In this episode, we talk to brilliant return guest, Faith Clarke about celebrating difference, shifting the narrative of cultural norms, and creating a restorative work culture. “Restorative work culture is a culture people don’t have to recover from. How do we remove things that harm and habituate things that actually feed people’s souls?”
In this episode, we talk to brilliant return guest and organizational health and teamwork specialist Faith Clarke about celebrating difference, shifting the narrative of cultural norms, and creating a restorative work culture.
All of the data says that environment trumps individual effort every day of the week (when it comes to results). So how can we remove things that harm and habituate things that actually feed people’s souls?
"A restorative work culture is a culture people don’t have to recover from."
We have to give space to the full human at work so we can have the capacity of the full human at work. What we’ve been doing is stripping humans down to machines – and that model is no longer working for most people, teams, or companies.
Listen in for a conversation that is full, rich, necessary, and will keep you thinking about when, where, and how to change things to our benefit.
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Organizational health and teamwork specialist, Faith Clarke is committed to helping business leaders cultivate a values infused, inclusive culture where people feel like they belong so that they can deliver on their business and social impact promises. Faith is particularly passionate about inclusion for BIPOC and neurodistinct individuals, grounded in her experience as a Caribbean immigrant and as a mother of neurodistinct humans.
Faith’s background in computer engineering, doctoral research in teamwork and numerous experiences with organizations who care about their social impact helps her curate a high-touch, systematic approach to building strong teams. This approach has helped her clients improve operations, maximize productivity and increase their revenue.
Faith is a published researcher and author. She has contributed widely to publications and online shows in the US and UK, and delivers workshops and lectures in a variety of academic and professional settings.
To learn more about Faith and her work, visit faithclarke.com or connect with her on social. If this conversation resonated, you may be interested in her Restorative Culture Assessment and Design Session (focused on restorative culture topics and based on current organizational needs).
For more info/to see if it’s a fit for your organization, schedule a quick coffee chat at https://calendly.com/faithclarke/connect.
I'm Céline Williams, and welcome to the "Leading Through Crisis" podcast, a conversation series exploring resiliency and leadership in challenging times. My guest today is Faith Clarke. My returning guest, I should say, today is Faith Clarke, an organizational health and teamwork specialist. Welcome back, Faith.
Thank you, it is always a pleasure to talk to you. We have so much fun.
We do, it's very true. I feel like the prerecord with you, we could just record that and get it to all of that. We'll just chat for a while. It's a pleasure to have you back and because it has been a while, a couple of years at least, I'm gonna ask the question that I always start with, especially with a returning guest after a few years, is the name of this podcast is still "For Better or For Worse: Leading Through Crisis." When you hear that phrase, what comes up for you?
When I think about leading and I think about people, I think about humans and the shared, I think especially with the pandemic, the shared crisis that we get into in our lives. One thing that I recognize with the pandemic is that it was almost an energetic state that we got into together, right? And so crisis is something that's shared. Even if it seems like you, as a leader, you're the one in crisis or it's just you and two other team members, those two people, their families, the people that sit adjacent to them, the people who have to receive information from them, there's something about that that's shared and it feels like as a leader, I want to hold that really gently, and really carefully, and really supportively. Humans have bodies and we're nature. What's needed in a human body when it's in crisis? Well, it needs regulation, and what helps humans regulate during crisis? Typically we don't feel safe and so I think as leaders, as we navigate these moments and these maybe long windows of crisis, is what do the humans you care for need for their safety? And then how do you invite them to accept that? And I think part of the struggle is that when we don't feel safe, we won't accept things from other people because who knows, right? That might be something that's toxic. That might further the situation. So I think leadership in crisis is very vulnerable leadership. To be able to open up about your own lack of safety, to be able to say this is what I needed, this is how I'm offering it to myself, and I'm offering you something that I too feel is needed as we are in the shared crisis together. It has to be collective holding and supporting. So that's what kind of comes to mind in these, are we post-pandemic yet, who knows, right?
