28. Reimagining Productivity: A Power Conversation with Annika Voltan

Saralyn Hodgkin
Hi everyone, I’m Saralyn Hodgkin. And this is the podcast to practice your leadership.

Hi all. Here we are for a power conversation. Annika Voltan and I. Annika who I very much respect in her work and how her work and her life, how she rises in that and all the challenges with such authenticity, humour, and grace. And we’ve brought this session together because Annika and I jumped into writing a three part series that you can find on LinkedIn, which focuses on a call to reimagine productivity.

And it takes a look at reimagining this term productivity to one that actually integrates intentionality, reflection, presencing – these practices that helps us prioritize rest, relationships, learning to disrupt conventional templates, patterns in the status quo of the output version of productivity. And it takes a look at this idea from three angles of the self, the me, from a place of teams, the we, and from an organizational viewpoint, hence three different articles that you can find on LinkedIn, we’ll post them in the resources. Okay, Annika Voltan, who are you? Introduce yourself.

Annika Voltan
I’m Annika Voltan. I’m the executive director of the Community Sector Council of Nova Scotia. I am a mom of three young children, and a wife, and a daughter, and a sister. And I live in Halifax, K’jipuktuk, in Nova Scotia, and really happy to be here today.

Saralyn Hodgkin
We’re doing this podcast because we put a call out to advocate for a drastic recalibration of how we define productivity. So talk me through why this was important to you.

Annika Voltan
I think it goes back a little ways for me. I joined a new role in an organization new to me just over a year ago, kind of in the midst of the height of the pandemic, and stepped in as the executive director of the Community Sector Council of Nova Scotia. And it was an opportunity to join an organization that had been through a lot of change. And to rebuild it and reimagine it, you know. I came in with a lot of optimism and energy about how we could restructure and kind of reorient ourselves.

But what what I realized pretty quickly is that it’s not that easy, especially when people have been through a lot of upheaval, a lot of structural change, dealing with incredible uncertainty and change in the external environment. And really what I was facing was a team that was was burnt out. And I know you and I worked together a bit through that process, Saralyn. And because this is an organization that works with nonprofits across our province, Nova Scotia, I was also starting to get engaged in conversations with other organizations, other sector leaders around what really has become clear is an epidemic around burnout and stress in the workplace.

And so over the past year we’ve done, you know, all kinds of engagement with different organizations, we’ve done surveys, we’ve done focus groups, and over and over again, it comes out that this kind of stress and unhealthy workplace cultures and burnout are just so prevalent across organizations. And often, the solutions that we come up with are really focused on the individual, like if you just take time off, or, you know, join that yoga class or go get a massage, whatever it is, it tends to be kind of self care at the individual level. And the more I’ve learned and researched into this, we’re missing the point in terms of the organizational piece, the philosophy around how we work and our expectations about productivity. And what we’ve all been kind of taught and conditioned to think about what work life should be, and I feel like there’s a huge kind of unlearning, unpacking of that happening all around us.

Saralyn Hodgkin
What I’m hearing you talk about is that the norms that are templated, conditioned, perpetuated in our systems, they’re just not serving us. And so what is the organizational responsibility to hold some of that stress versus individuals simply getting burnt out and go get a massage kind of narrative and equation, right? And being able to change all of that, and especially knowing that volatility, uncertainty, complexities like systems change work, but also just the world, the complexity that’s like, we’re constantly surfing the waves. And so if we continue in these normal behaviors of productivity equates to output, we just don’t have it in us anymore. It’s not working anymore.

And so what I’m hearing you talk about is a curiosity about the practices and what it means for people, teams, and organizations, on how we work differently, what our expectations on productivity, air quotes, again, what those expectations are now, because they need to be different than what is generally in our key performance indicators. What’s in our conversations around work life balance, as if there’s a balance. What it means to be successful, valued, have worth, and that I really like the terminology you use around unlearning, which I want to come back to. So helped me understand this burnout, busyness, you know, first, what are the effects that you’re seeing right now?

Annika Voltan
Yeah, it’s multifaceted, for sure. And you don’t have to look far on LinkedIn to see all kinds of people coming out with different stories and kind of their own realizations around how this is showing up. And I think some of what I’ve observed in my team, and in myself is it can look like, at a personal level, a lack of motivation, a sense of imposter syndrome, or I’m not good enough, or kind of a vulnerability that might be heightened because of this feeling of just not being able to kind of keep up or be good enough.

