A lot of people asked me how I came up with the idea of creating this survey, and what was its purpose. This is my answer to them.

It all started with my first steps in the labour market

I’ve been on the labour market for 18 years now, and of course, like a lot of you, I have witnessed multiple approaches and attitudes when it comes to management. Not just from my bosses, but other people’s bosses as well.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of the kind of bosses I’ve seen in action, in no particular order:

• bosses who allow bullying and refuse to let the victim move to another team
• bosses who don’t mind their best people leaving since that’s how the market works
• bosses who boast about how much money they make to employees with a low wage
• bosses who break labour laws
• bosses who fire people every time something goes wrong
• bosses who harass random employees until they suffer burnout and leave
• bosses who insult employees in front of their colleagues
• bosses who let clients abuse their employees
• bosses who let their employees take important decisions
• bosses who leverage people’s potential
• bosses who pressure new employees to snitch
• bosses who decide with whom it is OK to talk to at work
• bosses who promise the world and never intend to deliver
• bosses who put shackles on motivated and ambitious employees
• bosses who read their employees’ chat logs on a daily basis
• bosses who scream at people
• bosses who trust people
• bosses who try to destroy people’s reputations after they resign
• bosses who would eat babies if eating babies was profitable

There are a lot of kind of bosses and managers. What’s sad is that in my previous list, the bosses with a positive attitude are far outweighed by the other negative kind, and the nice ones weren’t even doing anything truly special but being decent human beings.

Hold my coffee, I got this

There was a time in my career — not too long ago — when I could feel that I was getting dangerously close to my tolerance threshold to abusive or retrograde boss-employee relationships. Strangely (or not), it coincided with my decision to focus on bringing humanity back to the core of the labour market and of the work place. If no one (in my immediate environment, at the very least) was willing to fix this mess, I would be the one to do so.

So, I was on my way to be the change I wanted to see in the world, and all I needed to start was a company that wanted to put their logo on that. I started writing on different mediums about the kind of progressive and human-centric environment I wanted to work in, until I found a company that had similar views on the matter. Where do I sign?

Since then, my replies to job offers on LinkedIn pretty much evolved from “Thanks, I’m not sure I want to be a Scrum Master anymore” to “Thanks for your consideration, but I’m busy changing the world”. Whatever I’m trying in my workplace, I expose to the outside world, and whatever I’m learning from the outside world, I try in my workplace. I am set to create such an example of people-centric leadership and management, that the labour market couldn’t just ignore it anymore. It’s still a work in progress. But this is my life now, and I’ve never been happier.

Brainstorm and inception

I was put in contact with Edda Pizzati, who founded a company called Humains, (comma included, that’s their brand) and that focuses on recruiting atypical candidates for job opportunities. There was an obvious and instantaneous professional connection between us, to the point where we just decided we should start a project together, and we came up with the idea of this survey. All that in one hour in a coffee shop in the Old Port of Montreal.

The discussion went from talking about why people leave their job, to what we could do to make people happier. And we thought that getting an idea of how bad (or good) things are as of now might be a good start.

Now I have never done a study like that before, especially not something with statistics. A good way to figure out if you can do something is to do it, so we threw a few ideas on paper. After a few passes, we had a clearer view of what we could achieve.

• We wanted to understand how people perceive their work environment and their manager;
• We wanted to understand what people expect from their manager;
• We wanted to understand what makes them keep their job;
• We wanted to find out if there were any correlation between all the demographics and variables we could use in the survey;
• And we also wanted to show to the surveyees, through the wide range of available answers, that management isn’t all command and control, and human-centric approaches do exist in management;

Designing the survey

It was clear from the start that we would share the data of the survey publicly. I don’t actually feel we’re doing this for ourselves, I’m hoping other people can find value in these results. With this in mind, we wanted a tool that was free to use. Google Forms felt like a very accessible and easy enough tool to use.