I hope so, man, I hope we are.
We hope so, right? But yeah, I think if there's anything that we should have learned is that it has to be collective responsibility, collective tending, and a sense of communal safety making when we're in crisis.
I mean, I would say, I would hope, I know that this is not the truth, what I'm about to say. I would hope that there's that sense of communal safety making regardless of crisis, that that is an underlying current all of the time. I think we both and anyone listening to this probably knows that's not actually the case, I know. I would hope it would be the case, and to that end, I think that look, we know that there's, I can't even remember the researcher who, there's many of them who've done the research on cultures that are more community-oriented versus individualistic and there's all this, I mean, it's really interesting sociological studies that are out there. And in North America and the US even more than Canada, it's very individualistic and not community-oriented, not community-based for a better way of putting it. That communal sense is limited. So I'm curious how you see that showing up, or how you encourage it, or how you might approach changing the conversation because there are a lot of leaders? I agree with what you're saying and I hope that's clear, but I know, I can think of a lot of leaders that whether I know them, have worked with them, whatever the case may be, who don't approach things that way, who aren't aware of the impacts on the people around them. They don't see it as a communal thing. It's a thing that I, crisis is a thing I have to deal with and manage, and figure out, and force my way through, and that's how we get through it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's always interesting to me when we require people to be completely responsible for themselves. Now I have kids who are neurovariant and what that's shown me is that the person who can navigate the world on their own is the person that the world supports. When you are well-supported in your world, it seems as if you're navigating it on your own. I mean, you are walking on the streets and you're taking yourself from place to place. That's because the sidewalks are there, support. That's because the maps work for you, supports. That's because the environment has created space for you. The person with the wheelchair that can't get on the sidewalk, it's not their fault. It's that the wheelchair ramp is not there. When our perspective is individual, that's all we see and the supports for that person, that individual, become invisible, right? And so for me, when I think about the individualistic society that we're in, it's about the blindness to how supported we are, the people who are saying that they're doing it on their own. So I like to just kind of play with that a little bit. All the data, all the data, all the data says 20% of results are from the individual entity and 80% is the environment. So I'll say to people okay, in this room, how do we pay attention? We can say to people, "Pay attention," but if we pump the oxygen out, can people pay attention? Just beginning to tune people to the fact that environment trumps individual effort every day of the week. Every day of the week. It really doesn't matter. The body is going to respond. When people don't feel safe and we say to them they should feel safe, of course, you're safe. Feel safe, think safe thoughts, what we are saying is your body's lying to you and your wise body that has kept you safe for millennia is lying to you, and you're not safe. Actually you are not safe. The body is quite wise. The environment is toxic and part of what we want to start just noticing is that we've always known environment, soil, water, air, that's environment. You know when a person who you don't like comes into a room. You kind of feel some kind of way You know when people are walking up behind you. We know environment trumps individual effort. So part of what we want to start to do is to leverage that knowing because what we also know is that there's interesting science on the fact that humans interthink. This phenomenon, that when humans are in connection with each other, they can create collective thought without dialogue. You see this in well-oiled teams that work well together. You see this all the time. They improvise on the spot and come up with new plans without dialogue, but you see it in things like, it's weird. You see it in arenas where you just have a bunch of people doing something and people catch it and it moves along. So if we know that we can interthink, that's environment, right? The effect of one person on another, then we can leverage this by having us work together in terms of support and care. So I tend to first just notice with people that it's a lie and we know it's a lie, and then notice with people how it's already happening within their spaces, where people are together creating effects that don't add up to individual plus individual.
Yeah, but its-
I- Yeah, go ahead, sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt.
No, I was just saying it's hard if people are committed to the, if people are committed to the thing that validates us by saying, "I did this on my own," right? The commitment to, "I did this on my own," will block the access to the 80% of support that brought you here in this moment to whatever it is that you did on your own.
