There are three things that you don’t want to do or see your employees doing. They will destroy good leadership and teamwork in your organization. Yet these three things happen daily in every organization and if unchecked will spread a disease called employee disengagement.
- Don’t Offend Anyone
What we do or say has an impact on people we work with, whether you are the leader or team member. When you offend someone, the impact can be devastating for the work relationship and for employee engagement and motivation. In fact, professor Christine Porath did a study on the effect and cost of being uncivil in the workplace and the results are astonishing. She claims that 48% of people who were treated uncivilly intentionally decreased their work effort. This Harvard Business Review article lists other costs associated with this problem.
The fix is simple, treat people fairly and with respect. Don’t offend anyone and don’t let this type of behavior go unaddressed. To pro-actively prevent offensive behavior hold regular training and discussion sessions on how to treat others in the workplace. Get everyone involved and participating.
- Don’t Be Offended
Someone is bound to offend you and it is up to you to choose how you respond. You can choose to be offended and coil away or retaliate. The responsible thing is to effectively communicate how you feel and let the person know that what they did is not OK. Then let it go. Of course, if the offensive behavior keeps re-occurring then you need to take more serious action to have it rectified.
- Don’t Take Revenge
A common response when being offended and especially after repeating offenses is to take revenge. I talked about this in my article and video on the 3R’s, resistance, resentment and revenge. This makes for great workplace drama and of course we see this all the time in our personal lives. TV sitcoms and dramas are built upon people taking revenge and it makes great entertainment.
But it is very toxic and causes negative emotions, fear and employee disengagement. My partner is a psychologist and many of her clients see her due to conflict in the workplace caused by the three don’t do.
Practice Prevention
Be pro-active to prevent people from offending their coworkers and then having to deal with the repercussions. Plan a discussion session by department to have employees talk about their experiences and how to deal with these types of situations and about prevention. Start with you own team and then make sure every department does the same.
Another approach could be to start a task team to implement training and discussion groups and monitor the progress made. The ongoing improvements can be tracked and then communicated to all employees as feedback.