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Channel: employee engagement and involvement – Performance Management Company Blog

Going Postal – Workplace violence and Engagement

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As regular readers know, I write a lot on the themes of employee productivity and workplace engagement. We’ve focused a lot of thinking energy on themes of generating active involvement and employee ownership involvement as a way of generating the intrinsic motivation to drive more success. Also, there has been a heavy focus on the manager as facilitator and what they might choose to do differently to impact people and performance.

Going Postal,” made it as a descriptive phrase for “losing it” — in American English slang, according to Wikipedia, it means becoming extremely and uncontrollably angry, often to the point of violence, and usually in a workplace environment. The expression derives from a series of incidents starting in 1983  in which US Postal Service workers shot and killed managers, fellow workers, and members of the police and general public. Between 1986 and 1997, more than forty people were gunned down in at least 20 such incidents of workplace rage.

A Bing search on “going postal cartoon” turned up over 3000 cartoons (many are a hoot!) and a google search showed 206,000 hits on the phrase (but no numbers for the cartoon images). Clearly, this is a mainstream theme. Why?

Workplace Rage is the end result of workplace frustration, and there is a lot of that these days. Statistics from different sources show that many workplaces are frustrating and sometimes intimidating…

  • In the United Kingdom, research found that 53% of employees had been victims of workplace bullying and that 78% had witnessed such behavior.
  • 52% of Americans have “witnessed, heard about, or experienced a violent event or an event that can lead to violence at their workplace.
  • A 2011 Massey University (NZ) survey of 96 organizations found more than half had experienced workplace violence.
  • In Taiwan, 13% of all employees frequently suffer from heavy pressure in their work, and 24% have emotional problems, such as anxiety, depression, irritability. 

And those factors can explode:

In Minneapolis in 2012, a man killed 5 co-workers, a UPS driver and himself after he was fired from his job at a sign company. He was given a warning the week before the attack for being chronically late — 35 workdays in a row in August and September – and his manager wrote him that his constant tardiness a problem that needed to be “rectified immediately.” While being fired, he pulled out a gun and started shooting, killing the company’s founder, three other Accent employees, and a UPS driver before killing himself. And the lateness was an early signal that things were not good insofar as morale…

The workplace shooting situation is so common that the safety video, “RUN. HIDE. FIGHT.”  has 2.3 million hits. Clearly people are concerned about this issue and there is a good bit of harassment and intimidation in the workplace globally. (I will post some of that stuff up and link to it here, at a later time)

There are lots of causal factors. And solutions are varied.

The issue would seemingly be addressed by improving workplace engagement and teamwork. If people felt more positive support for their efforts, one would logically conclude that normal people would be less frustrated and volatile.

If the managers did a better job of communicating and listening to ideas for improvement, there would be more continuity and involvement among the people. If workers felt that managers were interested in helping them make improvements, the numbers of dis-engaged and actively un-involved would drop.

A lot of the un-engaged workers are pretty visible. I call them Spectator Sheep:

Spectator Sheep poem

What does it take to involve them? Generally, not that much. My experience says that they want to be heard and have their grievances considered.  They want their managers to listen to what they see as problems or workplace issues and, often, allow them to work with others in teams to help modify or impact those concerns.

Performance Management Company offers a series of simple to use illustrations and team building exercises to directly address the issue of Manager as Facilitator. We have been developing and marketing these programs since 1993 and they have global use and you can see a few of them here.

We have packaged simple Square Wheels toolkits and facilitation guides to help generate active involvement and ownership.

Discover the Road haiku

Our flagship team building exercise, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, is directly focused on building collaboration and on implementing workplace change and improvement.

Managing Mud

Users say that our products are exceptionally easy to use and highly effective. Give me a call and I will be pleased to share ideas and possibilities,

For the FUN of It!

Scott Debrief

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant. 
Connect with Scott on Google+ – You can reach Scott at 864-292-8700 or at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/

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Decision Making, Creativity, and Implementation

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Maybe the title should be, “Engagement, Creative Problem Solving, Designing Solutions and then Not Failing to Implement,” but that seems a bit long. It is probably more realistic, though, when we look at the overall context of implementing ideas.

The data on the engagement of employees is really pretty awful, it has been pretty awful and it will probably stay pretty awful. Some relevant links from some previous writings are below, with lots of data and lots of simple ideas for generating more involvement and engagement of people in workplace improvement:

Engagement is actually pretty simple to accomplish and here is the key concept behind making improvements in that area:

Ask for Ideas

People will share ideas. Basically, the ideas around implementing workplace improvement ideas are pretty straightforward. Many approaches will work and some approaches will work much better in cultures that can generate a positive history of workplace improvements and small successes. The acceptance level is simply higher in those organizational cultures.

It is that last thing, “Not failing to implement,” that is my focus. In reading Dan Rockwell’s blog today called, “How to Say Yes to New Ideas Without Going Nuts,” Dan shared 12 ways to say Yes and to help to generate improvement. These are:

  1. Don’t expect people who resist change to lead change. Resistance stabilizes organizations.
  2. Let people who love new ideas try them. Ask, “Who can try this?”
  3. Say, “Yes,” in small ways.
  4. Minimize disruption with pilot programs and trial runs. Ask, “How can we try this?”
  5. Evaluate risk. Ask, “What happens if we try this?”
  6. Limit resources and finances. Creativity finds a way when limitations exist.
  7. Validate before big commitments or disruptions.
  8. Align with vision. “How does this take us where we want to go?”
  9. Align with values. “How does this express who we want to become?”
  10. Ask, “What happens if we don’t try this?”
  11. Define the win. “What will be better if it works?”
  12. Check your gut. “On a scale of one to ten, is it worth a try?” What gut-check number is acceptable for you?

