#rituals
We all live in the sphere of rituals. Whether they are our morning routine of a coffee, the run, the dog-walk, or top up the bird-feeder.
We also live in a world of work full of rituals. Whether it’s the Monday huddle; the task-list check at 0830 or the safety briefing before we go and work in the power plant or mine.
We also have rituals like 5 days per week on duty and 2 off duty which we’ve come to know as the weekend.
We have rituals of parenting and caring that forces us to change that 5-day paradigm — often to our detriment and especially the women in our midst.
And in the pandemic response of 2020 we have a lot of those rituals on hold, stopped or even never likely to return.
Kindness — for example — can become a ritual. See Joanna Suvarna’s work on Be The Ripple (here). Unfairness and bias can also become a ritual but we don’t need to go there right now and know this all-to-well.
We get caught in rituals. We become them. We may even not dare to challenge them.
Except now, #TeamPTHR is challenging a ritual in the middle of the 2020 pandemic response.
We are moving to 4 operating days, punctuated by a Wellness Wednesday.
So to be clear: We’re on duty on Monday and Tuesday; off duty on a Wednesday and back on duty on Thursday and Friday. Well, for those of us in the ritual of a 5 day week anyway. We also have people working different hours so they too are making an adjustment to suit this.
We’re a self-managed enterprise — which means we are not ruled by traditional hierarchical reverence and power. We have distributed leadership, self-direction, business partnering (pairs of peer-based accountability and development partnering) and our own work stacks and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). We have a strategy or five, a business model built on adaptable Stacks, a mission, vision and manifesto, are underpinned by principles and pillars like; who we’ll work with and not, how we’ll partner and affiliate and what we stand for in the world.
And one thing we stand for is how we teach, consult, advise, advocate people-first approaches.
What I’ve noticed — and we have all agreed — is that the current ritual of working from home in a dispersed fashion keeping the business venture alive in the face of collapsed orders and restoring client work and creating our all-new product line (www.pthr.co.uk/solutions/labs) has been intense, rewarding and energy-consuming.
The rituals we’ve had to adopt (bearing in mind working across 4 timezones too and having a couple of globally-distributed clients) has meant late nights, early mornings and more.
We’re tired. And we’re sub-optimal. But without blame or worry about under-achieving or social loafing. Believing in kindness to others, and walking our talk means we have to do something about this. Else we’re frauds. We’ll talk about caring leaders and compassionate organisations but if we’re not that way, then we’re faking it.
So we’re adopting a new ritual.
Wellness Wednesday is our punctuation day.
We will do whatever is good for the soul on that day.
Walking. Running. Resting. Meditating. Yoga. Life Admin. Social calls with friends. Reading. Watching. Learning. Studying. Caring for others. Whatever is good for the soul.
No ritualistic check-in on Slack. Which has become a really strong connecting source for us in our dispersed ways of working pre- and mid-pandemic.
No emails to clients. No delivery for clients. No design or research for clients. No responses to clients. No following leads. No evaluation of our work.
And on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday we’ll be on duty for clients, with clients, supporting clients and each other in the work we do that we all, without reservation, love.
But you can make the love of your work a ritual and being on-call is not as healthy as you may think.
So we’ve taken the exciting — and perhaps even daring — decision, to optimise our time and work to 32 hours of kilojoules dedicated to our enterprise. And the Wellness Wednesday 8 hours in support of that to make those other 4 days fulfilling, enriching, productive, creative, rich, powerful, resilient, impactful and rewarding.
We believe we can achieve the same (hence not adapting any of our financial aspects to compensate for this) across those 4 days.
And we’re going to experiment, test, review, iterate, adapt, learn and do as much as we can to support that belief and know more about ourselves and when we’re optimal.
Will I still log on like I am now on a Saturday morning to write a blog post? If my energy is there, sure. I adopt a ‘work when the vibe is right’ approach mostly and occasionally because I have to hit a deadline or whatever. I keep my own counsel but that can be a slog at times. Even for me.
Will I work longer on my on-duty days to compensate? Sometimes. I’m not naive about this. But 5 on-duty days with no recharge is beginning to impair my creativity, usefulness, ability to focus and applied best-self.
Will we be more useful to the enterprise, my colleagues and clients because we have a punctuated week; and have learned, relaxed, reinvigorated ourselves on our Wellness Wednesday? We believe we will. Time will tell.
What we’re committed to doing is being sincere, genuine and <cringe> authentic about our way of tackling the intensity of now and the possibilities of the near and longer-term future.
We love the way companies like Barry Wehmiller, Menlo Innovations, Mind Valley, Dreamcast, Boost, CyberClick, Beetroot, Widen, Matt Black Systems, Treehouse, Buurtzorg and ESBZ appear to be. So why would we deny ourselves the chance to emulate their human-centric ways in pursuit of helping our clients be like them but detrimental to ourselves?
We aim to serve Henley Business School Careers, ForViva, NIL Slovenia, Motor Neurone Disease Association, Coventry City Council, Lancashire County Council, FDM Group HR and Blackwood Homes be humans-first, compassionate and productive places to work that help their people flourish. We would be frauds if we were 80-hours, warrior-like burnouts in pursuit of that.
So we’re drinking our own homebrew here.
Nothing more than that. We’re fragile but determined souls who love the stimulation of our work but need the sanctuary of well-being for ourselves and each other in order to make good on our promises to the world.
Better business for a better world, may not translate into ‘work 4 out of 5 normal working days’ precisely, but we believe we can do this and then help our clients, partners and community also live that aspiration and dream.
We’re excited about this. We’re determined to give this a go for our own good but more, for also for the good of our work.
We love what we do and in that, we want to preserve the sanctity of our pledges. To be good to others by being kind to ourselves.
Our rituals then are being hacked. Our approach to our work is being rewired and reinvented somewhat.
And our ‘live experiment’ will be scrutinised, measured, evaluated, adapted and sensed. Others may applaud us, willing us to succeed. Others may decry this and will it to fail.
We’ll learn. We’ll do our best. We’ll be true to our beliefs.
We’ll ritualise that shift in rituals.
Because after all, human beings are ritualistic whether we notice it or not. We’re noticing that some of the rituals we have adopted aren’t feeling how they should and so we’ll judge our success on this ultimately on how we feel.
This Wednesday, my wellness will be what I work on. I’ve some books to read, some time to think and some recharging and regenerating to do. So maybe, if you come across me on Thursday, you might see a difference in me.
And that might become the new ritual — a fully-flourishing me and a more positively-impacted-upon you.
For more on the new ritual that is the 4-day week see below:
