it doesn’t exist.

Wave interactions: learning from the pandemic experience

For many of us, our government pandemic work felt like it sat atop a super-wave (and stayed there waaaay too long).

COVID response was/is a wicked problem; organisational capability and capacity fell utterly short of the challenge; and many people faced personal circumstances that left their resilience persistently low.

The result was trauma.

Hopefully we’ll never collectively find ourselves in that situation again. But, as individuals, we probably will. Because the ups and downs of work and life are inevitable.

We will likely again find ourselves on a tough-and-occasionally wicked project. Team lifecycles and myriad teaming decisions will sometimes leave us perilously unready for the task at hand.And our personal circumstances will eat into our reserves of resilience, leaving us struggling.

I want us to think more dynamically about this stuff. I want us to get better at anticipating and avoiding the moments where these waves combine.

We can usually cope with one, maybe two, peaks at a time - but almost everyone I know struggles at the intersection of all three. I certainly do.

I’m fortunate enough to work with colleagues comfortable enough to reveal they’re in a personal trough, and that for their own wellbeing they need extra help or to work on something easier for a while. But not everyone finds such disclosure so easy - and in some workplaces, and especially for minoritised staff, it can be  dangerous to reveal that vulnerability and ask for help.

A more inclusive strategy is to actively scan for these waves. Look for a growing mismatch between a project’s current difficulty and how well equipped the team is to rise to that challenge at that moment. Funnel extra capacity, capability and wider support to the team as they need it.

And check in on individuals. Because what might have felt manageable to them last month might not feel that way today.