According to Sigmund Freud, "Love and work are the cornerstones of humanness".
But it seems work is
becoming well developed as a place where workers do not want to be and the
cause seems to be a reversal to pre-Industrial Revolution, Theory X,
Authoritarian management style. And worse still, I learn my beloved Human
Resource function is complicit!
Despite the
overwhelming evidence supporting the value of creating an environment at work
which causes people to want to be at work and to give of their best, there is a
strong sense of general dissatisfaction with ‘work’ which shocked me.
It seems the number of disengaged or downright unhappy
employees is staggering. A Gallop poll has revealed that out of the world’s one
billion fulltime workers, only 15% of the people are engaged at work, meaning
an astounding 85% of people are unhappy in their jobs.
Scholars suggest that
to live a life with meaning, people must fulfil three preconditions. First,
they must have a purpose which gives them a sense of direction and which helps
the world make sense to them. Second, they must feel they are part of something
larger than themselves. Third, they must maintain connections with other
people. knowing your sense of purpose is worth
up to 7 years of extra life expectancy.
Given on average, we
spend about 1/3rd of our lives at work, around 90,000 of our waking
hours in a lifetime, work exerts a significant influence on ‘meaning’ in our
lives and therefore our life expectancy.
The focus on workplace
culture is relatively new with the Industrial Revolution as the turning point
in the history of management. Companies grew far larger than ever before.
Massive corporations with hundreds maybe thousands of employees sprouted up in
this era. And different concepts of management developed.
Frederick Taylor’s ‘Principles
of Scientific Management’ was one of the earliest proponents of management
theory, arguing that managers and employees must work together. This was heresy
for the Owner / Boss classes because until then most companies operated like
dictatorships. They issued orders and expected employees to get on with the
work.
About that time, Henri
Foyal published ‘Administration Industrielle et Generale’, focusing on
the administrative side of management, arguing managers were not interacting
well with their employees and all employees should only have one manager.
Max Weber built on Taylor’s theory and whilst he argued
similar principles, he also argued that the rise of technology could lead to a
toxic workplace culture and too much change could affect morale.
These early concepts of
management held that money was the main influencer of employee performance. However,
a five year study by George Mayo
focused on workplace conditions and how they affected productivity, brought new
thinking.
His work, described as “The
Hawthorne Effect”, found that relationships work as the key motivator for
employees, and when working as part of a team, people became more productive. In short, job satisfaction increased through employee
participation in decisions rather than through short-term incentives. Mayo’s work laid the foundations for
the focus on teamwork that today’s management theories have. His work was the
first to prove that the right people in the right teams leads to higher
productivity.
Ludwig von Bertalanffy noted from a biologist’s perspective,
an organisation is made up of various parts (departments) and of course
people. All of the parts and people need to work together for both a successful
business result and a good working environment. Ludwig also noted that personal
issues outside of work can also affect an employee’s motivation levels.
Another significant
contributor to our knowledge was Douglas McGregor who, in 1960 built on the
teamwork related ideas from the Hawthorne Studies which he published in ‘The
Human Side of Enterprise’. He presents two types of management, Theory X
and Theory Y.
Theory X is easiest
described as Authoritarianism, with managers taking a negative view of their
employees and expecting to control everything believing that employees wouldn’t
work unless they are pushed and or dragged
On the other side of
that coin is Theory Y, a more positive approach to managing people – a belief
that teamwork, professional development of and responsibility for employees,
leads to a more positive and productive work environment, and overall workplace
culture. Along with McGregor,
there is no shortage of research and opinion that Theory Y is the better
choice.
When I arrived in
management, Peter Drucker was the management guru, being one of the first to portray
management as a distinct function. He was a prolific author, with 33 books to
his credit. It was in one of
those, ‘The Concept of the Corporation’ he argued demotivation was rife, and
initiative reduced to the minutiae of checks, rules, and controls. Bureaucracy
slowed down decision making, created adversarial labour relations and did
nothing for ‘creating the self-governing plant community’ – the phrase
Drucker used for an empowered workforce. His thinking and wisdom form the basis of our modern view of effective
management.
