Employees Gone Wild

by Richard Burton

  The benefits of working in an office, other business, or corporate environment go far beyond paychecks, health insurance, and retirement plans. Being part of a team can be a powerful thing, a source of creative and personal fulfillment. But surviving—and thriving—in the corporate minefield takes more than just common sense and good intentions. Whether you’re an employee, manager, or human resources specialist, forewarned is forearmed. Use the cautionary tales and advice in this book to help keep you from being the next cautionary tale in your own office!

  In that regard, there are at least five things I’d like you to take away from this book. These five lessons will help you get along better—and get ahead—in your workplace.

  Lesson 1: It’s All About the Benjamins

  Yes, there are lots of things you—and your colleagues, and your employer—get out of a job besides money to pay the bills. Work can give you new skills, pride in a job well done, opportunities for personal development, new friends, and a wealth of experiences. (Not to mention witnessing enough craziness to write a book!) Those are great personal goals, and if you are fortunate enough to get all of that out of your job, that’s a wonderful thing.

  But your company does not exist for or survive on your personal fulfillment. Businesses go into operation in order to make money. Even nonprofits exist for a purpose separate from their employees’ personal goals: they need to make money to support a particular cause or mission.

  Therefore, if you contribute to the success and profitability of the organization, you are an asset. If you don’t, you’re a liability. And the goal of any balance sheet is to maximize the assets and minimize the liabilities.

  Does terrorizing good employees contribute to the company’s success? No, it drives good people away and can, in extreme cases, lead to expensive legal entanglements. Does making your coworkers miserable contribute to the company’s success? Nope. Just distracts everyone from getting their jobs done.

  If you’re looking for personal fulfillment in a job, you may well find it, depending on what constitutes fulfillment for you. You have to try to make a good match between your goals and your company’s. But always remember (despite whatever airy-fairy pronouncements you might get from an HR department tasked with improving morale), from the company’s point of view, your satisfaction is only valuable as it contributes to the bottom line.

  MEMO TO MANAGEMENT

  That doesn’t make all companies cutthroat, by any means. There are plenty of companies that have demonstrated that treating employees well leads to better employee retention, less expense to train new people, and positive attitudes both in the workplace and toward customers and clients. If you’re in management, keep that in mind: happy people do better work. You, too, can contribute more to your bottom line by making sure you align people’s personal goals and your professional needs.

  Lesson 2: No Employee Is an Island

  You don’t work in a vacuum. Heck, even if you are self-employed, hunkered down in a cabin in the middle of a desert island with only the local wildlife for company, sending your work by carrier pigeon out to the world, somebody is interested in that work and presumably paying you for it.

  Most of us are far from that desert island. We work with other people, lots of them. Each of those people is a human being, owed the same respect and consideration you would want. (Yes, they may not always give you that respect and consideration. Like your parents probably told you when you were a kid, just because everyone else jumps off a cliff doesn’t mean you should jump off the cliff, too.)

  There are a couple ways in which you can make your work life better by remembering you’re not the center of the universe. The first is simply respecting the shared space. Clean up behind yourself because other people have to work/eat/function there. Don’t belt out show tunes in your cubicle; other people are trying to hear themselves think. (Muttering darkly in a low tone—also distracting.) Show respect for your coworkers by respecting the place you all have to inhabit.

  Even more valuable, think about other people’s work needs. You’d be surprised—or maybe you wouldn’t—how often people are completely oblivious to what happens before the work comes to them and after it leaves their hands. If you take the time to find out what the person ahead of you in the workflow does, how they do it and why, and the same for the person after you, you’ll make better decisions about your own work and contribute more effectively to the overall workflow.

  It comes down to another message you probably got as a child: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

  MEMO TO MANAGEMENT

  Isolation is the enemy of productivity. If you can find ways to facilitate positive employee communication, you’ll reap the benefits.

  If you have a company newsletter or blog or companywide meetings, use them to highlight what different departments or business groups do and how and why they do that. If employees in all areas, at all levels, understand the entire process and the reasoning behind things, they will be more apt to get behind your mission.