And I think at an organizational level, it can look like saying yes to a whole lot of things, a lot of projects, a lot of new funding opportunities, a lot of just whatever comes along that sounds cool. And then before you know it, schedules are maxed out, people are overloaded, it starts to feel like, you know, why have we taken this on? What are we actually doing in terms of our impact in our work, you know, Mission Drift, all of those kinds of things. And it can look like people feeling tired. It can come up in team meetings around people feeling like they don’t have the energy to keep going or to engage. I think there’s all kinds of ways it shows up.

Saralyn Hodgkin
And it’s just such bullshit, right? It’s like, okay, yeah, I’m burnt out and tired, not because, like, don’t question my worth, it’s because there’s so much going on. And I’m just trying to find my ways to hold it all. As if we’ve got to keep thinking that I’ve gotta hold it all, as if we need to keep thinking that if I just do more, then I can be more, and then I can be valued. And I belong. And it’s this whole equation that goes through our minds, like the weight of it, God it makes me feel woah, like just talking about, oh gosh.

And I’m in it too, right? Like, hey, I’m right alongside it, like the best of us. And I suspect that there are these impacts on the individual, as you’re talking about lack of motivation, being burnt out, not be able to show up for our families or communities much less ourselves, which then reduces our window of tolerance, which then makes us less resilient to be able to be responsive or response able, and the complexity of the challenges, the crises, the the joy that comes in front of us. From an organizational point of view, or maybe a team point of view, talk me through some of the effects there.

Annika Voltan
This is a phenomenon that’s showing up everywhere, not just in our sector, but I think my lens is always on organizations that are working toward some kind of social change, community impact. And more and more, the importance of Equity and Diversity Inclusion, decolonization, and I bring that up because I think it can show up in terms of reduced ability to engage in tough conversations, reduced ability to navigate conflict, to feel like you’re being criticized and so I’ve seen it and heard of it being almost like a shutdown, a mechanism, or a withdrawal, or an inability to lean in, when this is a time when we need to be leaning in. So that so that’s one way I’m seeing it.

I think in in another way, it shows up as almost this feeling of not being able to get to the top of the list, if that makes sense. It’s not maybe the best way to describe it. But you know, just this feeling of like perpetual trying to catch up. And it can lead to people working longer hours, maybe spending time or more time on things that arguably could be moved along faster, like almost like a lack of ability to prioritize or see the bigger picture. I really, really believe that a big part of how we can counteract some of that effect is creating spaces for reflection. And too often we kind of, we’re busy and our reaction is to get busier or work more versus actually saying, okay, timeout, pause, what are we actually doing? What are we trying to achieve? What do we need to change here in order to actually restore and get back to a better place?

Saralyn Hodgkin
But why don’t organizations prioritize that time more?

Annika Voltan
In my opinion, I mean, we’re all doing it at all levels of the organization in terms of the busyness factor and kind of moving from meeting to meeting and man that really shone through during the pandemic. And since we’ve all been working virtually, and, you know, so many meetings back to back without that time to just even take a pause and a breath, it’s just click on click off, click on click off. And so I think there’s maybe even sometimes a lack of awareness that it’s even happening. There needs to be intentional spaces created for that reflection, that what have we learned conversation for, you know, how do we, how are people feeling and doing like, I think a lot of the time we miss putting that into place and creating a space where these things can surface?

Saralyn Hodgkin
And here it is, right? The intentional spaces. Just sitting with that fight, right? Intentional spaces. Otherwise, the patterns and templating just keep going, going, going, going going. And like you said, right, hard conversations are trying to be had, people aren’t resilient or responseable to lean in and be intentional, skilled, and effective in those conversations, maybe avoid them altogether, shove them in the corner, and then or however you show up, right? And then you’re seen as a failure, you didn’t do enough, you weren’t good enough, you didn’t show up well, in that conversation. You’re an asshole.

You’re like, whatever it is, you didn’t produce enough, you didn’t get that annual report done. What’s your problem, right? Maybe we don’t say these things out loud, but the inferences that go through our mind. And then it’s like, hold on a minute. Why should you feel like a failure? There’s something systemic going on here. So let’s step out and step back and look at the organizational responsibility here. And what I hear you saying is one practice is for the organization to prioritize time, resources, effort in crafting intentional spaces. And so lead me further through that equation. Organization expects intentional spaces to be created by its directors, its teams. So what? What will that do? What’s the bet? What will that create?