I filter all the above through the looking glass of active ownership involvement. If YOU own the idea and keep that ownership, you can pretty much expect to see resistance to that idea as you push it out to others. BOSS spelled backwards is self-explanatory and people do not like being pushed — you can expect push-back in some fashion in most cases, I think.

Alignment and vision are key, for sure. I frame things something like this:

Square Wheels image BELIEVE this is reality

For the most part, there is isolation of leadership and the support people cannot be expected to understand everything about the journey forward. But what they do understand is that things are not working smoothly and that there exist better ideas for improvement that are right at hand. A key is implementation!

New ideas might just represent continuous continuous improvement, in that a new idea builds logically on an old new idea and in that way is not radical. We also need to attend to the issues of “interdepartmental collaboration” in that a new idea may also have impacts on another group upstream or downstream that may simply resist those, “new ideas that we did not develop ourselves.”

Collaboration is not the most natural behavioral response when it comes to inter-team workplace improvement. Competition is much more likely:

Square Wheels Teamwork interdepartmental collaboration poem

That kind of interdepartmental collaboration competition thing also puts the old kibosh on a lot of ideas and implementation. The real keys are “ownership involvement” and in analysis of impact. If we do a good job of involving and engaging people in the shared idea and its implementation strategy, that ownership will make a difference. If we do a good job of involving them in looking at the idea from a variety of perspectives and being able to report a variety of positive impacts and minimal threats, we also improve the likelihood of implementation.

Funny, but I just wrote a consultant friend in Singapore asking him for what might be a pragmatic idea for a short series of blogs and then this one falls into my lap. These thoughts from Dan were most helpful in anchoring my thoughts on this subject. Implementation is a real key to any improvement.

And a followup telephone conversation with a rental customer for my Lost Dutchman team building game found that the competition between the tabletops at her senior management retreat were very predictable: they tended to not share information and to focus only on their small part of the big organization, actively working to block the sharing of ideas and information about how to optimize the results during play. The debriefing was great because they could talk about all these game behaviors and infer the similarities in play to the realities of daily efforts to impact their customers. People tend to compete rather than collaborate.

Square Wheels One - Judge ourselves intentions borderSo, my suggestions are to look for ways to involve and engage people and ask for their ideas but to also give them ownership involvement. Let them do the impact analyses and look at cost / benefits and let them design strategies to involve and engage other departments and make things roll forward more better faster.

Rental Car quote

and

Square Wheels One and TS Eliot Shadow

Both of the ideas above link to real issues of people and performance. Involving and engaging people to share their ideas and to interact in some kind of implementation team helps generate the intrinsic motivation to do things differently. There are all sorts of positive impacts that can be implemented locally in most organizations.

PMC sells great team building games as well as Square Wheels Toolkits for organizational performance.

Performance Management Company website for team building

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.

Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s blog on Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.

 


Presenteeism – They are IN but they are OUT

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I was reading some news feeds and came across the word, “Presenteeism” in an HR thread. The term was new to me, but since I was gathering some notes around the theme of involvement and engagement, it resonated. The common use is seemingly around working while sick and is seen as the opposite and related […]

Going Postal – Workplace violence and Engagement

0
0
As regular readers know, I write a lot on the themes of employee productivity and workplace engagement. We’ve focused a lot of thinking energy on themes of generating active involvement and employee ownership involvement as a way of generating the intrinsic motivation to drive more success. Also, there has been a heavy focus on the […]

Decision Making, Creativity, and Implementation

0
0
Maybe the title should be, “Engagement, Creative Problem Solving, Designing Solutions and then Not Failing to Implement,” but that seems a bit long. It is probably more realistic, though, when we look at the overall context of implementing ideas. The data on the engagement of employees is really pretty awful, it has been pretty awful […]

Presenteeism – They are IN but they are OUT

0
0
I was reading some news feeds and came across the word, “Presenteeism” in an HR thread. The term was new to me, but since I was gathering some notes around the theme of involvement and engagement, it resonated. The common use is seemingly around working while sick and is seen as the opposite and related […]

Going Postal – Workplace violence and Engagement

0
0
As regular readers know, I write a lot on the themes of employee productivity and workplace engagement. We’ve focused a lot of thinking energy on themes of generating active involvement and employee ownership involvement as a way of generating the intrinsic motivation to drive more success. Also, there has been a heavy focus on the […]

Decision Making, Creativity, and Implementation

0
0
Maybe the title should be, “Engagement, Creative Problem Solving, Designing Solutions and then Not Failing to Implement,” but that seems a bit long. It is probably more realistic, though, when we look at the overall context of implementing ideas. The data on the engagement of employees is really pretty awful, it has been pretty awful […]

Presenteeism – They are IN but they are OUT

0
0
I was reading some news feeds and came across the word, “Presenteeism” in an HR thread. The term was new to me, but since I was gathering some notes around the theme of involvement and engagement, it resonated. The common use is seemingly around working while sick and is seen as the opposite and related […]




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