Thanks, that was fun...
How loss of trust lowers the temperature
A recurring conversation. It comes up with people across companies, across age groups and across responsibilities. Work feels more and more like work. That might seem obvious, but there was a time, not so long ago, when work seemed to be more widely enjoyed. Whether that was because of having a best friend at work, or it felt like we were all in it together, that feeling seems to be disappearing. Most recently, an Engineering Manager told me she might just be getting old, and that her responsibilities inside and outside work might be the issue.
I’m not so sure. I think things have changed, not irreversibly, but seriously.
The reasons are not mysterious. The great growth spurt of 2021 was hugely exciting, and it felt like software was going to take over the world. It was immediately followed by the great layoffs of 2022, which were labelled by organisations as a “correction” to “over-hiring.” The aftershocks of those layoffs continue to reverberate. The rise of remote working through Covid, was followed by return to office mandates. Now, excitement for AI and the potential productivity gains have been tempered by the continued redundancies blamed on the technology.
The other thing that ended in 2022 was cheap money. Zero percent interest rates had allowed companies to invest in perks for over a decade, and call it culture. When interest rates rose, and redundancies arrived, indulgence was at an end. But there’s a difference between indulgence and warmth. The baby went out with the bathwater. Leadership got overly-focused on delivery and forgot that the people doing the delivering were the thing you needed to invest in.
People are ground down. I see and hear it everywhere. At neighbourhood barbecues, in hushed tones at lunch, in the pub at the monthly catch-up with friends. “This used to be fun.”
Fun is a signal. When conditions are good, it shows up of its own accord. Nobody schedules it. Nobody runs an offsite to manufacture it. When conditions are bad, the opposite is true. The office becomes like the worst sort of family Christmas.
Fun is a signal, but it’s only possible to have fun in a trusting environment. Trust is the thing that’s actually been damaged by the layoffs, by the mandates, and by the threats of replacement. Trust is knowing that you can disagree in a meeting without being quietly briefed against before the next one. That a redundancy round will not fall on the person who said the awkward thing in the all-hands. That members of the team can risk a half-formed idea, a question that might make somebody look slow, or a criticism of the wider organisation. Without trust, every conversation is a performance review.
Without trust, free expression withers. Without free expression, you can’t have high performance.
When trust isn’t there, teams do less of what makes them teams. The retro becomes a griping session, with no ownership or action. The 1:1 becomes a status report. The criticism that would have caught the wrong decision a quarter ago is a Slack DM between team members, or a WhatsApp message if they’re really being frank. The work continues. The output is measured. People wave vaguely at outcomes, but nobody wants to take the risk of measuring failure.
Meanwhile, we keep telling ourselves, “This used to be fun.” I keep meeting leaders who know something is missing; I know something is missing, and I have struggled to name it. The ground has shifted beneath our feet. The cost of being warm in this climate is to risk being seen as not serious, and risk is at a premium.
People notice. They notice when the woman they liked working for is the one leaving, and they notice that they are not in any particular hurry to work for the people who are staying. They tell you in passing, as if it were nothing. “It isn’t fun any more,” a leading indicator dressed as a small complaint. Eventually, enough people will vote with their feet.
The Engineering Manager I mentioned at the start of this article isn’t getting old. The work hasn’t become harder. The room she’s in has got colder, and she is reading the temperature. The fun is gone, but the trust was the first thing out the door. Building it back is slow work that doesn’t show up on a scorecard. This isn’t about free pizzas or hoodies. Fix the trust. The fun is how you’ll know.