After my talk on compassionate leadership at the Women In Tech Global Conference last week, I got quite a few emails and messages about the stress of anticipating their place in the future of work.
People are working now with some level of trauma. From the pandemic, societal issues, unfamiliar work/life situations, changes in infrastructure and just plain nervousness about how things are going to work going forward.
Before 2020 employee mental health had reached crisis level. Now? That research is starting to come in. We must recognize we cannot ignore caring for both the mental and physical wellness of our teams.
Post pandemic work and life are going to change in ways we are just beginning to predict.
Stories of people changing fields or quitting their job rather than go back to the “same ol’ same ol’” are everywhere. And what about those Steve Brown calls “Thread People” who provide a sense of stability and continuity to the company; often more reliably than their leadership. They’ve been holding things together, and now they wonder what’s coming next.
If the crises we endured over the last year and a half had been only a few months (as we thought it would be), then maybe we’d be going back to familiar structures. But this length of time has disrupted everything, and that’s not entirely a bad thing.
Let’s look at this disruption as a way for us to build better systems, better ways of working together with compassion, inclusivity, a sense of being a part of a community with purpose.
The future of work is here. How are we going to manage?
- By remembering the humanness that drives everything we do.
- Recognizing that the more we have been away from human connection and the culture of work, the more we crave a sense of connection.
- Implementing creative solutions to caring for individual needs as they return.
- Incorporating programs to enhance mental agility with mindfulness training