Eye on the Workforce

Hybrid work is causing problems. Many employers have required workers to return in some way, and workers are not happy about it. Worse, employers know return-to-office (RTO) policies have not brought about desirable results but do not know exactly what to do next. 

So, you are stuck on the front line of a problem you have little control over - again.

There is a way to turn this difficult situation into a positive, however. If you understand certain details of the background of the situation you can use your leadership skills to help meet your team goals and your employer's goals.

First, Understand the Employers' Situation

Employers brought workers back because they wanted at least two known benefits of workplace face-to-face interaction. Simply stated, these are innovation and camaraderie. Unfortunately, they did it wrong. They assumed that just being back would create the environment necessary to meet those goals. Employers are in the unenviable situation of having to force people to maintain a failed approach which makes the work environment even worse, especially for camaraderie.

• Employers are generally not sure how to meet their goals, so are forced to extend the inadequate policies while they figure it out.
• Some, who have not previously checked whether employees are actually coming to the office, are starting routine checks with sanctions for those who refuse to follow the policies.
• Workplace consultants have summarized the inadequacy here as employers not arranging for the correct activities to foster innovation and camaraderie.

Second, Understand the Employee Position

Workers generally like the flexibility afforded by working from home. They feel that they have proven they can be productive working remotely. When they have to go to work, they do not like the commute, and once they get there, they do not see any value to it. Often, "coffee badging" results where the worker comes to work only to be seen and then leaves.

• Resentment builds in the workplace - just the opposite of what employers want

These two situations make your job more difficult, but, understanding them helps you with your intervention to make office time better.

Tactics to Make Office Time Better

"Making office time better" means that you are helping meet your employer's goals while helping workers get more value out of the in-office experience. Here are some ideas to get you started. Your situation may call for something different, but your objectives are the same.

Add activities for the team to build rapport and solve problems.

Bring everyone in at the same time, consistent with their schedule.

• Conduct team-building activities that will build on the current maturity of the team.
• Eat lunch together and talk informally about shared interests.
• Identify team problems and consider solutions.

Create opportunities for innovation.

Set up interactions with unrelated teams or specialists. While this may sound unusual, innovation has been shown to arise from interaction and coordination between disparate individuals or groups. It comes from one group utilizing learning from an unrelated group.

• This is the kind of interaction employers have been hoping would happen under their RTO policies, but the policies do not necessarily facilitate these desired interactions. You, however, can help facilitate these interactions.
• Ask team members what will work for them. They may want to have a session with an expert or meet with another team to create best practices. Suggest that they think about cross functional groups to have face to face conversations with to see how disparate groups solve similar problems or work successfully in the work environment.
• Bring experts in to talk face-to-face with your team. Help make sure there is a low-stress, positive atmosphere where sharing is low-risk. Let the experts talk about how they do things and let your team focus on anything they find useful.
• "Innovation" in this case is high levels of improvement quickly by using new tools, processes or techniques unknown previously.

An Important Next Step for Your Career

Once you understand what leaders are after and what workers are experiencing, you can intervene effectively to increase worker satisfaction and improve their ability to innovate. But don't forget a critical step: Once you do this, communicate to managers and leaders what you have done. If you have achieved positive results, communicate them.

If your organization is stuck in an RTO-resentment ditch as so many are, you will show yourself as the rare type of leader that is part of the solution. This type of opportunity does not come around often, so use these simple steps as inspiration to form your own plan.

Bonus tip: In a larger organization, work with performance improvement specialists or middle managers to determine the best activities for your team, suggested specialists to contact, and to make it easier for you to communicate your efforts in this pain point so that you can get the recognition you deserve.

Don't miss my articles, also on ProjectManagement.com.

You have team management routines already established in your project or agile effort. Use these to make sure you are properly managing the mental health of your team. Meetings can be a useful way to identify potential mental health problems and start to deal with them.

Periodic Team Meetings

Where you work mental health may not be a common topic. With the preparation you make as described in Part 1, though, it can be an unsurprising topic in your team meetings. Here's how to include mental health topics in these meetings.

