We can be human-kind!

As the year winds down and the festivities step up, the season of the annual review begins. This is about how the year has been for us professionally, whether or not we have accomplished set goals, what went well and what could be improved. It’s a report card of the adult variety. These evaluations often come under the dreaded acronym KPI – key performance indicators. In this year of pandemic some of these may have been usefully suspended. However, with the advent of new employment paradigms, such as WFH, these may also have been altered to evaluate productivity in new ways.

Sometimes the process can be affirming and sometimes there are elements of anxiety involved if what you believe you have achieved may not be seen to satisfy managerial requirements. Sometimes what matters is not even counted. However, we are not just workers in various institutions subject to different bureaucratic demands that make decisions about our agency in the workforce. Thank God, we are all more than functionaries, cookie-cutter clones or automatons. We are gloriously holy and imperfect human beings jostling and bumping along together on the road of life, the road that is both personal and professional.

For us, there is another standard worth examining. This is not simply a measure of some feel-good altruism, but a way of confirming that we live with an everyday holiness that invites us to love our neighbour as ourselves.

This is the Kindness Performance Indicator.

And, after the year we have all experienced, perhaps the need for kindness is more important than ever when we shed a little light on the circumstances that others faced, their courage in adversity, their constancy of effort despite uncertainty, the way they lifted others through humour or picked up the pieces when a family member faltered. Kindness was one of the heroes of the pandemic when we daily saw how people pulled together.

Many of us know these words from Adam Lindsay Gordon whose statue stands near Parliament House in Melbourne.

Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone.
Kindness in another’s trouble,
Courage in your own.

These two standard bearers remind us of the best we can be when we are tested. Kindnesses large and small, the daily acts of courage in getting on with things, enduring, being there for others, continuing to put in when the going gets tough. And now, as we gather together more freely over the Christmas holidays it will be time for some of that froth and bubble, some lightness and ease and laughter as the sun shines.

One of the routine workplace kindnesses I see often is when a colleague, instead of just checking and collecting material from their own pigeonhole, has a quick squiz to see if their colleagues’ pigeon holes also need clearing. Material is quietly delivered to the recipients’ desks – saving them a trip down two flights of stairs in the middle of a busy day. Such kindnesses are the lubricants of collegiality, little grace notes that make a workplace warm.

A small kindness might be noticing that someone needs a moment to themselves or a gentle hug. They might need the acknowledgement that we are with them emotionally, prayerfully, during difficult times. Saying We are praying for you is a special sort of kindness understood by Catholics. Even cheerfulness is a kindness when the atmosphere is gloomy.

We should be kind because we are kindred in the human family.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux championed The Little Way, a model of practising everyday acts of saintliness for those of us who are not in the position to make grand or heroic gestures. She wrote: Miss no single opportunity of making some small sacrifice, here by a smiling look, there by a kindly word, always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love.

A small kindness might be doing something for which there will be no appreciation and perhaps even mockery or derision or a metaphorical slap in the face. This is when kindness really counts. The God who notices the lilies and the sparrows sees especially those acts which are done without the witness of an audience; the acts that tell of who we are in the privacy of our true hearts.

At the end of the year, only God will know what we have done or not done when we acknowledge our wins and losses, our success and challenges, our vulnerabilities and hopes.  And perhaps we need to be reminded to be kind to ourselves as well, not judging ourselves too harshly, if we have stumbled occasionally or needed a hand up.

Next year, we will settle again into the hopefulness that attends these brand-new days, charged as they are by time spent with family and friends and the summer holidays that give us replenishment as we head back to the world of work. Imagine the transformation made in workplaces if kindness performance indicators became part of the collegial fabric of our institutions. Imagine the growing warmth and understanding that could create unity of purpose and a new energy. Imagine how this could strengthen our communities and broker new and revitalising connections, putting pettiness and the limitations promoted by bias and discrimination into the bin of history.

Colossians 3:12 reminds us: Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. At Christmas, we remember the gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh given to the child Jesus in the manger by the three wise kings. We see the holy child swaddled in innocence in a nativity scene. We reflect on the beauty and significance of this world-changing birth and we grow kind. We finally acknowledge as we kneel before that sacred tableau that we too can clothe ourselves in kindness; a kindness that moves in abundance beyond the loved one to the stranger.

What gifts of self are we giving to others as we gently close out this interrupted year in our collective lives?  Perhaps we can revisit the gifts of the Spirit, reconnecting with them within ourselves to create a new flourishing for all around us. These gifts have no use-by date!

As we embrace 2022 with its plans, schemes, dreams and to-do lists etched into its unfolding days and weeks, perhaps these rebadged KPIs can measure who we truly are.

We can be human-kind!

By Ann Rennie