Emotions At Work
Within an organization there are constant interactions - between workers, managers and workers, between an organization and its' suppliers and of course its' clients.
With all of these interactions, emotions come up; people feel things. The type of emotions created can generally be divided into two categories:
There are thriving emotions like love and happiness that are catalysts for improving an organization, and there are adverse emotions like anger and resentment that hinder an organization's ability to fulfill its potential.
The adverse emotions impede the flow of communication within a working team the way that boulders accumulate in a river until finally creating a dam.
If emotions influence the interactions within a team and ultimately the results they achieve, then it seems we must pay attention to them. Indeed we can ask - Is it possible to manage an organization's 'emotions' in such a way that they support the goals of the company?
Feelings of hostility within a company - resentment, managerial disappointment, disrespect, fear - are common emotions and, except in 'enlightened' organizations, cannot be avoided completely. However, if these emotions are too common in the workplace, they usually cause damage.
Monitoring Emotional Waste
The concept of monitoring physical waste and understanding its cost is something factories are very familiar with. For example, in an industrial company, raw materials are processed into a final product. During processing part of the raw materials needed to create the product are unused, and this is considered the company's garbage or waste.
Waste must be moved to a waste facility like a garbage dump or a toxic waste treatment facility. The cost of transporting the waste increases according to the level of hazard it poses to the public, and decreases in proportion to how renewable and recyclable it is. There are statistical measuring standards that calculate the quantity of waste an organization produces and the average cost of waste disposal.
What about nonmaterial waste? What about the byproducts that cannot be measured despite the fact that they may cost a company more than its material waste?
What is the cost of time waste on negative and adverse emotions, that show up in poor service, work not done with the best effort, organizational problems not being dealt with, workplace politics and gossip, bad hiring ?
There is a famous saying in the field of management that goes, "If you can't measure it - you can't manage it," and this maybe the reason why managers rarely give enough attention to the subject of the benefits and costs of emotions in the organization.
On the other hand, despite what has been previously stated, there are managers that instinctively understand the importance of sensitivity to emotions and of human relations in the company, and how they can significantly improve functionality and in the broad sense profits for the organization.
Bonding Is A Must
Aside from management techniques and certain physical conditions, positive emotions create highly productive teams. Studies done on sports such as football and basketball, found that as a team's level of bonding increases, its' success rate improves as well.
In his book Love Medicine and Miracles, Dr. Barney Sigel, a pioneer in understanding how emotions are linked to physical health, shows that people in a positive and humorous environment are more likely to be healthy because their levels of cortizol, which suppress the immune system, are lower.
Lower levels of cortizol in the body result in a stronger immune system. Happy people working in a pleasant environment have fewer sicknesses, and are therefore less absent from work.
From Experience
In many organizations that I have visited, employees have complained of a lack of brotherhood or unity. When I speak to the management about helping the workers bond - the reaction is almost always the same: "We are not to blame, it's the workers who don't want to bond. We invited them to a 'bonding day' and they didn't come; we invited them to hear a lecture on bonding and the subject didn't interest them; we invited them to a 'fun day' with their families but few participated."
This is a classic example of a cyclical problem that constantly repeats itself. Why don't the workers come to a bonding day when the alienation they feel clearly bothers them?
Because every worker has already decided that they don't particularly like the other alienated workers, and if they have a choice - why should they spend a day with people they don't really like?
In most cases, the management did not specify that the bonding day was mandatory; therefore, most of the employees did not arrive, and so continued to feel estranged, troubled, bitter, and of course blamed management who in turn passed the responsibility back to the employees.
It is possible to find a simple solution to the problem described here. The key is to provide a work routine that promotes bonding, by defining it as a mandatory part of work. In my opinion, bonding activities that promote unity within the company must be financed by the organization and should be considered part of employee training to promote improved production by the team.
To conclude, here are some questions that any organisation or company aspiring to be successful can ask themselves: What is the real cost of a team that lacks bonding and employees that feel unsatisfied and alienated at work? How does this effect motivation levels and employee turnover rates? How is confidence in the workplace affected? And what is the financial cost of all this?