• Proactively remind team members to take time for self-care. This helps them with building the habit of taking necessary breaks and using resources that your organization provides.
• Provide other helpful reminders or tips based on your research described in Part 1.
• Ask mental health related questions. Use informal terms and phrases such as "We are coming up to a stressful point in our execution" or "Well that was a surprising turn of events. What do you think about that extra work involved?".
• Follow-up on the initial responses to your questions and get input from everyone who is willing to share in the meeting. Look for anyone who is struggling and consider a separate follow-up meeting to investigate further. See below for more.
• If your questions uncover significant stress or anxiety in the team as a whole, ask the team what the best way to respond is. They do not have to know immediately. Also bring up any relevant information or resources your organization provides. If your organization does not provide relevant resources, communicate your researched expert resources.

Individual Meetings

You may have a routine individual meeting with team members. Do not hesitate to use these sessions to identify and address mental health problems. Without the whole team listening, an individual may be more forthcoming.

• Keep the meeting agenda but look for discussion points that enable you identify potential difficulties.
• Ask how the teammate is feeling in such a way that circumvents knee jerk responses like "I'm fine" or "doing good". To do this, ask about a specific experience. For example, "How did it go with the review?" Or "What did you have to do to meet the deadline?" These will bring about more useful responses so you can determine what the individual's experience has been and how they are reacting to it.
• If you do uncover situations where a team member admits to overwork, anxiety, potential burnout, conflicts in work/life balance or similar mental health struggles, be supportive. Use empathetic language that you have prepared previously. Create phrasing for your supportive and empathetic comments beforehand so that they sound like they come from you naturally.
• Refer the team member to the best resources.

 Ad Hoc Incidences

Ad hoc meetings where you speak with someone specifically about immediate mental health challenges they are having at home or work are a good place for an intervention if you are prepared as described in Part 1.

• If, for example, your organization has a phone number to call for those who are struggling, then your effective intervention will likely be to empathize with the team member and then advise them to call the number right away.
• Determine if you can make other immediate adjustments to allow the individual to get past this difficulty. For example, you may be able to increase flexibility for to complete work, provide a day off to deal with a family situation, and so on.

 Again, you are not a therapist. Leave diagnosing and treatment to the experts. Your role only involves the early identification and advice to follow existing resources provided for this purpose. Don’t go too far, yet be confident in your role by building your expertise and preparing your phrasing. See this work as an advanced extension of your leadership skills, because it most certainly is.

But, if you create a working environment where mental health and stressors are regularly discussed, identified, and dealt with, the team will be happier and more productive in a sustainable way. Even if it is rare to identify a team or individual mental health difficulty, the fact that you have created an environment that makes the discussions routine will set you apart as an effective leader and improve the long-term performance of your team.

I’m sure you’ve seen reports of workers paying more attention to their mental health. Maybe you have noticed it in the workplace. Maybe you have seen communications from your organization supporting mental health. Did seeing any of these make you wonder what you could do – or would be expected to do – as a team leader?

What can you do exactly? You are not a therapist. You do not have a degree in Psychology (probably). In fact, you may be a little concerned that you could be asked to get involved in people’s personal problems, something you may not have signed up for and may not be good at. Still, you want to make sure your team is productive and happy, so perhaps your next question is, "what are the basic things I need to do to effectively deal with my team's mental health?"

 That's a question we can work with. With that as your scope, techniques are available to add into your existing routines. Just making these initial adjustments will create a better work environment consistent with contemporary needs.

 Start your project with awareness and supportiveness

Your initial moves should indicate that the topic of mental health is “acceptable” to discuss and that the team will address it if necessary.

• At a team meeting early in the effort (or as soon as you can), explain to the team that mental health is important.

• Share an example of a work-related experience where you had to take time to improve your mental health.

• Have teammates share their own experiences of stressors in the workplace. If you keep the early discussion related to the workplace, it helps create a bond and allows you to make notes on what the team is experiencing currently. This allows you to monitor for these stressors in the future looking for ways to avoid or reduce their impacts.

• Provide information on resources available from your organization. This is how you avoid being some kind of expert in mental health. You become successful by making sure there is an awareness of a potential problem and refer team members to appropriate resources created by experts.

• Explain that addressing mental health is important to individual team members and the team. Even though you used work examples previously, make sure to specify that family and personal issues are included.

• If you know at this time what accommodations you specifically can make for mental health, provide examples. These may be brief time away or flexible weekly schedules.

Do quick research to prepare

Now that you know what to do in the early meeting on mental health, it should be pretty clear that you need to prepare beforehand. Some of these preparation steps you may already have done for other reasons (because you are a good leader, right?). Any of these might be suitable for your situation:

• Look over your organization’s communications about mental health for how it is prioritized. This will provide you with help to craft your own message and tone. You will not want to stray from the organizational message. Better to rephrase in your own words and refer the team to the exact message.

