Workplace griping: The key release valve your culture lacks

Collaboration suites have an annoying blind spot: They don’t help employees bump into each other.

Once upon a time we had “telecommuting” and it was controversial. Most managers and executives figured letting employees work from home was doing them a favor.

But, filled with optimism bias, the IT industry busily crafted collaboration suites whose purpose was to reproduce the in-person work experience on-screen.

But for all the features and functionality these suites provide to team members trying their best to collaborate, they don’t help us stay sane the way an in-person work environment does.

To understand the issue, think about an occasion, back when everyone worked in their assigned cubicles, when someone did something that got under your skin. Something important enough that you were having a hard time letting go of it.

On this occasion, as you walked through the halls to the break room, muttering and grumbling to yourself, you bumped into a buddy – someone it was safe to unload on.

And you vented (there are less polite verbs). Your buddy let you go at it for a while, then talked you down from the proverbial ledge. De-stressed, you were able to get back to whatever you needed to get back to.

The value of venting

Venting serves the same purpose in organizational dynamics that the relief valve serves on a pressure cooker: It keeps the pressure at a level low enough that the whole apparatus doesn’t explode.

It’s a cumulative effect. One employee who needs to vent and has no one to vent to makes the aggregate workforce an increment crabbier. Two? A bit more.

The effect is non-linear, and there’s no tracking metric that lets managers know crankiness is reaching critical mass. And yet, as aggravations accumulate and venting opportunities are harder to find, employees’ ability to collaborate slowly erodes. The mathematics of catastrophe theory take over, and, as with Paul Ehrlich’s legendary rivet-popper, with no clear warning the wings come off.

In most businesses, HR has, by now, instituted training for those managers who oversee virtual or hybrid workforces, to encourage them to institute analogs to the in-person practices that are easily lost in the transition to a digital workforce.

Analogs, that is, to such practices as monthly all-hands meetings, regular one-on-one updates, and — and this is collaboration-suite nirvana — the chemistry of in-person whiteboarding sessions.

Even for the most prosaic aspects of collaboration functioning, on-screen interactions are a pale substitute for what in-person relationships make possible. Like, that is, bumping into a buddy when something has annoyed you and you need to vent.

It’s a leadership training blind spot.

The blind spot isn’t the need for digital tools an employee can use to vent to a buddy. A video call serves this purpose well enough.

No, the blind spot is recognizing that venting is valuable. Without it, the whole workforce becomes incrementally crabbier from one day to the next, as employees who need to vent no longer have the opportunity afforded by bumping into a buddy.

They no longer have the opportunity because (1) there is no digital equivalent to bumping into someone; (2) few if any managers institute digital counterparts to the old-school sorts of interactions that used to turn colleagues into buddies worth bumping into; and (3) nobody providing management training would ever consider encouraging employees to vent in the first place.

And yet, my informal, anecdotal evidence suggests that increased employee flammability is a very real trend, and the loss of informal venting opportunities truly is a major contributing factor.

Flipping the script on frustration

CIOs should help the whole IT leadership team recognize that venting about frustrations isn’t just okay; it’s an essential ingredient for a healthy workforce.

But don’t make venting your lead story. Not that it isn’t the true lead story; it just isn’t the best way to sell it.

So instead, link venting to the biggest challenges faced by those who lead and manage a virtual or hybrid workforce: maintaining and fostering the desired business culture, and fostering the interpersonal trust-based relationships among employees we expect to work effectively in teams.

Do that and, when it comes to venting, you’ll be halfway home. Bumping into a confidant will probably have to remain a fond memory of a more organic past. But at least employees will have some friends they can ping when a frustration needs to be aired.

The big “but”: Don’t even think about using generative AI to create an automated chatbot gripe channel. Because if you think using generative IT to automate the venting experience is a good idea, it’s a safe bet you’ve never interacted with a chatbot.