And I think that is, and this is 100% my opinion. I think that's a real challenge in this idea of community and recognizing that 80% because there is such a narrative out there of I did it on my own. What is it? I pulled myself up by my bootstraps or whatever that terrible, crappy saying. It's like did you? Because nobody, first off, that saying doesn't actually make sense, but nobody does anything on their own. You have to have, if you think that there's a real solid chance you had a lot of privilege that got you to that place.
Lots, lots, yeah, what I like to do is to help people notice the places where they don't have privilege. The easiest access that people have to that insight is through the lens of their marginalized identities. Now most of us have at least one identity that's marginalized in space and when people can land in that identity, then they can see how that identity is not supported and then they can see how they didn't, they weren't able to navigate because they didn't get the support that they needed, and then we can bridge that back out to what's the support for a person who does not have, has the flip of this identity. Let's use mine, one of mine. As a person who's not a morning person, apparently morning people are...
Preaching to the choir here, Faith. I'm here for this.
They are the people, right? The 5:00 AM, 8:00 AM, you hear me? 8:00 AM would be the early morning for me.
Thank you.
AM club and all these things and if I actually look at what that means when people think I don't care about projects, when people think I'm not organized enough, all of those things and then you flip it around, I love working after my kids are down at nine, 10 o'clock. I can be all and they're judging me for maybe I'm not spending time with family and that kind of thing when we can be aware of the fact that we judge the marginalized identity and then flip it around and just say where? Where have you been judged in your marginalized identity and where have you not been supported? That becomes a place of opening for the dialogue of privilege and we all are fragile through the lens of our privilege identities. We get a little defensive. When my kids say to me, "Mommy, that's just not the way I think," I want to say, "But you can't. You can't think that way," right? As a person who is quote, unquote neurotypical. It's just my fragility around the neuro typicalness. When we can begin to be flexible and notice oh, I have privileged identities. I'm fragile around those privileged identities. I am well supported in those privileged identities. These marginalized identities that I do have have not been supported in the spaces and then even flip it. What would the world be like for me if my marginalized identities were well supported? That starts to create some looseness when we can have those conversations.
I love the idea of having people think about their marginalized identities because I think that so many people don't identify with, that don't identify with having a marginalized identity, whatever it is. I mean, I think there's, I'm gonna make a bold statement here. I think there's a lot of women who will say that they don't have a marginalized identity and will ignore the realities of gender bias, and that's 50% of the population right there, right? So I say this, acknowledging even something like that where people will say, "I don't have a marginalized identity," and they're not willing to look further because it's not whatever, I'm making up a number or whatever, five things that they see as these are the marginalized identities out there. Anything else, I'm not one of those. I'm not whatever I see those five things as.
Not just that, but when you acknowledge a marginalized identity, you are acknowledging the impact of this thing as debilitating in some way and that makes you lose the power of saying you could. It's just because I'm not disciplined enough. That's so much more powerful than acknowledging the lack of support, the 80% in the environment. I mean, I could wake up at 4:30 if I were more disciplined.
Sure.
It's like when I tell people that I'm time fluid and I'm like when I arrive 10 minutes late, it is not about me disrespecting your time. It probably is about me honoring the thing I was doing before with the person I was doing it before and going all in and being deep. And while you are judging me for not respecting your time, I'm judging you for being too tight and clinical. And we both have these things, it's just that the environment in this part of the world has privileged the time-specific identity and has marginalized time-fluid identity. Whereas where I'm from and in South Italy, that's kind of privilege and there's space for it. In Jamaica, there's a ton of space for people's fluidity with time. So I think when we can't stop moralizing difference, they'll be easier for people to acknowledge marginalized identities, acknowledge lack of support 'cause it doesn't mean anything about your goodness or your badness. And that's kind of part of the hierarchical supremacy systems we've inherited, that difference is about your value and the goodness and badness. Therefore you can't admit to something because then, and so.
