Everyone needs to vent sometimes !

My organization has some very nice people, always friendly and cheerful but I recently noticed a slight increase sense of annoyance or bitterness among team. For example some passive-aggressive Q&As during all-hands or other meetings, a feeling of distress and uneasiness during regular standups or 1x1s. I noticed a similar behavior in myself also.

I decided to do root cause analysis, as any SRE would do ;).

My first thought went towards the current scenario i.e This might be because of the crisis we are in. Obviously Covid has hit everyone in one way or another. It has already affected everyone and we have no idea how much it will keep affecting. The stress and anxiety levels in almost every individual have risen. But could there be something else.

Apart from the above factor of global pandemic and its effects, there is another thing which plays a major role I think in this behavior among people in the company. Every human being has some sort of problems in his personal life at some stage or another. These problems pre-occupy the mind when we work on our daily tasks in the company. Our brains as complex and beautiful as they are still cannot keep too many items or TODOs in their storage. So when the limited storage starts to get clutter up, we tend to become agitated about it. There has to be a release point where we can just talk about those small annoying (sometimes meaningless) things, maybe in the form of vent or something else, and just get our minds uncluttered.

Organizations need to do a good job in providing opportunities to the employees to vent out. 1x1s which focus more on listening rather than problem solving. Maybe a slack channel or a whatsapp group where employees can just vent, or any activity around it like a meetup etc.

One thing to note here is that this behavior that comes out of the negative feelings inside can have other major underlying reasons also. For example a broken process in the software development cycle which occurs often and causes irritation for the engineers. Now these sort of things need to be addressed in a prompt and effective way, different than some other smaller issues which are sometimes meaningless and does not necessarily requires a sophisticated solution.

For these smaller issues venting out is good. Although it may or may not solve the underlying issue itself but it does feel better after it. And when you talk about things out loud, more than often, it gives you a counter perspective also that they might not be worthy of putting so much attention into, so you tend to release it from your mind (short term storage) and feel light.

Happy Venting Guys! 😎

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