The Business Shrink - The Disgruntled Employee

Manage Challenging Staff Without Losing Your Mind

Peter Morris, Peter Laufer

• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781598694147
• eBook ISBN: 9781440514562
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Do your employees plan exit strategies around the water cooler?Are your office hallways filled with nasty gossip?Is your productivity shrinking and your profits dissolving?As a manager, every day you're faced with disgruntled employees. Now Peter Morris, host of the popular radio show "The Business Shrink, " draws on his long experience to help you fix these problems.
Gleaning tips from experts such as CNN commentator Lou Dobbs and job search guru Martin Yate, Morris shows you how to:

• Give workers strong, positive feedback
• Break the endless chain of blaming and backstabbing
• Abolish poor employee performance and boost productivity
• Nip cases of harassment and bullying in the bud

Using sample scenarios, workplace quizzes, and actual examples from Morris's show, you'll learn how to create a harmonious workplace and how to turn disgruntled workers into productive, committed employees.

1
the phenomenon
of the disgruntled
employee

Who Is Disgruntled?

How do you recognize a disgruntled employee?

A lot of people like to look at the clock and count the minutes before they get to go home. Or they think, “Gosh, only ten more years until I get to retire.” Although this is certainly an unfortunate and unhappy state of mind for the employee, it does not mean that the employee is, strictly speaking, disgruntled in the sense that we are tackling here. There is an inner, emotional dimension at work when people are disgruntled, but to keep things simple and avoid getting lost in psychoanalysis, let’s start by defining a “disgruntled employee” strictly in terms of behavior. In the broadest terms:

• He is not fully engaged in his work most of the time.

• Her performance is spotty or erratic.

• He is unreliable.

• She doesn’t socialize well with peers or superiors.

• He regularly expresses annoyance and irritability around the workplace.

• She provokes anger from others.

A disgruntled employee may also stir up workplace discontent among coworkers and habitually speak cynically about the job, the company, and perhaps about you.

Intuitively, everyone knows who the discontented employee is. But observing this person’s behavior is the foundation for beginning to deal with it.

A Plague of Disgruntlement?

Some social scientists believe that there are more disgruntled employees in the work force today than ever before. Some of them point to the “good old days” after World War II. Soldiers came back from the war happy to be alive, thrilled that their entire universe was no longer threatened, and grateful to Rosie the Riveter for relinquishing her job to the returning men. They would never have dreamed of letting minor dissatisfactions or a need for “more challenge” or “more meaning” ruin their day at work. These men knew they were lucky to have livelihoods! And the country had only recently emerged from the Great Depression, so these workers knew how bad things could get. But even the end of the Depression and the Allied victory in World War II didn’t guarantee a happy work force. Wages had been frozen during the war, and 1946 was a year of strikes across America as workers sought to improve their status on the job.

Today, we live in more bountiful times. Despite the wars America has been involved with abroad, and even in spite of September 11, most of us take peace within our own borders for granted. Today’s worker has grown up in a culture of instant gratification unimaginable to the laborer of fifty or sixty years ago. The baby boomers, Generation Xers, and Generation Yers have been coddled and flattered by advertisers, mass media, and well-intentioned educators and psychologists who talk about the “basic human need” for “self-actualization” and “achieving full potential.” Not to mention, the cacophony of popular social philosophers and academics who decry the “dehumanization” of the workplace and have coined terms like corporate drone and cogs in the gears of industry.

Baby boomers, Gen Xers, and Gen Yers are increasingly mobile; they change jobs often. Changes occur for a variety of factors not prevalent in the 1950s and earlier, and the increasing number of women in the work force fuels that revolving door. Some workers make a horizontal, not vertical, leap to take a similar job within the same industry because the new company offers a more appealing work environment. Others change jobs to follow a relocated spouse. Still others choose to work part-time in order to spend more time at home raising children. The kind of loyalty that made it common to work for the same company for an entire career rarely exists now. Employees relish moving from job to job or even from career to career.