Because in those hierarchical systems, there is a good and a bad and a right and a wrong and that's inherently built into all of those, whether it's capitalism, whether it's racism, whether it's sex, doesn't make a different. Whatever, the patriarchy, whatever it is,
Value hierarchy, and in that value hierarchy, the people at the top have access to resource, whatever it is, and knowledge. The knowing of the right way to do it is at the top of the hierarchy and then you know your place in the hierarchy, and so, yeah.
Yes, and I feel like I'm a broken record for this all the time, but it goes all of this reinforces this idea that all of these things can be true at the same time. If we remove, I think you, I don't know if you called it moral judgment. You had a term for it that I was like oh, I love that term and now of course, I'm forgetting it.
Moralizing difference.
There we go, if we remove that, thank you, thank you for... If we remove that, instead of moralizing difference, if we can acknowledge that it's just different. That people are just different. There is no better or worse, more valuable, less valuable, whatever. If we remove the moralizing aspect of the fact that differences are going to exist, full stop. It's what makes the world interesting. We don't want there to not be differences ultimately. We might think we do, but we really don't 'cause that's where innovation, creativity, all the stuff that makes humans and the world a cool place to be in comes from difference, not from same-saminess. Same saminess is boring.
No, no, I love ecosystems as an analogy for what we want. When a friend of mine was into food forest, so when you look at a food forest layout, it's everything on every level and everything that's producing every type of thing that makes the food forest be something that generates food all the time. And I was like you want the variety because that's what makes the ecosystem work. If it's all the same and everything is extracting the same thing, then you don't have anything putting the thing back that the other thing needs, that thing falls apart which is what we're seeing straight away. That's just how it works, yeah.
Yeah, it... I mean, I'm gonna, again, broken record, but the diversity is what keeps things healthy and it is, we need that. We need those differences and I really hope that, so I'm gonna say this again. How you phrase moralizing difference has really landed for me because I haven't heard it put in that way before and it's such a simple concept that I hope people who are listening and watching go oh, yeah, we do do that, we moralize it. Rather than just being like hey, they're different and the diversity's cool, we moralize it, we make them right or wrong. And I think that the minute we have a few people together, let alone an organization, let alone a team, let alone whatever, that starts to happen. It's so built into how we operate, and if we don't acknowledge that and if we can't have a conversation and say, "Oh, yeah, I am doing this," or think about it for ourselves or other people, then we get stuck in defensiveness. So we get stuck in really doubling down on whatever that, I'm on the right side of this difference.
Yes, yes, right, right, right because again, these systems are self-sustaining. The fact that I am where I am and think that I'm right puts me in proximity to privilege which provides me with resources and others, right? So there is a primal reaction to the loss of wherever you are on the hierarchy and being willing to accept that, that that's not even you. It's you, but it's the programmed response of a system that's sustaining itself, right? And so being eyes wide open and then being able to step back and say, "Well, am I really unsafe? And if I am unsafe, how do I create a world where I am safe without participating in the system?" And just really doing that toggle is the beginning of the work. And then depending on how many privileged identities you have and where you are in the hierarchy according to the system, you have power to shift the system. The privileged identities have the opportunity of disrupting the system and still keeping themselves safe, even though we have that primal response, right? That we might not be safe, and so there's an opportunity to use the leverage that your privileged identity has for you and just say, "How do we point to somebody else and say, 'Hey, come here.'" I've heard, for example, the women in meetings and just like what Céline was saying is how do we use what we have, the place and space at the table, to say, "Hey, Faith, you are down the corridor. Come into this room and sit at this table," instead of saying, "Faith isn't here. She just lacks ambition. She could come into the room. She knows we have an open door policy, but she chooses not to come in." Using our privilege to bring that in helps us to shift the playing field enough so that this whole moralizing is just harder to happen.