Annika Voltan
My bet is that the impact will be better strategy, being able to say no to things that come along when they don’t fit the mission or the impact that we’re trying to have. And so targeting resources and time towards the activities that we’re really wanting to work on to be able to achieve our goals. And more recently, I’ve become a big advocate for retreats in in my organization. At the end of those experiences you can get so much further ahead. We had the opportunity and privilege recently to bring our board and staff together at a retreat and we were working on our Jedi commitments, so justice, equity, diversity, inclusion and decolonization, and we got so much further in that time just by kind of taking the time out and having, going deep in those conversations. So I think it’s, you take the time out and you can go deeper and further just by not continuing to bulldoze through.

Saralyn Hodgkin
There it is, you can go deeper and further without just bulldozing through. And productivity has been so linked to output and just do more, bulldoze through, come on, giver, right? Like this type of attitude, inference, or at least templating, that can be very invisible. And what I hear you doing differently is saying, actually, that equation is false. That actually isn’t true. And I’m seeing it in our people, in our organization that burnout is real, that leads to all of these effects. All these ripple effects, and we gotta, we gotta flip the script on the equation of what actually allows us to show up thrive and generate the energy required, and the innovation, and the creativity, and the team work that is required in our work. We’ve got to be able to create a different equation that allows that to come up and through so we can do our, do whatever that is, right?

And part of your magic formula is, what I’m hearing is, hold retreats, call them whatever you want, but like retreat-like settings, one or two days, virtual, together, like whatever is possible in these wacky times. But set aside the time to get into a retreat like setting, to be able to pull in your words from before, reflect, and integrate, and being able to find that place of resilience. Right? Find that place of realignment in a team, find that place of realignment in self. What are we doing here? Why are we doing it? Let’s get clear. What are we learning? What do we need to, what do we need to play with? So retreat sounds like a significant practice. Or have significant value in your practices. Is that true?

Annika Voltan
Absolutely. Yeah. And I think I bring up retreats because I have experienced a lot of magic in those kinds of settings. But of course, that’s not possible to do, you know, every week or month even. And for some people, it might be hard to do ever. So it’s not the only ingredient. But I think that even that kind of setting can be incorporated in a daily practice. And it can look like holding spaces in your calendar for no meetings, it can look like taking time at meetings to just get to know each other or check in on how we’re feeling. And in project planning processes, not kind of pushing that let’s just get it done, get it done, get it done, and we’ll think about it later in terms of whether we structured that right, or whether we, you know, asked all the right questions. It’s like, take that time upfront.

Saralyn Hodgkin
Yeah. Yeah. Again, underscoring what you said before, the burden and the cost is on the individual to say, no, no, I’m practicing my boundaries here. I’m going to take 10 minutes before this call. And while that isn’t pumping out the annual report, or that’s not, you know, some producing some widget, right? I know that that’s what I need to thrive. That’s what I need in order to show up. And that the organization on the flip side, right, looking at this almost like a concentric circle model, right? The me, the we as team, and then the org, in terms of nested circles, that the org has to take the responsibility of the financial costs and burdens to say, yeah, dear employee, we trust you, if that’s what you need, take what you need. And you know what, we’re actually going in when we’re trying to figure out how to distribute our resources, we’re going to put X amount of resources into reflective time, so that the organization can start to take responsibility in the way that it puts dollars and resources and narrative into ‘this stuff is important.’

Annika Voltan
Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is part of what reimagining productivity looks like. It actually shows up in budget lines, too, and in terms of the trust that is cultivated across teams and across levels of power. And some interesting research that we did this year was around the skills and capacity needs that people working in nonprofits in Nova Scotia are looking for. And in our survey, we had almost 200 people respond to this and we had some questions as what that spoke about, impact of the organization in terms of quality of services provided, increased products, and services delivered, increased reach, feeling that the organization is achieving its mission, etc. And when we looked at behaviours and skills that organizations need or where they feel they are, things around healthy workplace cultures had the highest score in terms of effect on organizational impact. And the kinds of things that are embedded in this idea of a healthy workplace culture include things like trust and ability to navigate conflict.

So psychological safety, role clarity, cultures of feedback, engaged leadership, all those kinds of things that often they take time and they take spaces for trust development. And that really is about relationship building. And so, you know, in this kind of systems change social change environment that we’re working in, we hear over and over how relationships are at the core. If you want to do community change work, if you want to work with equity seeking groups, if you want to do collective impact, whatever it is. Like it always comes back to relationships.