With massive changes taking place in the definition of work, rapid reconfiguration of many different working roles and careers, and all the remarkable emerging forms of twenty-first-century technology, people in the work force seem to have more choices than ever before. But, ironically, the very number of choices creates an underlying sense of anxiety and unease. It can breed a new kind of fear—the fear of not getting the goodies you deserve.

Therefore, today, it is much easier than ever to think you’re getting a raw deal in life, no matter how many amenities you enjoy or what salary you draw. It’s even become something of a fashion, a badge of sophistication, to be a bit of complainer and a cynic and never to admit you like your job.

On the other hand, now as ever, people want to get along with their coworkers, and many of us form deep, lasting friendships with associates from work. But when coworkers are cranky, self-centered, and hard to get along with, it can make an otherwise pleasant job into a misery. In the words of Katherine Crowley, the author of Working with You Is Killing Me and a guest on my radio show, “The actual activity of doing one’s job is often relatively simple. The far more challenging thing about work is the relationships; the people you have to work with, the people who may invade your boundaries, the difficult boss, an unruly employee, a peer that doesn’t carry his or her own weight.”

A disgruntled employee is a kind of blight in the office, causing emotional and physical distress to supervisors and coworkers. Katherine Crowley likens the disgruntled employee to an elephant in the room, something you can try to ignore but that commands the bulk of your attention all the same. She says,“When you’re under stress [from having to deal with a difficult person], it reduces your immune system. . . . Individuals go to work every day with a knot in their stomach or literally a pain in their neck, or their blood pressure begins to rise as they approach. . . . People often feel trapped at work. I’m trapped by my incompetent coworker or by this demanding customer, and I don’t know how to get out.”

An unhappy coworker can be downright scary. Even if the person never becomes physically violent, the threat of violence is often perceived to be there (especially if the disgruntled one is a drinker or drug user); verbal assaults and sarcasm also take their toll. The angry worker frays everyone’s nerves, and turns the office into an unsafe, unwelcoming place for coworkers.

It’s Even Worse for You

For you as a supervisor, the disgruntled worker presents a triple whammy. On the one hand, you have to endure the same negativity that everyone else does, which is wearing on the spirit. But it is also your designated role to set limits on what is and is not allowable, in terms of expressions of anger and discontent. So you have to be very careful; many disgruntled employees are extremely skilled at “toeing the line”—that is, going just so far but not far enough to clearly warrant disciplinary action. Furthermore, in many situations, you have to be extra careful not to be nasty or negative to the angry employee because that behavior, coming from you as a supervisor, could be construed as harassment or discrimination. So you have to suppress your natural human responses to these employees in many situations.

But most complicated of all, you’re also responsible for the safety and well-being of all your subordinates, and therefore you’re also called upon to protect the rest of the office from psychological and, in some cases, physical abuse by the disgruntled employee. If an employee is “acting out” in some fashion, and you stand by and let it happen, or fail to take prompt action, she can wreak havoc in a short time. She may hurt someone else on the job or hack into the company computer or verbally explode in some way that affects the company’s customers and other relationships. Managers are often found liable, both legally and within the confines of a company, for the excesses of a disgruntled employee. Terry Bacon, the author of What People Want: A Manager’s Guide to Building Relationships That Work, spoke to the safety and security issues when he was a guest on my radio show. “You have a responsibility to ensure safety in the workplace,” he told us, “and that’s why there’s no substitute for very swift action if you see someone’s reaching the brink. You just have to pull them aside and you have to take them off the line and deal with the situation very quickly.”

At a certain point, in your role as manager you’re no longer simply dealing with just a disgruntled employee, and whether or not to fire this person, or work with him to change his behavior. You’re also making important decisions (pertaining to the disgruntled employee) that will greatly affect the lives of other workers, the company itself, customers, and even other third parties.

