It is hard to soar like an eagle when you are surrounded by…

Frustration at Work
Have you noticed a pattern of increasing frustration within your team? If you know the rest 🦃 of this phrase , you may recognise it as a tongue-in-cheek response from an operational workforce.

Modifying the Environment
I was introduced to Lewin’s equation some years ago. It says - Behaviours are a function of the person and their environment (physical and social).

 B = f(P, E)

This suggests it can be effective and scalable in a large workforce to focus on the improving the environment to positively influence behaviours.

As a leader in your org, what to do next to make progress with increasing levels of frustration in your workplace can be daunting. Have you ever felt limited by the options to address your team’s frustration?

Practical Application
Reflecting on the environment (in a systemic sense), allows for early, pragmatic improvements to be made. Environmental tweaks can also have a greater than anticipated impact on behaviour than we often realise.

To get started, involving teams in reflective discussions seeking small co-designed improvements may be good rhythm to get into.

Off the Dance Floor to the Balcony
For senior leaders, it may be necessary to make space for a balcony view and different perspectives of the environment to progress some potentially bolder experiments.

Raising the Heat
Some factors just aren’t obvious when you are in the thick of that environment everyday and the patterns have become a norm over possibly decades.

Frankly, there might also be some difficult decisions to make about the environment which are culturally strongly protected, but influencing undesirable behaviours. It may be necessary to hold the tension for a period which can be counter-intuitive when it’s frustration you are trying to address in the first place. It’s a delicate balance of short term vs long term polarity.

Creative Approaches
There can be value in getting creative and experimental in what you consider to tweak your environment. An example (might not be practical everywhere, but just an example of out of the box thinking) to illustrate this was open days and family visits for one operation. Having interested outsiders visit the operation had an unintended benefit of a general mood and tolerance improvement within the operation that carried over somewhat past the actual visit itself. One hypothesis could be it allowed a reset of normal behaviours and reflection that actually some pretty cool things happen in workplaces everywhere.

Call to Action
Consider one aspect of your team's environment you've overlooked and imagine how changing it could reduce frustration. What's the first step you could take to make progress?