And we don’t incorporate the time that it takes to develop relationships into our project planning, whether that’s externally or internally in terms of how we run our operations. And so what happens is that we have schedules that are, like I said, jam packed task lists with all kinds of different deliverables. But the relationship piece is what takes so much time and emotional energy. And it means that our days are spilling well beyond the kind of typical what we’d expect from a work day or work week. And it’s not surprising that people are tired, people are burnt out, because we’re not allowing for valuing the space that that takes.

Saralyn Hodgkin
There it is, right? Boom. Right there. It’s that relationships matter. Relationship building takes time. And then you just named four things: psychological safety, culture, feedback, engaged leadership, and one other thing, but you listed a whole bunch of stuff around what it means to hold a reimagined version, a reimagined template of productivity, for the organizational culture, and it all stems or is centred on the foundation that relationships matter. And so the practices you know, you’ve talked about retreats, reflection moments, crafting time, and narratives for staff to take reflection moments, creating no lists, having things show up on budget items, but here it is in your asana project plan, right? Or in your key performance indicators, or whatever it is.

Where’s the item called relationship building time? Where is that relationship building with myself? Relationship building with my colleagues, as you said before, Annika, relationship building outside the organization to get a different perspective on life and not be so egotistical in our own organization and rule, right? But to get that observer and step outside of self, like that’s a pretty big list. And here’s the challenge, because I agree with it all. But here’s the challenge in the backlash. How am I supposed to do all that with my job? How am I supposed to take the time with all of that with my job?

And I think what I’m inferring under what you’re saying is our jobs need to change in order to incorporate this as core to our job descriptions, to the expectations of jobs, in roles and responsibilities in organizations. Is that?

Annika Voltan
Absolutely.

Saralyn Hodgkin
Is that right? Yeah, that’s what you’re… and what I hear you doing is that that’s what you’re doing at CSC, at the Community Sector Council in Nova Scotia, that that’s what you’re doing is that you’re reshaping the expectation of what when you put down, you know, I spent 50% of my time on comms, 20% of my time on budget allocation. I don’t know whatever it is, right? However, you divide your time, there’s a percentage that needs to go into reimagined productivity practices, which includes relationship building, is that right?

Annika Voltan
Yeah. And I mean, I’m trying, I’m not perfect by any stretch. And we talked earlier about unlearning. And I think this is part of it is I, like so many of us, was taught that productivity in terms of output is where it’s at. And, you know, I went to business school, I have ambitious parents and have been consistently rewarded throughout my career for output based productivity. But I’m really personally challenging that idea. It still shows up, it’s still sometimes there. It’s my own practice, or my team’s practice, or a colleagues practice to say like, you know, why aren’t you doing more? How can you justify this kind of taking time and space?

So that’s why I say I’m not perfect, but it’s a practice that you can keep coming back to, keep reminding yourself of, keep making sure that even if you go through a really hectic week or a few weeks that you bring it back again and try to implement. It’s kind of like, you know, going off the wagon what, whatever kind of healthy habit you’re trying to put in place, but we all mess up. But it’s like, keep bringing it back to that kind of value of time for relationships. And yeah, even what you were just describing, great idea, we haven’t done it, but even you know, in our kind of personal plans, and how we do performance reviews, or some version of that, actually bringing it into that next level, I think would be great.

Saralyn Hodgkin
Because it needs to be a part of systems, right?

Annika Voltan
Yeah.

Saralyn Hodgkin
It needs to be part of, and I, you know, the only word I would change io everything you said was I ‘dtake out the word but and add and, right? I’m not perfect, and I continue to practice in these ways, right? In this process of unlearning, unlearning, in order to learn. Okay, Annika so here’s my, here’s one of the quotes that we wrote in this three part article series. Time spent on trust building in teams, and cultivating spaces of psychological safety and reflection, is often viewed as indulgent and unproductive. It is time to challenge this assumption. I think that may be even bolded in the article, I’m not sure. But it’s, you know, it’s calling it out. It is time to challenge this assumption. We both wrote it.

Annika Voltan
Yep.

Saralyn Hodgkin
And now I’m throwing it back at you just saying, okay, sit with that for a second. What do you think?

Annika Voltan
I still believe it.