Yeah, I wonder how many or how common it is, how many like someone's gonna give me a number. I wonder how common it is for people to not do that 'cause I do think most people don't do that, simply out of not wanting to be uncomfortable? Because that is going to question, I mean, questioning our own privilege. Having that conscious thought is uncomfortable for a lot of people and I think many people are really, they just wanna avoid any discomfort they absolutely can and what an easy way to do it when you have the privilege to be like, "Well, I don't need to be doing it, so why would I make myself uncomfortable?" So I wonder how common it is? My guess is it's very common, and how would you go about encouraging people to embrace said discomfort? Because I can see people going, "Well, where I'm lacking in privilege, if it's my marginalized identity, obviously I want that to change. But if it's my identity that's not marginalized, why would I make myself uncomfortable?"
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's back to that individualized thinking, right? Because if we know that we're connected and 80% of the effect on us is the world around us, then we have to shift the experience of the collective. I'll say what a friend of mine said to me, a white woman. We were working on a project together. She said that when she's listening to her Black colleagues and feeling that feeling like that's not true, somebody says something to her and she has that that's not true, that feeling, as she's holding that feeling, she remembers the moment when she was sitting with her husband and she called him out on some kind of gendered type of behavior. And he said, "That's not true," and that feeling she had when he said, "That's not true," she brings that into this conversation in this moment and says maybe I should believe this person. The invitation to discomfort has to come from a place of really deep compassion, but it needs to start with self-compassion. You felt that feeling. Regardless of who you are, you felt that feeling that this person who is uncomfortable is feeling right now. If we can go access it from wherever other experience we've had and access our own desire for place and space, then we can offer that in the moments. And I think that I tend to want people to start with self because we can't include in others what we are not willing to include in ourselves. But I thought it was just really useful because we were talking about some of the issues in that organization that were really specific to the white colleagues in their relation to the Black colleagues. And she was just like, "This is the way I give myself pause. I experience this very moment." Not this very moment, but this moment because somebody said to me, when I said hey, somebody told me and I was like yeah. And so for me, it's the same when my kids come to me because I experienced this as a Black immigrant woman. So then when they say through the lens of an identity that I don't have an experience with, although maybe a little but not, then I'm like that pullback. Oh, I saw when somebody did that to me, and what did I want? Because we do have to create a world that we want to live in and we want to live in a place where when we say something, people lean in and say, "Really? Tell me about that," versus, "Really?" So listeners aren't gonna see all these facial expressions.
That's why we have YouTube also, so people can go and actually let you know. But I think that that's, I love that analogy by the way. Thank you for sharing that. I think that's really powerful to have that, to have the language around that moment of really, is that it? And being able to pause and recognize that. And I think there are, I think there's so much opportunity. I'm gonna make a statement, then I'm gonna ask a question. I think there's so much opportunity still for people to have not only self-compassion, but any self-awareness around what they're feeling, or that they are feeling this way, or they might be feeling, or they have felt that way 'cause I wonder how much easier it would be to change some of these systems if more people actually knew or could name or understood what they were feeling in some of those moments 'cause I do think, and I'm gonna gender this for a second and broad generalization, I know this, but I do think often, men especially 'cause they are not encouraged to talk about their feelings and they are socialized to just power through, and get it done, and be productive, and whatever it is, they're often the most resistant to some of this simply because they haven't had the privilege of being able to feel the feelings, and stop, and pause, and identify, and deal with it. They've had to power through it and I think that is often a barrier to a lot of what we're talking about if that makes sense.
