Tips For A Happier Workforce
I wish my workforce could just get along. I wish that employee wasn’t always so miserable. I wish they would not be fighting again.
‘I wish’ won’t get you anywhere. Nor will just breaking up that fight. If you want people to get along, be happier or stop fighting in the workplace then it starts with setting an example. Leaders, it starts with you. First, lead by the behaviour you are expecting. Lead by example.
Next as leaders we need to get rid of the ‘I wish’ attitude and figure out how to fix it or make it better. This starts with you changing the ‘I wish’ to ‘why’ with great curiosity. We should be asking ourselves ‘Why is my workforce not getting along?’ ‘Why is that employee not happy?’ ‘Why are they fighting in the first place?’ Using your curiosity will help you to first and foremost not be part of the problem. When we use the ‘I wish’ with our workplace issues we may end up just accepting it as normal behaviour when it shouldn’t be acceptable at all. This becomes us being part of the problem. No one is asking your workforce to be best friends, but we do need them to get along for safety reasons and to ensure your workplace is a collaborative and inclusive one.
When we start asking ourselves why, we may find out that something systemically is not working, or we may find out that someone or a process is the cause (such as lack of training) which we can then deal with directly. Perhaps we discover inequities such as disciplining one person and not the other for the fight. Perhaps we have not included everyone and that is why the employee is always upset – they were missed because we were not being inclusive. Maybe the fight was about differences of opinion that could have been avoided if we ensured proper continual training on our code of conduct or communication policies. It may even come to our attention that we don’t have a policy in place at all, that is now needed with training to help prevent these issues from coming up again.
Dig deeper into the ‘I wish’ statements with your curiosity. Ask the employees for feedback (individually where needed to ensure confidentiality or to not put someone down in front of a group). Look at your policies – is something missing? Has training been done? Look at yourself. Are you accepting unacceptable behaviour? Are you leading by example in the right ways? Find out the true reasons and work to create action plans to address them. If you discover you have been part of the problem, don’t worry about the past – we can’t change it. Make changes going forward to lead by example in a way that takes you and your workplace to the next collaborative and inclusive level.
No more ‘I wish’. It’s ‘why’.
Tara Lehman
