Harshness in the workplace

Many people report feeling work related stress and anxieties due to an increase of harshness in the workplace. This is not unusual as we often have huge workloads which take a lot of from us. However the stress and anxiety is not always coming from the amount of work people are doing, the quality or indeed ever tightening deadlines. The anxiety is related to the contempt, harshness and in some cases abusive attitudes organizations and managers are having towards employees.

As managers push for efficiency, smarter working and more innovative ways to perform the workers are being ground down with what at times seem judgments rather than criticism. Some colleagues have reported to me their bosses telling them if they’re not happy they can leave. They feel with the recession hitting, redundancies and payoffs always a threat that it’s an employers market, with many allowing themselves to be at times bullied just to keep a wage coming in.

The new drive towards efficiency, introducing KPI’s, targets and performance management tools are being seen by many as not so much a tool for improvement or development but a way of measuring how much the employee has failed, or as one client put it, ‘a stick to threaten and beat staff with’.

In one meeting I was in recently when a junior manager was reporting a worker that had performed above and beyond what was required of her, saving lots of time and money in the process the assistant director who was chairing the meeting responded with, ‘F**k me, where did she come from?’ The same assistant director continually complains no one even tries for innovation or excellence in his organization.

Perhaps some organizations could look closer at why people are leaving them for other jobs, listen to what they’re actually saying in their exit interviews. Perhaps notice how little you get with a stick, maybe introduce a carrot as well as an experiment and see how a far a bit of balance will go.

#workplacestress

Tags: anxiety, assertiveness, counselling, relationships, stress, work, work stress