I drafted a series of questions that grew every now and then. I based my question on my own management experience. Situations where I was challenged, or where I was drastically avoiding traditional reflexes. In the survey description, I wrote that we don’t pretend there are good or bad answers to make sure people wouldn’t self-censor. In reality, of course, there are tons of management styles, and we all have our preferences.

I wanted to offer the broadest choice of answers, from very conservative to very progressive. Many times, I went to the extremes, not only because I wanted to go beyond what I’m used to and what I know, but also in hope that people would actually challenge their perception of their work environment. One of the first question I asked was what perception people have of their manager, and I asked it again at the end of the survey, to see if answering the survey itself had changed their initial perception. I’m excited to see the resulting statistics of this experiment.

Concerning the upcoming survey results

The survey results will be shared in an upcoming article on LinkedIn, on my collaborative blog Primos Populi, as well as on Humains,‘s blog. Depending on how much interesting information we gather, it could come in multiple separate articles. We will try to present the results in a nice and appealing way, maybe an infographic of some sort. If any of you have a tool for this that’s free to use, please let us know in the comments!

Also, know that the resulting .CSV file will be available for download to everyone.

Olivier Fortier

Owner of Primos Populi, partner and coach at Moabi. As a former manager, I prefer to use a “people first, the rest will follow” kind of approach. My favorite topics are organizational culture, safe work environments, and lowering the center of gravity of the decision making process. I cultivate people’s awesomeness.

www.primospopuli.com

I find this so important that, for me, it’s not a Modern Agile principle anymore, it’s one of my core values now. Professional and personal success is not a pie. The success of other people doesn’t remove anything from the rest of us. Quite the contrary, it actually inspires a lot of people. So I just decided that whatever I can do to help people succeed is good for everyone.  

To ensure people’s success on the workplace though, there is another concept that is absolutely primordial. In this article, I would like to explore my second favorite Modern Agile guiding principle: Make Safety a Prerequisite.

What do you mean by safety?

I mean psychological safety.

Modern Agile, which was brought to life by Joshua Kerievsky, gives us a pretty general idea of what safety means :

Safety is both a basic human need and a key to unlocking high performance. We actively make safety a prerequisite by establishing safety before engaging in any hazardous work. We protect people’s time, information, reputation, money, health and relationships. And we endeavor to make our collaborations, products and services resilient and safe.

All of this, however, sounds like a given to me. I really like to go much further than this. You see, in today’s job market, people have the reflex to put on their “professional mask” when going to work. By professional mask, I mean that they feel compelled to show an image of themselves that provides multiple appearances :

• The appearance of being in control
• The appearance of knowing what they’re doing
• The appearance of not making mistakes
• The appearance of optimal performance

The reason people wear a mask is due to their perception that control, knowledge, perfection, and performance is expected of them at any given time. You’re paid a good salary, so we expect that you should be in control, know what you’re doing, make no mistakes and always be performing. Right?

Wrong.

Wrong because if we wanted this, it would be safer to go with robots or softwares. These things can’t be expected of humans at all times, it’s just not possible, and probably not even desirable.

People shouldn’t be afraid to fail

A safe work environment is an environment where people can grow and learn. And I’m sorry to break it to you, but learning is not possible if you can’t make mistakes. Actually, failing isn’t the opposite of success, it is a huge part of it. People who succeeded are probably people who made more mistakes than others.

One very good example is the story of Thomas Edison. As an inventor, Edison made thousands of attempts at creating an efficient light bulb. When asked by a reporter how it felt to fail so often, he reportedly answered this :

Whether the story behind this quote is true or not, you get the idea… And Edison was lucky enough to know what he was trying to achieve. Now, let me list a few things that wouldn’t exist if people didn’t make mistakes :

• Penicillin
• The pacemaker
• X-Rays
• Microwave ovens
• Fireworks
• Ink Jet Printers
• Post-it notes

All of these things were discovered very randomly by people who were trying to do something else. What kind of world would we be living in if mistakes were prohibited? Failure is an incredible opportunity to learn and discover. I’m not the only one to say it. This little fella was able to encapsulate this whole concept on the silver screen, recently :

As managers and colleagues, it is our duty to create an environment where failure is not something to be frown upon.