Yeah, the thing that I tune into on this matter of self-awareness is that all of us, for whatever reason, are in a time when we've, our intuneness with our senses has been stripped away. Stripped away by the machines, stripped away by the environment. We used to need our senses for all kinds of things that required us to stay alive, and then the machinery has kind of been and we've kind of dulled that out. And so it's absolutely gendered and there is a general phenomenon that for some reason says feeling things is less valuable than thinking things out. But then the thinking is on its own machine and it's in some kind of habitual frame that needs to be interrupted by the feeling. But because we've kind of put feeling as a thing that we're not going to value, then we're not paying attention to that and we pay attention to it in some other spaces at other times. So there's a part of this that is perhaps an acknowledgement of the whole human, and if we started in our pre-conversation talking about just taking care of humans, there are no humans who don't have emotions. So if you can't feel your feelings, then that's like if you can't, if you get a bee sting and you don't feel it, that's such a bad thing. If your pain response in your skin is off, that's so horrible for you. Not being able to feel your feelings is such a bad thing and I, I think I didn't get angry until I was 35. And so so many of us have been taught this in this season that we're in, whatever the past 200 years or whatever it is, right? Because it's irresponsible, it's uncool, whatever it is. So coming back to our bodies, coming back to our senses, and coming back to our emotions is essential for our survival on the planet as far as I'm concerned. Otherwise we're just automozomes. And from that place, what am I actually feeling? Where am I feeling it? Oh, it's tight in my chest. Oh, it's in my shoulders. Oh, it's in my neck, in my head, whatever, and what are we calling that emotion? And then why, how come? Oh, you said this thing and slowing all of that down, it needs to happen at work. Yes, it does need to happen in team meetings. Yes, it does need to happen in culture meetings. We have to give space to the full human at work so that we can have the capacity of the full human at work because what we're doing is stripping humans down to machines and unfortunately are men who are not experiencing the full compliments of their emotions at work are the most machine-like to their own detriment. Bell Hooks said that the patriarchy had to hurt men first before the patriarchy could hurt everybody else. And so to their own detriment, they're not the full compliments of themselves and then because of their power are requiring that of the system around them, and that's quite sad.
So I wanna jump off that really quickly. Use that as a jumping point is what I mean, not jump off as in totally change the topic to be clear. I realized as I said that, I was like that's not translating the way I want it to. To a lot of the, whether it's a lot of the work that you do, I don't wanna make that assumption, but I know one of the things that you're passionate about and you talk a lot about is this idea of restorative work culture, and it sounds to me like that might be part and parcel. There is a link there between what we're talking about and this concept of restorative work culture, and I'd love for you to, I mean, I guess kind of define it, tell me a little bit about it because it feels like it's all in the same universe right now.
Absolutely, absolutely, I'm gonna go backwards and I'm gonna say that culture, for me, in my head, culture is the habitual thought, and behavior, and emotions that a community experiences together and culture is also how we make meaning together, right? So we're at work. It's the habitual way that things are happening. Are people habitually going into silos or what's going on? Restorative is the thing that gives at least the same as it takes or in my case, more. It gives more than it takes. It's the not-parasitic relationships. Most people have a parasitic relationship with work. You go there, it takes from you, and you need to recover somewhere else. So a restorative work culture is a culture that people don't have to recover from. Why do we go to work and then need to recover to go back to work? That's because work is taking from us in ways that it shouldn't. And so when we are designing work cultures that actually fit humans, think plants, soil and stuff like that, we are actually studying what does the plant need? What's the soil, what's the sunlight, the temperature, pH? What do humans actually need and how is that put into the environment? And how do we create practices that make the thinking, and feeling, and behavior habitual supportive to humans? So how do we make sure that the judgment, the judging, the moralizing of difference, the exclusion when the difference is happening, the leaving to the side and saying well, what all those behaviors that actually harm humans, the overwork, especially of marginalized identities, the not valuing of work, the pain, all those things, how do we make those things, remove those things from the culture and habituate the things that actually feed people's souls? And I think if we could do that, feed people's souls, we've seen people with no compensation go and do amazing projects and change lives together, strangers. Strangers come together and say here's meaningful work. We want to do it, why? Because the compensation is feeding their souls. I'm like how do we do that at the nine to five or whatever it is your full-time situation is? Guaranteed engagement is going to increase. Guaranteed the revolving door is going to slow down because humans love meaningful contribution and we find it wherever we can. And it's such a shame that we're not finding it in the place that's supposed to be compensating us, and then we go home and have to do this recover. So restorative work culture just looks at some of those principles through the lens of the typical employee life cycle. When employees arrive, when employees are building community at work, when actual work is happening, how it's happening, teamwork, leadership, those things. When conflict shows up which it shows up every day of the week and at nights too, and how are we thinking through those kinds of movements in restorative ways? How are we sharing power? How are we sharing leadership? How are we sharing decision making? How are we building work in a way that's not based on systems of slavery or industrial models that were purposed on commoditizing behavior and commoditizing bodies and extracting labor from them, yeah? I dunno if that makes sense. That was a big spiel, but.
