You can't seize the moment with your hands full

Photo by Rodolfo Clix.

There are two parts that make playing Minecraft with little kids really hard.

The first is that they don't have any concept of inventory management. In Minecraft, as in life, you can only carry around so many things at once. The kids don't get this at first. They carry everything with them. And when they find something cool, they have no room to pick it up. So they think the game is broken and get frustrated.

The fix for this is to build a chest. A place they can store their stuff and come back to it later. You encourage them to carry essential items like food and torches, but put down all the random bits they will only use occasionally.

The second hard part is when the kid figures out that if they can open their own chest, they can open yours too. And yours is where all the good shit lives cause you are an adult. And you are actually capable of complex game play. At first they were just looking. But then you notice that a bunch of diamonds are missing. And because you're the adult, you have to be mature about the fact that some small child just robbed you.

In Minecraft, you solve this with a special chest - an Ender Chest. This is a magic chest, much harder to make, that provides safe storage for every player in the game. When you open it, you only see what you put in there. And the same is true for everyone else. Everyone's stuff is safe, because you can only take out of it what you put into it.

Today, our second book comes out. It's an ender chest. It is a full year of these newsletters, from the first lockdown to the anniversary of those lockdowns.

It is a place to put down some of what the past 18 months have felt like. To make some space in your inventory. To know that whenever you want, from the safety of your own home, you can go back and explore and process what's inside.

Putting stuff down to make room

It's not like we aren't carrying around some stuff.

A great resignation. A fundamental reset in how we establish and calibrate compensation. A mental health crisis. An utter collapse of corporate culture. Turnover fuelled by burnout. Leading to burnout fuelled by turnover.

It's been a real shit storm out there. As any business journalist with a twitter account and three anecdotes can tell you. You'd be forgiven for feeling like everyone has quit, everyone is burnt out, and there is no light out there to be found. Like the future of work is here and it's a fucking mess.

And yet.

The narrative is so loud about all the things going wrong, we're missing some of what's going right. A positive through-line that's only visible if your day job involves talking to middle managers at a bunch of different companies.

Which is our day job. And what we've learned is that:

There is a burnout crisis. But not for everyone.

There is massive turnover. But not for everyone.

There is a culture implosion. But not for everyone.

There are organizations who have come through this pandemic with a healthy team and a healthy culture. Not a lot. Not the majority. But they are out there. And if we lined up all our alum company logos and had you guess, we don't think you could. It's not industry, or size, or funding, or business model that got them there.

Measure the Distance

To understand what sets those companies apart, it helps to take a longer view.

We've been in this pandemic for more than 80 weeks now. 80 Monday team calls. 80 1:1s if your own boss keeps those appointments. 80 missed 1:1s if they don't. 80 weeks of Sunday scaries for some of you.

40 of these newsletters.

When you step back from the day to day, and week to week - how do you measure that distance for your organization? It's one thing to say that none of us is new any more. But that's defined in the negative space. Acknowledging the loss is valid and important, but it's only half the story. What's different in the positive space? What could be?

Organizational culture is a rolling average. It's an accumulation of the last 10,000 interactions we've had with our employer, and how they made us feel. Connected, supported, seen. Pressured, abandoned, disrespected.

When you think about how your organization has weathered the last 80 weeks, think about that average. How the decisions you've made personally have moved other people's averages around. How the decisions your employer made have moved your own.

The authentically exciting moment

In her newsletter this week, AHP writes about the push back to offices, and how exciting it could be,

We have such a unique, authentically exciting moment to take stock of what “office” work could look like moving forward — what parts of it need a collective space, which parts do not, and what office spaces will look like and provide. And so many organizations are straight up squandering that opportunity.

That's the trick. That's how the organizations we work with are doing it. The ones who have avoided burnout, avoided turnover. Who are thriving as a business and as humans within the business.

It's that their bosses aren't squandering the opportunity. They're paying attention to what's changing about work. They're getting ahead of it, and renegotiating with their employees as partners. They lead as though things have changed, because they have. It's not complex, it's just hard.

The pandemic has turned their worlds upside down, too. They were just as frightened in the early days, just as locked down. But as leaders, they made choices that made space. They cleared out some room in their inventory and gave themselves and each other some slack. So that when new opportunities came along, they could pick them up instead of getting frustrated.

Since the first day of RSG, we have been committed to a central belief: that if you can reach bosses, work gets better. Reach them with skills, sure. But also reach them with accountability, and intersectionality, and an awareness of their own power. Bosses move the average with the decisions they make, or refuse to make, each week.

We need bosses to sit with what the last 18 months have changed. So that they don't squander the opportunities in front of them to make work better. If you are a boss, or have bosses in your life, order a copy, or three. If you want copies for your whole company, we'll get them to you at cost.

We hope it helps. Thanks for trusting us with your stuff.

- Melissa and Johnathan