People are mostly afraid to be blamed

I think this is one of the root causes as to why some people are so afraid of making mistakes. Since pretty much forever, failure in the workplace has been seen as something terrible because people are often blamed for their mistakes.

I always ask “What do you optimize your system for?”

When people are blamed for their mistakes, it is negative reinforcement. It’s the infamous stick that sometimes comes with the carrot. The system is optimized for not making mistakes.

When people are encouraged to learn from their mistakes, it is positive reinforcement. The system is optimized for learning from a situation.

“But some mistakes cost thousands of dollars!” you might say. Fair enough. Are you telling me no one learned anything from the mistake? See it as an investment. Spontaneous training session. Unfortunately, you can’t have tax credits for this kind of training though!

So, how do I make my work environment safe?

There are many ways to achieve this. I don’t know all of them. But I know one thing: if it’s gotta be a safe environment, it’s gotta be safe for everyone, starting with management.

Managers must lead by example

If managers and executives are “always right” and if they “can do no wrong”, the system is optimized to avoid making mistakes. Management mostly set the standard in behavior.

If all managers stay late at work, not a lot of people will be comfortable leaving earlier. If your managers never take vacations, people will feel bad for asking for vacations. So if no manager ever says “I don’t know”, “I need help” and “I screwed up”, you can imagine people will probably try to hide their mistakes.

If managers can’t admit to being wrong or having to improve on something, people will not openly provide constructive feedback. It will actually sound like something very bad. If managers are known for admitting they can improve, people will feel like constructive feedback is something positive.

By admitting our own vulnerabilities, we set a standard in the workplace. We communicate the idea that not being perfect is absolutely fine.

Reward this kind of transparency

If someone admits to having made a mistake, make sure to focus on the lesson that was learned. It should be welcomed, shared and celebrated. Be mindful of not putting people on the spot too much at first. Thank them in person. When you feel people are ready for this and that the culture of safety is strong enough, you can even thank them publicly. What they learned will be useful to others.

A practical action to improve safety at work

In my work unit, we were wondering how to improve the safety of our immediate work environment. There was this idea that I’ve been carrying with me for a few years and that I never brought to reality. A colleague and I decided to make it happen.

We called it “The Wall of Enlightenment”

It could have been called the “Wall of Failure” but we didn’t want it to sound so pejorative to those alien to the concept of psychological safety.

The idea is simply to create a place where people can share their mishaps, and what they learned from them. It’s a very simple arts and craft project, with one very simple rule.

We started in February. In our weekly announcement session, we explained the concept. Managers had already started filling the first column with their own mishaps. I also explained that I went to see the CEO and made him commit to thanking each and every person who would share their adventures on the Wall of Enlightenment.

After the first month, though, only managers had posted their mishaps. I was a little disappointed, but I kept going. A few days into March, there were 2 new mishaps on the wall, and they were put there by people from the staff. I knew then that at least 2 people out of 23 feel safe in our environment. It’s a wonderful start.

So far, I’m ahead with 4 mishaps shared on this wall, some very embarrassing ones. Instead than being ashamed and hiding those mistakes, I feel safe to have a good laugh with my colleagues and discuss freely how majestic some of my failures were. My colleagues will remember and will probably avoid repeating my own mistakes in the future.

The most interesting thing is how people who visit our office are amazed by this very simple concept. Which reminds me how far we are from fixing the job market. But hey, one has to start somewhere…

Olivier Fortier

Owner of Primos Populi, partner and coach at Moabi. As a former manager, I prefer to use a “people first, the rest will follow” kind of approach. My favorite topics are organizational culture, safe work environments, and lowering the center of gravity of the decision making process. I cultivate people’s awesomeness.

www.primospopuli.com