The expression Human
Resource Management had been around for a while however, it
began to gain wider
recognition at the beginning of the 1980s in the USA and late 1980s and early
1990s in the UK, which is when I became involved. Whilst the term Human
Resource Management as we know it is attributed to Peter Drucker, Dave Ulrich
has been referred to as the ‘Father of modern HR”.
It is about that time we began talking about ‘culture’
in business. The workplace culture is the environment created for employees. It
is the mix of the organisation’s leadership, values, traditions, beliefs,
interactions, behaviours, and attitudes that contribute to the emotional and
relational environment of a workplace.
It is what makes a business unique, and the upside of a
great culture is that it attracts talent, drives management, impacts happiness
and satisfaction, and affects performance. It is the personality of the
business. A good work culture is one which encourages employees to behave like
a family and watch each other’s back.
Of course, a key influencer in creating a culture, good
or bad, is the boss who has a huge impact on how employees feel. A telling
brain-imaging study (*2) found that when employees recalled a boss that had
been unkind or un-empathetic, they showed increased activation in the areas of
the brain associated with avoidance and negative emotion while the opposite was
true when they recalled an empathetic boss.
A recent
example of current thinking is from Hamel & Zanini’s ‘Humanocracy’ (*1)
“…organization infantilizes employees, enforces dull
conformity, and discourages entrepreneurship, it wedges people into narrow
roles, stymies personal growth and treats human beings as mere resources.”
Sadly, what I am hearing
from diverse examples of ‘work’ is Un-kind, Theory
X, Authoritarian management... and worse, that Human Resource staff, the ones whose job it
was to facilitate the positive cultures, are becoming the most hated department
in an organisation. WHAT! I was an HR pioneer, one of the first in the country, and I loved
working with some amazing leaders who embodied all of that positive thinking
about work in everything they said and did. I find myself stumbling to try and
understand what the hell is going on at work these days.
Line managers have the final responsibility for a
achieving the organisation’s goals. They also have the authority to direct the
work of their teams. HR managers are staff experts, assisting line managers in
areas like recruiting, training, compensating, and creating a positive working
environment / culture. But be clear, the business line manager is there because
they know the business. However, it seems HR has usurped line management and
are dictating what will and will not happen. Line managers are becoming
babysitters.
Why is that? There was a time when HR worked with and
for the employees, but their role seems to be shifting to that of protecting
the company from the employee, not to help the employee. As such HR is seen as
the enemy, like the spouse’s lawyer in a bitter divorce settlement. They are generally
too involved with policy and creating more roadblocks instead of removing them;
are too focused on ‘administrivia’ instead of focusing on important things like
culture, and the all-important trust.
HR people, who should be the Ministers of Culture in
their organisations, are often seen as culture killers instead. In a TimesJobs
Study they note, “…Most HR functions are still structured for an industrial
economy rather than a people economy…HR leaders need to make concerted efforts
to improve their employee engagements, HRM practices, policies, and
procedures…” (*3)
In The Arts Mechanical, ‘The HR Secret Police’, J.C.
Carlton writes, “The problem is that HR is bureaucratic by nature. …
any bureaucracy will work for its own purposes rather than those of the
organisation that the bureaucracy is supposed to be supporting.”
Ironically, an unemployed
job seeker might say “If I had a job, I wouldn’t complain! I’d be grateful just
to have a pay cheque.” The reason many people hang on to their unhappy job, is simply
to just pay the bills. And hating their job becomes ‘normal’. They see jobs as
modern-day slavery. It seems many employees worldwide wake up every
day and rather than looking forward to a day of work, they drag themselves to
the workplace, looking forward to ‘hump’ day and counting days to the
weekend.
(*1) Humanocracy – Creating Organizations As Amazing As
The People Inside Them. Gary Hamel & Michele Zanini. Harvard Business
Review Press. 2020
(*2) Examination of the neutral substrates activated in
memories of experiences with resonant and dissonant leaders. Richard E.
Boyatzis in The Leadership Quarterly – Volume 23 Issue 2 April 2012 pages
259-272
(*3) Nilanjan Roy, Head of Strategy, Times Business
Solutions
#loveworknot #goodleaders #hrgonebad #empoweredworkforce
#ingeoffsopinion
