Treating Your Employees Like People
For twenty five years I held various supervisory and management positions where people worked under my authority and reported to me. Sometimes I can be a bit of slow learner, but in this matter it only took a few years to realize that If you treat people like animals, they will behave like animals. They react rationally to the way they are treated by management and the organization. It is simply physics: Action - equal and opposite Reaction.
The converse is not necessarily true. Just because you are honest and fair with your workers, doesn't always mean that they will always work hard and be fair with you. But it is a starting point. You must treat them like adults, and you must be rigorously honest with them. Once they realize that they can't trust what you are saying, you are sunk. After that there has to be accountability, leadership, and concern for the employee's family and his personal situation. The leaders must continually demonstrate that they are willing to do the same kind of nasty and dirty hard work that management is expecting from their employees.
What makes me think about this are several recent events. In this morning's newspaper I was reading about a Harvard educated, white, lady professor shooting and killing several of her supervisors and the other people who she felt were judging her and her job performance unfairly. This sort of work related violence where an employee, or a prior employee, shoots and kills his bosses and others who who have treated him badly is becoming commonplace. The shooter typically has developed such overwhelming anger and resentment about the improper treatment he has received, that he finally decides to take serious action, regardless of the personal consequences. Older or terminally ill workers who are nearer to the end of the road, have less to lose and can be especially prone to this type of violence and get-even behavior.
Yesterday afternoon I was driving home and I passed one of the local Toyota dealerships. I thought that Friday afternoon might be a good time to have the latest software upgrade for the anti-lock brakes on my new Prius installed. I do this sort of software upgrade for my home computers and their software often. It is so commonplace that it makes me wonder, “Why the hell I have to take my car into the dealership to have this done?” Anyway, driving by I didn't even bother to stop at the Toyota dealer because I saw the long line of cars still waiting to just get into the service department, and a group of obviously disgruntled Toyota owners milling about.
Over night I got to thinking about the mechanics who are performing the fixes for all these recalls. They are now working long hours and are under a great deal of pressure. I wonder if the dealerships are treating them well? No doubt there are a few of these Toyota dealership mechanics who feel that they are being expected to perform like brilliant but unemotional high speed robots, but who have very little job security, no health insurance, no pension plan, and are being paid a relatively low hourly wage. Now that the workload has increased, and the working hours have suddenly gone way up, you can be sure there are plenty of guys who last month were considered as nothing more than newly hired rank trainees who are now performing these various recall upgrades with almost no supervision and certainly not any post procedure testing to assure quality assurance.
Having a car dealership mechanic work on one's car is actually a bit frightening. Whenever possible I avoid this. I can't imagine the car dealerships which I know taking the position that good mechanics are important to their continued prosperity and survival, so these people should be treated properly. All the car dealerships I have ever had much to do with were first and foremost sales and marketing organizations. The few great car salespeople made a lot of money. The mechanics were generally ignored and looked down on. Second class citizens.
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