Can a company ensure that they are able to keep their best employees? This is a question that many leaders in organizations struggle with. If we select people with potential and we develop them (= spend money on their development!), they may leave us and go and work for somebody else. If we do not develop them (= spend money on their development), we will not have the best people that we can. Certainly a very difficult decision, and one that has resulted in some companies spending a lot of money on the development of employees, only to loose them when they go and work for somebody else.
But why would they leave their jobs? Is it more money
at another company? Is it because they are just not committed to the company?
Or is it something else?
In 2013 I happened to listen to a presentation by Patrick Lencioni at the Global Leadership Summit. The title was intriguing: “How to loose your best people”. Patrick is the founder of The Table Group, a consulting company on leadership in organizations. In their own words: “The Table Group is a firm dedicated to making companies more successful and work more fulfilling.”
Patrick raised an interesting
point. If people are going to stay with us in our organization, it has
everything to do with job fulfilment. It is about whether the job is fulfilling
or miserable. Interestingly enough, a miserable job is not the same as a bad
job. When we think about a bad job we tend to think about low level positions,
such as janitors, packers, fast food workers, etc. A bad job is one that
person, as an individual views as bad, for their own personal reasons. It is
the job that the individual certainly do not want to do.
A miserable job is more universal.
It is a job that makes a person cynical and frustrated. They feel demoralized
when they go home in the evening. People in such jobs are drained of their
energy, their enthusiasm and their self-esteem. And here is the important
thing; miserable jobs are found in every industry and at every level in the
organization. Patrick points out that there are many professional athletes,
CEOs of companies and actors who are miserable as a person in their jobs. And
there are many people in “bad” jobs who are not miserable.
So, something must be causing the
misery. And we know that it is not necessarily the job itself. It then has to
be something else. It has been found that as many as 77% of people dislike
their jobs. These are people who will leave their jobs at the drop of a hat if
something that they perceive as better comes up. And this is costing companies
huge sums of money in lost productivity.
If it is not job specific, there
must be universal drivers that make people miserable in their jobs. Patrick
feels that the primary source of job misery (as well as the cure) resides with
one individual, the employee’s direct manager, no matter how high or low the
employee is in the organization the employee is. Research has indicated that
the employees’ relationship with their direct manager is the most dominant to
employee satisfaction. It is more dominant than pay or salary, benefits, perks,
the work – live balance, etc. Even employees in what would be regarded as a “good”
job, with a good salary, etc, cannot feel fulfilled in their jobs, unless the
managers provide them with what they need – relationship.
According to Patrick, people do
not leave jobs where they are known, and where they are cared about. They want
these things, and if they get it, they feel fulfilled, and if they don’t, they
feel miserable.
Patrick cites three signs of a
miserable job:
Anonymity: This
is the feeling that employees get when they realize that their manager has very
little interest in them as a human being. They realize that the manager knows
very little about their personal lives, their aspirations and their interests.
All humans need to be understood and appreciated for their unique qualities by
someone in a position of authority. People who get the feeling that they are
invisible, generic and anonymous cannot love their jobs, no matter what job it
is.
Irrelevance:
When employees cannot see how their jobs are making a difference to the lives
of others, they start to feel irrelevant. Employees need to know that the work
that they do impacts on somebody’s life. It could be a customer, a co-worker, a
supervisor, just somebody. They need to know that what they are doing matters. It
is not always important to whom, as long as it matters.
What employees are looking for is a connection between
what they are doing and the satisfaction of somebody else. Without that, the
employee will not find lasting fulfilment. Think about it, even the most
cynical employee needs to know that their work matters to someone, even if it
is just the boss.
Immeasurment:
I
know this is a made-up word! Employees need to be able to measure for themselves
their contribution or success of what they are doing. If they cannot, they have
to rely on the subjective opinions of others. Normally these persons are their
direct managers. And this is also where a manager can contribute greatly to
employee satisfaction, or make their jobs even more miserable. Employees need a
tangible means of assessing success or failure. Motivation deteriorates as
people see themselves as unable to control their own fate.
If managers do not want to allow employees to assess
their own performance, it is often because they are scared of loosing their
power over the employee.
According to Patrick Lencioni, as simple as these three
signs are, the fact remains that few managers take genuine interest in people. The
people who are reporting directly to them. They do not remind them of the
impact their work has on others, and they do not help them to establish a
system to be able to measure themselves and their performance.
The reason for this disinterest includes three main
drivers:
They
are too busy: The reason why managers think that they are
too busy is because they see themselves primarily as individual contributors
who just happen to have people reporting to them. They fail to realize that the
most important part of their job is to provide their people with what they need
to be productive and fulfilled in their jobs – in other words, not feeling
miserable.
They forgot what work-life was like before
they moved up: The managers
have forgotten what it was like when they were a little bit lower down the
ranks. They forget how important it was for them when a supervisor or managers
did take some interest in them, talked to them about their work and why it
really mattered. They forget how important it was to them when their managers or
supervisors gave them a way to evaluate their own progress and performance, or
how miserable they felt when they were not provided with that opportunity.
They are simply too afraid to try: Managers and supervisors feel afraid and embarrassed.
They are scared that their employees will loose respect for them because they
may seem to be insincere or manipulative. Or that, by taking a personal
interest in the personal lives of the employees, they will be stepping into
inappropriate territory. As Patrick says, they fail to understand the
difference between the interview process where personal questions are not
allowed, and the actual work experience, where managers need to treat people
like human beings.
Can the employees from
there side do anything to make their jobs less miserable? They certainly can.
They can engage with their supervisors and managers around what is making their
jobs miserable. Most managers do want to improve, even when they seem to be
disinterested. The employees can so far as to ask their manager for a means to
measure their own performance, etc. They can also start do do for the manager
what they want the manager to do for them.
What was discussed in
this blog also ties in with the requirements of the new generation management
system standards. The standards talk about leadership, managers who are
actively engaging with their people, and about communication, including communicating
to all employees how they and the company are doing, even as far as the
achievement of objectives are concerned.
So, in the light of
the information provided by Patrick Lencioni, it is possible to turn a
miserable job into a fulfilling job. All it takes is communication between
managers and their subordinates. And to give subordinates a pat on the back
sometimes, and letting them know that they are relevant and their work is appreciated.
Please visit our
websites at www.sheqmanagementsystem.co.za,
and at www.sheq-management-systems.webnode.com.
Until next time!
Koos
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