Assume Everyone Has Bad Workplace Experiences in Their Past
People With Bad Workplace Experiences Enter Every Job Wary
If you have never had a boss or coworkers you struggled with, you are unusual.
If you never had a teacher who used behavioural conditioning (rewards or punishments) for classroom management, you are unusual.
If you never took multiple choice tests with ambiguous answers, you are unusual.
If you have never experienced microaggressions or hostility you didn’t understand a cause for, you are unusual.
Most people have experienced harm of some sort from people with authority over them.
Most people have experienced workplaces and interpersonal relationships that were very exciting at first and turned out to be bad for them.
Most people start a new job cautiously optimistic.
Being Explicit About Culture and Expectations Creates Trust
New employees need to know the rules of the game at this company before they can feel confident they know how to play.
Even if HR has a strong onboarding program and the organization has a culture of trust, every new employer should be greeted by their boss and given explicit permission to control the parts of their work process that the manager doesn’t care about.
Things that may seem too obvious to say that should be said include:
Explicit permission to take care of your body, schedule the breaks you need to maintain good thinking, or turn your camera off.
Explicit understandings about what work commitments include the assumption that personal things will be delegated versus which work commitments can be rearranged to accommodate other parts of life.
Explicit permission to ask questions.
An explicit statement that the manager sees their job as helping the report improve and agreements about how to give feedback.
Explicit permission to ask for resources needed to do a better job.
Being conscious about these things and addressing them preemptively reveals things every new employee is trying to ascertain.
It doesn’t remove the need to back up the words with appropriate action. Having been explicit, maintaining trustworthiness requires delivering on your word.
“It Shouldn’t Need to Be Said” is a Rejection of Reality
Things either need to be said or don’t need to be said.
If not saying them creates uncertainty, then they need to be said if you want to create psychological safety.
Being Explicit About Unspoken Norms Feels Awkward…But Only at First
If you don’t have the habit of being explicit about these kinds of cultural assumptions, it will feel awkward at first.
For many people, family or cultural experience has trained them to think of speaking about such things as rude or demeaning.
Using a preamble that acknowledges “maybe this doesn’t need to be said, but just so there are no misunderstandings about my expectations” can be useful to overcome reluctance or awkwardness.
Once people experiment with having these conversations, they tend to report that all their relationships improve. And over time, they become comfortable and even joyful opportunities for deeper human connection.