No, it makes total sense and it is a, I think it's a, I mean, this is not gonna surprise you. I think it's an incredibly important concept to be thinking about, conversation to be having, and I love that you're doing work in that way because so many people, and I would guess more so in individualistic societies like we live in in North America, aren't even questioning that because they're so used to, it's just so accepted that work is what it is and your body is commoditized to work. You go, you put in your 40, or 50, or 30, or whatever, whatever your contract is, number of hours a week. You know you're gonna be tired at the end of the day and you're gonna be drained, and that's just the way it is.
That's just how it works, yeah.
Right, and they're not questioning it and I think some of the questioning it is changing because 100 years ago, not even, less than that, but I'm gonna say 100 years ago, there was one person in the house typically who was going and doing that. It was the man and he got to come home and have a wife at home, maybe some kids, but she was taking care of all the home stuff so he didn't have to worry. It was okay that he was drained at the end of the day. It was accepted 'cause everything else was taken care of and that is not the case anymore. And I hope people are more aware of why that doesn't work now. Really it never did, but why it absolutely doesn't work anymore and it needs to change, and work should not be a place that drains us in that way.
I think that when we flip it into an ethical and moral dilemma, I think we'll get more traction on it, that I'm basically saying it's wrong to hire people and extract from them more than they receive. It's wrong, it's not their fault, it's just wrong. Just as it's wrong to kind of have people in rooms where the oxygen is not adequate for human bodies to live. So when we acknowledge that and we invite people into our businesses, into our work situations, and it's like what do people need? It's not just a paycheck. What do people need? It's not just oxygen. Then we can start to construct environments and actually support the humans the way we would want our children supported. And so many people do work, and lead organizations, and then create different environments for the ones they love. And we think about that, like why we want to create a world that our kids, if we're not there to protect them, can live in and we don't worry about that. And that has to be that we change the thing that we spend 40, 50, 60 hours a week doing, yeah?
I could keep talking to you about this. I really could keep talking to you about, especially this restorative work culture 'cause I'm also passionate about work culture as you know, and I think this is a really important conversation. And I wanna be mindful of your time, so I'm gonna ask the question is there anything we didn't get to or that you wanted to emphasize inside of this conversation? The answer can be no and it can also be let's talk about restorative work culture another time 'cause it's a great topic.
I mean, I would love to talk about it more, but we could definitely do it another time. I think that if there's one thing that I think business owners want to think about, if they wanna begin tweaking this, is to change onboarding. Everybody's doing it and we're doing it like it's tech and tools and logins, and there's such a fantastic opportunity to connect people to community, and so I mean, and I'd be happy to be in any conversation with anybody who wants to just tune into that. If we connect people to community, then there's some traction that we could have. Bonding, figuring out who needs to be with who so that they understand their work. Most employees feel that onboarding was a waste of time, most, and yet we spend so much money on it, So I invite people, if there's an entryway, if you don't have anything going wrong, there's a place where you can actually save money, that's onboarding, by doing it differently and inviting people into something that feels more communally resident, so that would be my last comment.
So I encourage anyone who's listening to or watching this, you can connect with Faith, everything will be in the show notes and it's faithclarke.com is the website, and I highly encourage you to reach out to her 'cause she's awesome. And Faith, I wanna thank you for taking the time to chat with me today. It's always a pleasure. I enjoy you very much.
It's fantastic, I should just come visit and we have a coffee, but thank you.
Let's do that next time.
We should, we should, thank you.
Thank you. Thanks for joining me today on the "Leading Through Crisis" podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, please take a minute to rate and review us on your podcast app. If you're interested in learning more about any of our guests, you can find us online at www.leadingthroughcrisis.ca.