• Research your organization's benefits around mental health so that you can speak to them briefly. There should be a page and/or a message that you can leverage. You might want to have a summary bullet list and a link ready for use in meetings. Something as simple as a phone number to call for mental health assistance will make a huge difference.

• In the above communications, you may find that there is written guidance for individuals as to how to report larger problems to their manager, which may not be you. There may be self-care instructions that help individuals better make mental health part of their routine. Look for a quick link that you can use for guidance such as this.

• While you are researching the above, note the signs and symptoms of mental health problems, including burnout, so that you can identify and refer team members who may be suffering.

This blog has been full of ideas over the years to help make workers more productive and happier. The new twist, which is very important, is the specific focus on mental health. Most organizations now have targeted resources and are making it a point to address mental health issues.  

This is a timely response, because team members are more aware of the importance of mental health and are speaking out when there is a problem. They will value your efforts at creating a healthier work environment. They will value your efforts to help individuals who are suffering mental health issues.

Part 2 will cover how to make mental health part of your usual routines, so managing it does not affect your mental health!

Like this blog topic? Check out my hundreds of articles on this site. They are generally about people management. Never underestimate how this topic can propel your career!

Before getting into today's topic, I would like to express my appreciation to ManagementHelp.org for recognizing this blog as One of the Top 20 Best Project Management Blogs to Follow. I will continue to work to present relevant and useful topics. Feel free to use the comment section to let me know of your workforce management pain points so that I can address them.

 One of your goals is to ensure your entire team is performing as best as it can, and that it continues to improve. Unfortunately, times change and the techniques you have used in years gone by will need refreshing. For instance, in recent years there has been a focus on applying empathy in the workplace. Now even empathy-related tactics have been expanded into a new and important area. Today you can be a better project manager/scrum master, a better leader, by addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I).

The objective here is to ensure that individuals from marginalized groups are not left behind but instead are fully incorporated into the team activities and decisions. The particular individuals or groups may differ depending on your geography or culture, but the tactics to use are consistent. DE&I-specific tactics start with specialized coaching and becomes more sophisticated as needed. This allows you to start simply and "grow into" these new skills. Here are four categories of skills that will help you plan your growth.

Coach

Every day, as a leader, you can make a difference to marginalized individuals on your team by acting as a coach, by being DE&I-sensitive.

• Start by asking questions: Are there gaps in skills or knowledge that will help the individual be able to participate more? Is it more a lack of confidence? Is the individual experiencing behavior from others that is demeaning or toxic?
• Once you find out what is needed, get approval from the individual as to how to proceed. The team member being coached must be in control in this situation and must be assured of your good intentions and trustworthiness. The process may go slowly at first.
• Follow-through with the next steps at the appropriate speed. As you achieve success, it will build momentum for the next activity. Be sure to communicate the improvements you are seeing to the individual being coached in a timely fashion. Get feedback as to what they think and whether they are more confident. Don't depend on your interpretation of the situation. You, your behavior, may be part of the problem. If it turns out to be, do something about it to continue to build trust and improve the team.
• Part of coaching team members from marginalized groups is to create a safe place to build their skills and confidence, recalling that you are doing this to give the individual an equal footing with other team members. Incorporate opportunities, for example, in team meetings, project reporting, and stakeholder interactions.
• Work to adjust the behavior of others where it interferes with creating a safe work environment for all team members. Such behavior blocks team performance.

Support

Once those being coached have built up their confidence, be proactive in supporting them for other growth opportunities they find. These may be within your team or outside the team. Help them with additional skill-building, documenting evidence for interviews or networking.

Defend

You will have more skin in the game for this level and may end up countering cultural norms.

• Intervene when you see individual instances of demeaning behavior or even dismissive comments directly targeted to a marginalized individual’s abilities.

• Set the facts straight on the individual’s capabilities. Call out stereotypes as a blocker to project performance and achieving business goals.

Sponsor

An even higher-level of support will be to promote a worker from a marginalized group for a particular position as career advancement.

• Acting as a sponsor, you bring career opportunities to the individual and assist with preparing to submit for a position or to assume the role.
• The sponsor role is beyond just helping and learning. It is identifying possibilities proactively and recommending to stakeholders an individual for that role.

