Making team health everyone’s responsibility

A career ladder addon that rewards glue work (a.k.a. office housework)

Situation: Office glue work is often overlooked and under-rewarded.

Complications: Women and minorities are often left to take care of these vital tasks with little to no meaningful recognition.

Questions: How can we change the landscape and ensure that glue work is everyone’s responsibility and is measured and rewarded along with all other skills required for a given role?

Answer: Create a career ladder addon focused on Caring for the Collective.

Glue work (a.k.a. office housework) needs to be done for people and teams to work effectively but is rewarded with only a hearty thank you or a quarterly culture award.

Rarely does a person get a solid year-end review, let alone a change in compensation or promotion for the skill and effort required to do this work effectively. Why? Because this essential work is not represented on the career ladder.

Over the past months, some amazing women and I have workshopped an “addon” to ensure that caring for the collective team is part of how all team members are evaluated and rewarded during year-end reviews, compensation evaluation, and promotion cycles.

We hypothesize that all disciplines and organizations can utilize this Caring for the Collective career ladder addon. But this requires some refinement. In the coming weeks, I will be working with a few fantastic former colleagues to see how this can fit into their organization’s career ladder(s) or path(s).

Once things have been stress-tested, I intend to open source the addon so that the work that ensures our teams are happy, healthy, effective, and inclusive of all gets rewarded. And in time, this addon can stop being a nice-to-have and becomes the norm.