  A friend who works in publishing told me about inviting a sales manager to talk to the editorial and production people involved with a particular book about why the book was being rushed to press (causing great pressure on the entire team). Once everyone understood the impact of the potential success of the book, they stopped complaining about the tight schedule and found solutions that would meet the sales needs.

  Information helps everyone work together more effectively. Share it, don’t hoard it.

  Lesson 3: Keep Your Private Life Private

  Colorful adventures, peccadillos, and day-to-day troubles are best checked at the door when you come to work. If you’re worrying about whether you remembered to pay that bill or whether your daughter did her homework, you’re not focused on the work in front of you, and you will make mistakes. When you make mistakes on the job, the consequences range from the minor—you or somebody else has to fix the mistake or do it over, which isn’t good for your reputation or advancement in the company—to the major—your error is costly to the company or endangers other employees or the customers using your product.

  If you’re able to do the same on the converse side—let work go when you walk into your home—you’ll benefit from that as well. Focus on family, household, friends, and other activities after hours, and you’ll be fresher and more prepared when you get back to the workplace.

  Then there’s chat; if you spend all day, every day, regaling coworkers with your nighttime adventures on the club circuit, they may tire of the distraction enough to raise the issue with a manager. A particularly resentful colleague—or one who has it in for you for some other reason—may use the information against you in a more damaging way—he or she might tell your boss you’re not pulling your weight because all your clubbing means you come in hung over or even drunk or high.

  Sharing personal information at work can have other consequences, too. We are cautioned about putting too much information out on social media about our children, lest those intent on harm use it to gain access to our kids. But long before Facebook and Twitter and even the internet existed, there were parents who shared vast quantities of family information with people they didn’t know very well. Do you really want every Tom, Dick, or Harry who happens to have a job at the same place as you to know where your kids go to school and when their birthdays are? Not to say you can’t ever talk about family or personal matters at work, but being discreet and limiting the amount of such talk is probably advisable.

  TIPS

  Friend Request

  What do you do if a coworker or boss wants to friend you on Facebook or the like? If you are friends with that person outside of work, maybe you’ll feel comfortable accepting. But if you don’t want to accept and are concerned that rejecting the invitation will be taken amiss, you can always explain that you use Facebook primarily for communicating with family members in order to smooth things over. And if you do accept the invitation, I strongly recommend you
familiarize yourself with the privacy settings of your chosen social media and make use of them. Remember, too, that some social media, e.g., Twitter, are inherently public. You may think your ancient, gray-haired boss doesn’t know what Twitter is, so you’re perfectly safe dissing him there. You’d be surprised how many graybeards tweet. And even if he doesn’t, what’s to keep someone else from sharing your tweet with him?

  MEMO TO MANAGEMENT

  Although there is a movement to have employees stay connected constantly, keep in mind the need for employees to relax and refresh so they come back to work with clear heads. Some of the best ideas come to the forefront when you’re not thinking about the problem; give your employees the chance for that to happen.

  Making sure your employees have the opportunity to relax will also make them more effective on the job. You’ll also see less burnout, which means you’ll have the opportunity to retain the people in whom you’ve invested training and experience. And that will save you money in the long run.

  Moreover, if employees have no opportunity to focus on personal matters—whether it be talking to a child’s teacher or dealing with a major financial issue—outside of work, those things will creep into the working day out of necessity. That sets a precedent for other employees that it’s okay to take care of personal business during the workday, and pretty soon everyone’s productivity is diminished as they try to do two jobs—the one you’re paying for and the work of managing home and family—during the workday. In the long run, it makes good business sense to draw a line between work time and personal time and respect that line.

  Lesson 4: You Can’t Win ‘Em All

  Sometimes, we herald people for their “uncompromising” dedication to something. There are certainly things that should never be open to compromise—things affecting safety, for example—but in many things, compromise is key to getting anything done. Digging your heels in and refusing to move will just mean you’re left behind.