Team members from marginalized groups will thrive once they are participating on an equal footing with others on the team. The reality is that they will be less likely to get the chance to do so without an ally. That's where you come in, a new type of leader prepared to assist. While the skills for DE&I may be new, there is a ladder of techniques available to you allowing you to grow over time. And make no mistake, these skills are differentiators if you want to move into more complex projects and more sophisticated organizations.

There is more to discuss on this topic. Use the comments section to address your own concerns and look for futures posts to dive deeper. Don't forget that I also have articles and more on ProjectManagement.com going back to the year 2000.

In agile, you as scrum master, must protect your team from outside distractions and pressure. One source of pressure is the leaders' desire for status updates. It is a source of pressure because agile values and priorities focus on getting the work done, not on trying to estimate how long until completed. So, it is not surprising that two comments to my article Winning the Organizational Transition to Agile requested more ideas for communicating to sponsors and stakeholders when your agile effort will be "done". So Deepak, Stephane, and others with this same question, this is for you.

Agile embraces the fact that requirements are basically impossible to document fully and completely before the design and development get started, and addresses this by continually showing the customer (for example, business representatives) results, asking for feedback and responding appropriately with new development. Teams respond to comments like this:

• "Oh, looks like we forgot some steps."
• "We thought we wanted that design, but it is not going to work."
• "We see some opportunities here looking at your latest demonstration and want to update requirements."

Even with drastic changes in scope, the development team remains in control until the product owner and customer representatives are satisfied with the result. While this method is better for the development team, it makes determining "the end" very difficult.

But therein lies the solution! If it is your customer who tells you when your work is done, it makes sense to leverage that relationship when you define status. With this in mind, follow the steps below to build a status statement.

Target End Date.  Assume that organizational leaders want a status summary that will tell them an end date plus any risks/issues/impediments that could interfere with the end date. The first part of the status summary must have an end date, but for agile, a more accurate term is Target End Date. Certainly, at the beginning of the effort, despite having few risks and zero impediments, there are many unknowns, it needs to be communicated as just a target. This can be estimated using a number of user stories, even total story points, distributed into a given number of sprints.

You should run your estimate by your product owner and/or sponsor for confirmation, adjustments and approval.

This is a very rough estimate, so now it is important to communicate just how rough to set expectations of the leaders. It is important to communicate that, even though there is low risk and no issues/impediments, the team is not naturally "Green" and on track to that date, because you just don't know in agile. And this is important as well: If you do not meet the date, it should be clear that no one necessarily is doing anything wrong. Change is a natural part of the process.

Confidence Level.  One way to communicate the roughness of your estimate is by communicating your confidence level in that target end date.

• Keep it simple by using "Low/High".
• Three options, "Low/Medium/High", can be used if you can keep from overusing "Medium" thereby making it meaningless.
• Some leaders prefer (Read that: "Require") more precision. Try a percent, such as 25% or 75% confidence level.

Generally, early on in the project, you'll have a low confidence level. Later as you get toward the end and most user stories have been completed, you have a higher level of confidence that the end date provided is accurate. A major impediment may lower confidence level.

Again, you do not have to be anxious over the Confidence Level measure. Collaborate with the product owner and even some subject matter experts. There should be agreement all around here so that when a leader probes further, the rationale is solid, customer/business-based, and everyone has the same story. A real benefit here is that confidence level can be based upon the subject matter experts' and product owner's understanding of what they do not know in order to complete the scope of the effort.

Putting all this together, the summary statement on a status report can look something like these examples:

Example 1:  Target end date for beginning of project with many sprints pending.

Target Deployment Date: 25 July, 20XX    Confidence level: Low (Unknowns in early development).

Example 2:  Same project later with just a few sprints estimated as remaining.

Target Deployment Date: 25 August, 20XX    Confidence level: High (No impediments, near completion of development).

Example 3:  Project near the end but with an impediment.

Target Deployment Date: 15 February, 20XX    Confidence level: Low (Despite nearness of target end date, impediment discovered requiring research to determine next steps.)

In the above example, additional status bullets can be provided to describe that limited progress can be made until impediment is resolved, re-design may be necessary or that partner resources may not be immediately available to assist in research.

This agile-friendly format is not expected to solve everyone's problems. You may think, "Well my leaders are not going to agree with this format". OK, maybe you can find a similar format that will work. If nothing works, you do not have a leader communication problem. You have an organizational change problem, which requires you to escalate along a much different path. This was the point of the original article, and you are now stuck in a two-article reading loop.