It’s back in the news! When the term first came into use it was regarded as the antidote to ‘hustle culture’. It was one of the new ideas to emerge from the pandemic when people had more time to reflect on the healthy balance between work and other aspects of life.
In an ideal world, it’s a great idea. We should work to live not live to work.
Recently some have raised the questions Is it really about rebalancing or is it more about shirking? Leaders ned to be discerning and up to date on underlying issues in their organisations.
Here are 5 areas for leaders to help evaluate whether or not there is a problem brewing.
1. Is there a culture of micromanaging?
If team members are not given sufficient autonomy to do their work, it can lead to demotivation. Micromanaging suggests lack of trust or confidence in staff members and can be counterproductive.
2. Are all work functions valued?
Obviously in multi-disciplinary teams you’ll have specialisms and areas that require experts that may appear to have more value. However, every organisation needs support staff, administrators, finance people and various staff across all levels of the organisations. Appreciating individual team members and their efforts can reap dividends in terms of motivation and job satisfaction. It’s worth looking at trends and checking if there is a retention issue in specific roles.
3. Is hustle culture celebrated and normalised?
Some working environments need staff that are flexible and able to work unsociable hours and obviously, employees should know this when they sign up. Other environments have an expectation of working extra hours to show commitment. In these environments compromising non work commitments, family, leisure and free time can become the norm just to ‘fit in’. If this happens regularly, burn out and stress can follow.
4. Challenge undermining behaviours?
One of the most obvious signs of toxic culture is where managers or colleagues feel emboldened to undermine colleagues knowing such behaviour is acceptable and normalised. This can cause the recipients of such behaviour to mentally check out.
5. Does your performance management include space for genuine reflection and feedback?
Some organisations, approach feedback as a tick box with off-loading work and looking at targets in a sterile manner. If your appraisal meetings do not give room for concerns or feedback to be shared, there can be no genuine sharing of challenges and issues which is a lost opportunity for strengthening understanding in this work relationship.
