Dignity, Respect, and the Bottom Line

By: Amanda Brady, Director

In United Airlines’ pre-flight
welcome video, President Jeff Smisek, announces that United’s employees
and customers are “treated with dignity and respect.” “Treat others as
youSmisek
want to be treated,” he says. While I have no insight into United’s
culture beyond the smiling faces ensuring that my seatbelt is fastened
and my Blackberry is turned off, as an executive recruiter I’ve learned a
lot about how company cultures can impact the business. Indeed, a
company’s culture can pull people in and keep them around for years or
it can compel them to race for the door at the first opportunity.

Why do executives move?

Often, executives move to satisfy intrinsic motivators such as achievement, recognition, and responsibility, as noted in this Harvard Business Review article.
Interestingly, increased compensation is not as significant a motivator
as you might think. More often, however, executives move for more
intangible reasons. They may call it strategy, philosophy or chemistry
but, many times, it boils down to an incompatible corporate culture.
This is consistent with our experience, too. One of the primary reasons
people return calls from executive recruiters is because the corporate
culture where they work is not affirming or productive. It may even be
destructive to the individual on a personal or a professional level. In
essence they are working in a culture that does not allow them, or
possibly anyone else, dignity and respect.

But how do you create a culture of dignity and respect?

Well, at one level, you can’t just create
a culture since broadly speaking, corporate cultures are complex and
develop over time as a set of learned and shared assumptions that yield
predictable behaviors – behaviors that are typically based on how
employees think they should act and how they believe they will be
rewarded.  Thus, things must change over time.  Change can and should
start at the top, but it must also spread throughout an organization to
have any lasting impact.

Like most
companies, our firm culture has developed over our 30 year history, and
not without making our share of management mistakes.  But through those
mistakes, and applying the lessons learned, we’ve tried to create a
culture of dignity and respect that engages our employees for the long
term. We learned that when employees are happy, engaged and valued, you
are on your way to creating a culture that hopefully reduces turnover
and avoids considerable replacement expense. (One client estimates
replacement costs of roughly 70% of the position’s annual salary when
factoring in recruiting fees, training, and the impact on others having
to pick up the slack in the interim.)

Here
are some tips to keep you from making employees feel insignificant and
undervalued, whether they are in the board room or the file room.

1. Take it outside or, rather, inside. Save criticisms for a private meeting instead of in the hallway in front of others. Embarrassment just creates resentment.

2. “Did you really say that?”
We’ve all heard, “There’s no such thing as a dumb question.” If that’s
true, then there is certainly no need for rolling eyes or knowing smirks
across the room. (However, asking the same question more than once is
kind of stupid.)

3. Watch out for karma.
Reserve negative comments about others for management meetings where
your input can make the business or culture better. People are smart
enough to know that while they may be your audience one day, they are
likely to be your target the next. And the hyper colleague you dish
about this year could be your manager next year.

4. Save the RED marker.
Instead of using red ink to scrawl editorial criticisms on a document,
try a face to face meeting to talk about the good things you see in the
document.  Then refer them to Strunk & White’s Elements of Style
or give them writing tools to help them improve. The personal touch
always works better than receiving a document that makes them feel like
they just got a big fat “F” from the teacher. Positive learning is
always more effective (and life-long) than a kick in the gut.

5. Treat your colleagues like your clients.
It is always surprising how quickly we return our clients’  or
customers’ calls, as if our life depended on it, but it may be days
before we get back to our work colleagues. If you promise a colleague an
answer or a document, don’t make them come begging for it. You would
not want to be treated that way, and not responding to them timely makes
them feel invisible at worst and angry at best and maybe even
revengeful in the middle. None of the three will help your culture.

6. Keep it down. A raised voice is simply never appropriate. Period.

It’s
easy to read these tips and say, “That’s not me,” but even “nice”
people can get sucked into these behaviors. And if you assume that these
behaviors negatively impact the psyche of your colleagues and their
desire to stick around, then in turn the company culture will be
impacted and turnover will likely increase. And let’s face it, turnover
is expensive. So the moral of the story: Be nice. Save money. And both
you and company will be better for it.


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