Why You Declare, and Are Never Scored

This is a Reveal post. Every third post in the series takes one decision made in building HumanSafe Career and explains the reasoning behind it. This one is about the kind of conversation the whole thing is built to make possible.

A sentiment survey has a fixed grammar. One party writes the questions, the other answers them, and the party that wrote the questions keeps the results and decides what, if anything, happens next.

Nobody designed that to be one-sided. It follows from the shape of the instrument, in which one side is the organisation and the other is a respondent.

A respondent is not a party to a conversation. They supply a reading about themselves, and the conclusions are drawn somewhere else.

The decision

HumanSafe Career is not built to collect sentiment. It is built to set up a dialogue between an employee and their organisation, conducted in structural observations, in which neither side is reporting on the other.

That dialogue already has a home, and it is the one to one. The meeting most professionals have every week or fortnight is the one place where the person inside the work and someone responsible for part of it sit down together.

Two refusals make that possible, and they are the subject of this post. The person declares, and nothing is inferred about them. The person is never scored.

Each removes one of the reasons a conversation at work stops being between equals.

Why you declare

The first reason is that one side knows things about the other that were never offered.

A working day produces a steady stream of conclusions about a person, drawn from what they do rather than what they say. A message answered late, a calendar with no gaps, a status light that turned amber, a camera left off.

Someone arriving at a conversation already described by that stream is not there as an equal. They are there to account for a picture they did not draw and mostly cannot see.

So nothing about how a person is doing is derived from anything other than what they have chosen to declare. Not from activity, not from timing, not from patterns over time, and not from silence.

The line is drawn at inference itself rather than at a particular kind of data. A conclusion about someone reached without them is the same act whatever it was reached from, and it puts the conversation on unequal terms before it starts.

Why you are never scored

The second reason is that one side holds a judgement of the other.

A score is the characteristic output of a sentiment instrument. It may be an explicit number, or a label, a flag or a band: engaged, at risk, disengaged.

Whatever its form, it is a judgement about a person, and whoever holds it holds the stronger position in any conversation that follows. The person is no longer describing their working conditions. They are answering for their rating.

So nothing a person declares is turned into a rating of them. There is no ranking, no risk flag and no comparison with anyone else.

There is one number, and it is worth being precise about it. The HumanSafe Score describes the working environment, built only from what the person has declared, and it reads it back to the person in private not to the organisation.

Every one of those words is about the conditions, not the person. It is a reading the person can bring into a conversation, not a judgement anyone in the conversation holds over them.

What the two sides talk about instead

With both refusals in place, what is left is a structural observation. Not how the person feels, which stays with them, but what in the arrangement is producing the strain.

That changes what the one to one is about. Left to itself it tends to become a review of the week's tasks, because tasks are the only thing both people have words for.

Held weekly for half an hour, a one to one takes 26 hours a year of each person's time, or 52 hours between the two of them. That is about seven working days of combined time for every manager and every person reporting to them, already booked and already attended, and most of it is spent on the status of tasks.

A structural observation gives that time a second subject: the working arrangement, which neither of them is and both can see part of. It turns a meeting that reviews the work into one that can solve for structure.

The employee brings one instance of a condition, the week it lands in. The manager brings how often that condition recurs across the team. Neither view is complete, and each is the part the other is missing.

That is the sense in which it is a collaboration of equals. Not that both sides have the same authority, which they do not, but that each brings something the other cannot get any other way, and neither is there to be assessed.

What it asks of each side

It asks something of the employee, which is to describe the arrangement rather than the feeling. An earlier post in this series set out how a declaration becomes that description, and the transformation is what lets a person say something accurate without exposing how they felt.

It asks more of the organisation. It gives up the score, and with it the comfortable position of the party that asks the questions and keeps the answers.

What it receives instead is information it has never reliably had: a description of its own arrangement, from the people working inside it, offered on terms they chose. Is a score worth more than that?

The position

Our position is that the useful conversation at work is not between a measurer and the measured. It is between two parties describing the same arrangement from different sides, and it already has a room, which is the one to one.

Every instrument that infers or scores puts one of them in the position of the subject. Declaring, and never being scored, is how we keep both of them in the position of witness.

What we would leave open concerns the one to ones that are already in the calendar. In many of them, one side arrives holding a rating of the other, or the memory of one.

Take the next one and imagine the rating removed, so that neither person holds a judgement of the other and only the arrangement is left on the table. What remains is the conversation this was built for, in a room that has been booked all along.

More on how HumanSafe Career works: humansafe.tech

The contents of this article are for informational purposes only and do not constitute professional, legal, or financial advice.