June 24th, 2008
You may not be aware of it, but you
could be patronizing your staff.
Patronizing comes in the form of offering
sudden gratitude to staff after years of poor treatment, such as randomly
altering the way the staff are addressed (from employee to whatever
tag you'd like to give them) or treated.
The issue here is not so much the effort
to recognize staff as an essential tool (which they are: without them
then the company would be nothing), but the manner by which executives
go about its delivery.
Executives base their decisions on
financial data. When they see that certain numbers are not to their
liking, they say, "Ok, we have to do X tasks in order to bring
Y numbers back up to date."
There is no direct observation nor
regular visitation to the floor to really get an idea as to what is
going on, why those numbers are dropping and what needs to be done to
fix it.
Where they once treated their colleagues
like equals, they now seem them as a burden on the company's bottom
line, acting as a true liability to their sense of vision for the company.
They treat their former colleagues with mild contempt, seeing them as
children with feeble minds who need their hands held at all times.
But when the company's profits start
to sag and productivity is low, they then realize that it may be time
to do something about it. So they initiate weird plans to show some
form of appreciation for staff because they have to, not because they
truly want to, in order to turn around that lagging productivity.
This is why it is patronizing. Sudden
bursts of appreciation, altering the way staff are treated by a management
who knows nothing of who they are as people, the banners and publications
and videos are seen as a lame excuse to get staff to work harder for
virtually the same as before.
And when their planned initiatives
do not go accordingly, the executives get mad, blaming the people for
not seeing things their way or acting in the fashion that they deem
necessary.
So why would you waste your efforts
on promoting fake appreciation when it could have been solved simply
by being naturally more human towards those who help make the company
great from the start, or relating to them and gauging their opinions
as to what it is they think would work?
They are, essentially, the ones who
have the direct knowledge of what the customer wants or which part could
be opted out for another in order to improve an existing product.
Yet this is never done. As long as
companies continue to see their people as numbers and mindless drones,
then they will never be truly capable of going beyond their present
state of being.
The funny thing is that you rarely
see disgruntled staff in flatter, organic structures. Why? To start,
an organic organization does not have as many management levels. The
chain of command is drastically spread out, giving staff more control
individually over the direction of the company and directly relating
their performance to the company's performance.
The communication between management
and staff is very flexible and open. Many times you see directors or
even the president of the company mingle with staff on a regular basis,
joking and talking to them about the recent sports game.
In fact, sometimes management takes
a back seat and lets their people guide the boat along the course because
they know that these people have the skills, knowledge and experience
to take it down the right channels.
Simply put, an organic organization
with fewer management figures dictating blindly what needs to be done
is often in a better position to recover from any form of loss or implement
a staff-enhancing program. Why? Organic, flat organizations place more
control in the hands of people as opposed to management.
Meaning, really, that the empowered
workforce has the capability and capacity to execute decisions using
their own direct knowledge, experience and understanding of how people
work in order for the business to push forward.
Any efforts to show gratitude are genuine.
You'll find that natural gratitude carries further and has a greater
impact that forced appreciation.
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