Saralyn Hodgkin
It’s fierce, eh? It’s like, yeah, we got to recalibrate the ship. This is not working. Yeah.

Annika Voltan
Yeah, absolutely. It’s big. It’s real. I, as I’ve shared, I’ve felt it at an individual level, I’ve felt that kind of sense of, you know, oh, this feels like wasting time. I’ve felt that from colleagues. And I’ve felt it from funders, you know. And I think if I look back over the last kind of five or six years, where I’ve been doing a lot of work with community groups, and community based organizations and stepping into leadership, I think it’s the number one thing that I keep coming back to is how important it is to build that trust. And there’s lots of cliched sayings of you know, you gotta go slow to go far, change moves at the speed of trust, so there’s a reason these things have stuck.

And I go back to what I said at the beginning around needing trust to navigate conflict, difficult conversations, uncertainty, all these, these big things that we’re navigating right now. We’re in a time of societal unrest, we’re learning about the problematic nature of the colonial and capitalist systems that everything is built on right now. And we need to let that go, we need to change. It’s past time for change. You know, it’s showing up in terms of anti-racism, climate change, truth and reconciliation, like, these are big, big challenges of our time. And it’s interesting too that, alongside of those massive things, we’re also hearing about this great resignation. And so they’re all interconnected.

And people are saying enough on so many levels. And they’re walking away. And they’re, they’re saying it’s time for something better, whether we know what that better is, we’re all figuring it out as we go. But we don’t have trust in so many spaces. We don’t have trust in terms of our political systems, in terms of our relationships with each other in terms of with corporate entities, you know, the list goes on. And, this is where it’s gotten us. And so I think at first I was, I was kind of hopeful that COVID would be the trigger for change that we’ve been waiting for. And then it felt like everybody just was saying, can’t wait to get back to normal. And it’s gone on so long now that it’s actually starting to feel like maybe, maybe we are actually on the brink of some some really big changes that are going to be lasting and reshape our future going forward.

And so trust is at the centre of all of this. And if we don’t start to push back on this idea that trust building time or relationship building time is unproductive, we’re going to just keep swirling and circling around the same issues we’ve been building for decades and hundreds of years.

Saralyn Hodgkin
We’re navigating big things, you just said, It’s time for something better, you just said. And it all centers on trust. My add is the word dehumanization. It’s such a scary word for me and for me to even bring it in the room. But the lack of trust that we see out there right now, and the lack of, of humanizing experiences, and what I hear you doing, Annika, and what you’re sharing here, you know, we’re navigating big things all around, and enough is enough. And it’s time for something better.

It requires things like trust, humanizing our experiences. And there’s something there for me that as we’re shifting our language and the intention of certain words, like the word productivity, and reclaiming those in the entirety of these words like productivity, to reimagine what that looks like in an environment, and a society, where we come from the generous assumptions of building trust, of coming from places of humanization, like some of these elements are required. And, man, I find that hard right now. I find it, some of that part of it really hard right now, as I look out in the world. I don’t know if any of that resonates for you?

Annika Voltan
Yeah absolutely, and I think this is part of the great overwhelm that we’re also facing. And the natural reaction can be to disengage, or retreat, and find other ways of not thinking about it, it’s too big to wrap your head around. And I absolutely have been feeling similarly in terms of is any of this even worth it? All the time I put in at the end of the day, how can I, or my organization, or even groups of organizations I work with, how can we really have any meaningful impact in the sea of all of what’s going on right now?

And so I think if I kind of walked myself back from that, it’s so important to find ways at an individual level, at a team level, at an organization level, because we’re all part of different levels of systems. And so it’s kind of snuck up on me as this realization that, and it’s a simple one, what we’re talking about in a lot of ways is, you know, just putting a timeout on the busyness, on creating spaces to connect with people. It’s not rocket science. You know, it is human. And I guess, my hope is that, if we have enough of that, if that can spread then I think there’s hope for working against the polarization that we’re facing, working against the dehumanization.

But absolutely, if you put your mind on the big problems they seem, maybe they are insurmountable, but it’s, it’s the what can we each do and I think I really do think that there’s some of these practices and kind of taking a different approach to how we think about our work lives and how we think about productivity could have a really meaningful effect.

Saralyn Hodgkin
I’m with you. There it is.

Thanks all, I’m Saralyn. You can find me at holonleadership.org. I walk alongside you as you practice your leadership.