Almost every OD professional and/or organizational leader has creating a great workplace as one critical KRA item for them. They resort to various tools and tricks to ensure that there is sufficient to activity to showcase when questioned on what they are doing to create a great workplace such as employee engagement initiatives, fun @ work activities (which essentially are only fun activities with no direct impact on creating a great workplace), recognition drives etc.
Seldom do we find our respected professionals trying to uncover what actually makes a great workplace and why do we even need a great workplace. A lot of organizations even with lousy people practices and totally disengaged and disillusioned employees may still be busy booking huge orders and delivering the numbers and in this era of 3 year long shelf life for CEO's if you are delivering numbers, does it really matter what kind of a workplace you are creating.
A lot has been written and argued about the need for creating a great workplace and it is always heartening to see every time a CEO puts his/her foot down and ensures that the whole organization is marching towards a common goal of creating a great workplace with a single point agenda of achieving SUSTAINED BUSINESS success. So, it can safely be said that the outcome a business may achieve by creating a great workplace is SUSTAINED BUSINESS success.
Now, coming back to the basic question, what do we mean by a great workplace?? Without an understanding of this basic definition I am not sure how successful we can be in our effort to create a great workplace.
To my mind a great workplace is one where employees have a psychological ownership of the organization, are willing to go that extra mile, look forward to contributing to the business success, have their personal goals completely aligned to the organizational imperatives, are looking forward to making everyday count at the workplace and see themselves as an integral part of a larger purpose.
If the above symptoms indicate that we have succeeded in creating a great workplace, what is that we need to work upon to make sure that the above symptoms start showing on the ground.
On a closer scrutiny of these symptoms you may find that all of them are actually outcomes of the work environment that we are able to create. The biggest player in creating this enabling work environment which necessitates exhibition of the above mentioned behaviors by our workforce is a function of how effective our local level managers are in their interactions with their teams. It is an established fact that managers are the lenses through which an employee visualizes the organization at large and hence it is the ability of our managers to create an enabling environment which can help our workforce exhibit behaviors which are congruent with that of the employees at a great workplace.
While the local level managers are the lead players in our effort to create a great workplace, they need to be supported adequately at an organizational level with necessary enablers to ensure that they are able to positively impact employees in their interactions and hence provide an environment which creates a great workplace.
In conclusion, it may be said that creating a great workplace is a function of creating great managers and hence our efforts of creating great workplace may bear maximum fruits if we were to root them in impacting, empowering and sensitizing our local level managers, with adequate support and role modeling from the organizational leadership. Every time we are faced with a question of creating a great workplace it may be our best bet to success if we were to keep our local level managers at the center of our strategy and design interventions around them. So, always remember, it is not the OD professional or the HR head who can create a great workplace, they can only be facilitators of change and it is our local level managers who can actually be the change and ensure that we are creating a great workplace for sustained business success.
The 1900+ member strong employee engagement network has come out with the second edition of its free e-book for managers. This book contains simple yet powerful advice for managers to improve employee engagement.
I have had the pleasure of being one of the contributors to this great source of advice with my following one line statements:
Before you start engaging an employee, know him and respect him as an individual first and engagement will follow.
A manager should always remember he/she is "on stage"- and his/her subordinates notice every little trait so always exhibit the behavior you would want them to emulate.
Let’s be clear: It’s never easy to be a great boss, even in good economic times. It’s challenging in part because of an unfortunate dynamic that naturally arises in relationships of unequal power. Research confirms what many of us have long suspected: People who gain authority over others tend to become more self-centered and less mindful of what others need, do, and say. That would be bad enough, but the problem is compounded because a boss’s self-absorbed words and deeds are scrutinized so closely by his or her followers. Combined, these tendencies make for a toxic tandem that deserves closer study.
To appreciate the first half of the dynamic—that bosses tend to be oblivious to their followers’ perspectives—consider the “cookie experiment” reported by the psychologists Dacher Keltner, Deborah H. Gruenfeld, and Cameron Anderson in 2003. In this study, teams of three students each were instructed to produce a short policy paper. Two members of each team were randomly assigned to write the paper. The third member evaluated it and determined how much the other two would be paid, in effect making them subordinates. About 30 minutes into the meeting, the experimenter brought in a plate of five cookies—a welcome break that was in fact the focus of the experiment. No one was expected to reach for the last cookie on the plate, and no one did. Basic manners dictate such restraint. But what of the fourth cookie—the extra one that could be taken without negotiation or an awkward moment? It turns out that a little taste of power has a substantial effect. The “bosses” not only tended to take the fourth cookie but also displayed signs of “disinhibited” eating, chewing with their mouths open and scattering crumbs widely.
It’s a cute little experiment, but it beautifully illustrates a finding consistent across many studies. When people—independent of personality—wield power, their ability to lord it over others causes them to (1) become more focused on their own needs and wants; (2) become less focused on others’ needs, wants, and actions; and (3) act as if written and unwritten rules that others are expected to follow don’t apply to them. To make matters worse, many bosses suffer a related form of power poisoning: They believe that they are aware of every important development in the organization (even when they are remarkably ignorant of key facts). This affliction is called “the fallacy of centrality”—the assumption that because one holds a central position, one automatically knows everything necessary to exercise effective leadership.
Now let’s look at the other half of the dynamic—that followers devote immense energy to watching, interpreting, and worrying about even the smallest and most innocent moves their superiors make. This is something we’ve long known about animals; studies of baboon troops show that the typical member glances at the alpha male every 20 or 30 seconds to see what he is doing. And although people don’t check what their boss is doing two or three times a minute, this tendency is well documented in human groups, too. As the psychologist Susan Fiske puts it, “Attention is directed up the hierarchy. Secretaries know more about their bosses than vice versa; graduate students know more about their advisors than vice versa.” Fiske explains: “People pay attention to those who control their outcomes. In an effort to predict and possibly influence what is going to happen to them, people gather information about those with power.” Further, people tend to interpret what they see the boss do in a negative light. Keltner and his colleagues report that when the top dog makes an ambiguous move (one that isn’t clearly good or bad for followers), followers are most likely to construe it as a sign that something bad is going to happen to them. Related studies also show that when people down the pecking order feel threatened by their superiors, they become distracted from their work. They redirect their efforts to trying to figure out what is going on and to coping with their fear and anxiety—perhaps searching the web for insight or huddling with their peers to gossip, complain, and exchange emotional support. As a result, performance suffers.
Robert I. Sutton (robert.sutton@stanford.edu) is a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University, where he cofounded the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. He is the author of The No Asshole Rule (Business Plus, 2007) and is currently writing a book on great bosses.