  And sometimes you just have to give in.

  There are going to be times in your working life when you can’t get anyone else to see your point of view. While sticking to your guns may seem like the right thing to do, after a while, everyone else will be sick of hearing you rant about the same thing. Step back, take a breath, and let things go. In time, you may be able to collect more evidence to support your position and win people over. Oh, and if you do eventually win—say, if things went badly awry because they didn’t do what you suggested, and now they are going to take your advice—be gracious in victory. You don’t win friends by screaming, “I told you so! You should have listened to me!”

  No matter how right you are, in business, the boss gets to win. You may not like it, but that’s the way hierarchy works.

  If you know your boss is driving the company train straight off the rails, and he or she is not willing to hear it, you won’t win yourself any goodwill by harping on it. At that point, you have to decide for yourself how serious an issue this is: Will you ride along, knowing the decisions being made are the wrong ones, because you need the job and don’t have a lot of options right now? Will the consequences affect the boss or will they affect you? Knowing that the boss and you are always going to be working at cross purposes, can you still contribute effectively? If not, it’s time to move on.

  If you differ with a boss or coworkers on minor issues, compromise on at least some of those issues. Nobody is going to want to work with you if every little thing is a fight. And that will affect your performance reviews, raises, and ability to advance. In short: don’t be a pain in the butt.

  MEMO TO MANAGEMENT

  Employees will be much more likely to go along with a controversial decision if they understand the reasoning behind it. Not to say that management should have to justify everything to employees, but if an employee or a group of employees is opposed to or confused by a choice made by management, you can defuse any negative behavior (and potential loss of good employees) with a willingness to discuss the “why” behind it. Once employees have the background about the situation or the information that influenced the management decision—information they didn’t have—you may win them over and get their enthusiastic support. And even if minds are not changed, openness to conversation about the matter will create an atmosphere of collaboration. Employees will feel that they are part of the team, not just cogs in the machine who are simply told what to do.

  Lesson 5: Doing the Work Is Less Work Than Pretending to Do the Work

  It never fails to amaze me how many people there are who spend vast amounts of energy avoiding work—when they could have done the work they were avoiding in less time, with less energy expended.

  People make up dozens of excuses why something isn’t done. They find make-work tasks to do so that they won’t have to work on the thing they don’t want to work on. They bustle around talking to other people instead of doing their actual work. They avoid bosses or colleagues so they won’t have to admit they haven’t done the work—I’ve seen people so good at hiding that they ought to consider careers in the witness protection program! They will change the clock on their computer to make it look like an email was sent at a different time, they will falsify documents, they will hide things in other people’s offices—all that effort not to do work is a lot of work!

  And eventually, the work is going to have to be done. So, as the ad says, just do it.

  Some employees think that if they make it hard to get them to do something they don’t want to do, eventually others will take the path of least resistance and just do it themselves or have someone else do it. That might work once or twice, but before too long, colleagues will resent doing your work and management will notice that they are having to reassign your work . . . and the question will be: If this person doesn’t do the job, why do we need him/her?

  The answer to that one is pretty obvious.

  MEMO TO MANAGEMENT

  Beware that last one—the employee who makes it so difficult to get him or her to do something that you routinely assign the work to someone else. Sometimes it’s subtle: the person does the work, but does it badly, or in a roundabout way, or takes a long time about it. He or she will be positive, pretend to be receptive to criticism or direction, or will claim to be focusing on doing the job perfectly.

  If you find yourself thinking, “I’ll give it to Jane, because it’s too much work to get John to do it in time,” that’s a red flag. Look closely at why you feel that way. If you feel like you don’t have the time or energy to deal with a certain employee, it’s probably time for a conversation with that employee about how he or she does the job. Making the employee aware that you realize what’s going on may be enough to solve the problem.

  I hope these five lessons will help you be happier and more productive (and therefore more successful, with many raises and opportunities to advance) in your work. And as for all the lessons by example throughout this book:

  Try not to be that guy/girl.