Hello from the basement

Photo by Sam.

It's not so bad down here. There's a pull-out couch. And a 3-piece bathroom. There's a beer fridge. In any other situation it'd feel like a win to be stuck with a dozen cans of craft brew. It's less interesting at the moment.

One of us has COVID and so far, thanks in large part to the basement (and boosters! and masking! and updated rapid test procedures!), no one else in the house does.

Years ago, when we got married, we joked that our suburban friends and our city friends had opposite responses to seeing our home. Our burbs friends said, "Wow, you live in one of those tiny homes. Cuuuute!" And our city friends said, "HOLY SHIT YOU HAVE A BASEMENT!" For the past few days, we have felt immense gratitude to have a basement.

2.5 years is plenty of time to scenario-test. We're married co-founders. There's an airborne pathogen. We talk for a living. And if one of us gets sick, the most likely thing is that both of us do. That's not how it's played out so far, but we're still being cautious and taking things slow. (It also means this newsletter will be a short one. We write them together, and working through COVID — even on a newsletter to thousands of people we love — is a mistake. Thank you in advance for getting it.)

Two weeks ago, we wrote about the benefits of cross-training. How bosses can sponsor and delegate to grow their people but also be away if the need arises. We were talking about vacation. But that's not the only reason you might find yourself offline for a stretch of time.

Unplanned Outages

Last week, Derek Thompson had an article in the Atlantic about how everything is weird right now. When talking about why productivity is low while employment is high, he writes,

"Let’s say you own a restaurant. Every month during the Great Resignation, one-seventh of your workers quit. Now you’ve got almost all-new kitchen staff and waitstaff, and you can’t train them fast enough. The new chefs keep messing up your nightly specials. The new waiters keep dropping plates. Every week, somebody seems to get COVID. Yes, your restaurant is fully staffed. But are you working at full capacity? Not a chance!"

Two weeks ago half of Canada fell offline because a software upgrade on their routers mistakenly tried to swallow the whole internet. Last week the hosting platform we use for our programs had an unprecedented outage. And then the very next day, they had another one. Our doctor's office got knocked offline. No more flights can be booked out of Heathrow this summer. And don't even get us started on Pearson.

Outside the world of hypothetical restaurants, real plates are getting dropped.

And while you're struggling to keep the plates spinning on your team, the CEO is talking about "belt-tightening," and "doing more with less." How are you supposed to be proactive when things keep breaking? How do you build burst capacity when your company just put in a hiring freeze?

Have you seen that McKinsey article that everyone's been quoting this week? It's hard for us to uncritically cite McKinsey given, you know, their track record. That said, the data in this particular one tracks what we hear everywhere right now. People remain more willing to walk away from the wrong job. And that the strongest driver of attrition is a lack of clear development and advancement opportunities.

Clear development and advancement opportunities. Bosses, the answer to your burst capacity conundrum may seem familiar. It is also the solution to boredom-slash-stagnation-related turnover.

Nice-to-have or need-to-have?

One of us is out with COVID. One of us is solo-parenting. And in the midst of it, with all the things we were trying to figure out, the one we didn't worry about was whether our team at RSG could handle it. Our team is, to be fair, outstanding. But one of the things that makes them so outstanding is that they cross-train. With us, and with each other.

The data on this is clear. Cross-training correlates with a variety of happy outcomes, for organizations and employees. Employees feel more engaged and invested in their work, they stick around longer and they grow with their organization. That growth, in turn, leads to all the things you hope it would. Fewer incidents, more resilience. Proactive identification of problems. More burst capacity.

We know, though. It's a lot. It's one more thing to deal with, when you're still racing to keep up or rebuild or start over. "Cross-train my team" lives squarely on the nice-to-have list for most managers. Faced with the weight and urgency of the need-to-have list, it's hard to see where it would fit. Even when you know that training would help. Even when you read the studies that say growth opportunities reduce attrition. It's still hard to fit it in.

We'd just like to remind you, from the basement, that by the time training is a need-to-have, it might be too late to get started.

- Melissa and Johnathan