As manager, you’re responsible for doing all you can to protect corporate property, as well as the personal property of people in the office, if there is a known threat to such property. Disgruntled employees have a horrific talent for “sucking the oxygen out of the room,” drawing exclusive attention to themselves, and leaving managers with very little emotional energy to devote to the needs of other employees who are not unhappy. As a result, other workers may wind up feeling neglected and underappreciated, until they too become disgruntled. In this way, discontent can easily spread like the plague.

Poisoning the Atmosphere

In short, disgruntled employees can poison the workplace atmosphere for everyone, and spread their discontent like a malignant virus.

They can do so in a variety of ways. Some of these employees are very articulate and skilled at generating sympathy for their point of view. They infect other workers with their distrust and scorn for company policy, until these sentiments start to spread throughout an organization or a department. Two or three unhappy people start “organizing” the rest of the workplace into a type of “emotional labor union,” and then everyone digs into a bunker mentality that says, “I hate this place. I feel exploited and unhappy. So I’m just going to do the bare minimum from now on. I’m just going to do what I have to, and look for a way out of here, or take an early retirement.” No one gives the job their best effort anymore, productivity suffers, and morale plummets. It is remarkable how quickly this can occur and how often disgruntled employees consider it their divinely appointed mission to foment dissatisfaction.

Advice for employees: See life from your boss’s POV.

As an employee, you’ll make your life a lot more comfortable if you periodically think about your workplace from your boss’s perspective. She works for a boss, too, remember. You’re both in the soup together, and if you consider her stresses and strains once in a while, perhaps your own complaints will be assuaged. In a February 2007 report, The Conference Board (a prominent business research organization) reported that Americans are increasingly unhappy with their jobs. Less than half of all Americans say they are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61 percent only twenty years ago. And this decline in job satisfaction, while highest among the newest entrants to the work force—those under the age of twenty-five—is rampant among all workers no matter what their age, race, income, and residence. Those are scary and sobering statistics for both workers and their bosses. With some work and a little luck, you can mitigate dissatisfaction in your own workplace, and considering what the boss faces each day may ease your sense of burden and burnout.

Of course, unhappy employees do not have magic powers, and they cannot actually hypnotize formerly satisfied, well-performing workers into imagining that they are unhappy. But many do have a talent for exploiting intrinsic problems in the workplace, making mountains out of molehills, and emphasizing the negative. Sometimes, a negligent company or manager gives the discontented employee power by ignoring small problems that grow into bigger problems and cause disaffection among employees. When the boss is not willing or able to address the “little issues” that affect quality of life in the workplace, it is easy for workers to grow cynical, and for the truly disgruntled employee to fan the flames of resentment and distrust.

Therefore, as a smart manager, make sure you don’t give your employees any valid reasons to become disgruntled and disaffected. Keep your ear to the ground, investigate the earliest rumblings of general restlessness or displeasure in the workplace, and get to the bottom of it and root it out before it becomes entrenched.

The Insidious Dangers of Leniency

Another way that disgruntled workers can poison a workplace atmosphere is by getting away with their disagreeable behavior. When other employees see that the person is allowed to behave inconsiderately and push limits but doesn’t suffer any tangible consequences, they may get disgruntled about that. Worse yet, when an unhappy employee gets “kicked upstairs”—that is, promoted or recommended for promotion by a supervisor who simply wants her out of his own department—this can inspire enormous, justified resentment on the part of employees who have been laboring diligently and are far more deserving of reward than the discontented one.

ON THE COUCH

No More Ms. Nice Gal

Now, let’s s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• acknowledgments
• about the business shrink series by peter laufer
• introduction: the disgruntled employee and you
• 1: the phenomenon of the disgruntled employee
• 2: warning signs and types of disgruntled employees
• 3: handling disgruntlement
• 4: legitimate disgruntlement
• 5: handling the vindictive employee
• 6: cultivating a nondisgruntled workplace
• conclusion: mental hygiene in the face of disgruntled employees
• appendix: a series of conversations to solving issues with the disgruntled employee