Elephant in the Room— Positivity — Productivity – Artistic Reflection on Systems Failure in Workplace Cultures

It’s all news – The Good the Bad and the Ugly

When I was a teenager, my future father-in-law asked me a question. I didn’t know how to answer it. Now, wait a minute. This is not because I am stupid. I am a person who likes to mull over a problem and consider it before jumping to a conclusion, or reacting. That way, you make fewer mistakes. We will get to the question later on.

The older you get the more you learn to step back from a situation and see the bigger picture. That isn’t to say that age precludes a person from any higher aspirations. I was a manager at the age of 19, but I wasn’t a good manager of people then. I was a good business manager. To be honest there were very few things needed to be a good business manager. One was to conduct oneself professionally and politely, another to arrive on time, providing excellent and careful customer service was another, and the other was to get the work done somehow; for me that meant either staying late or arriving early and not expecting to be paid overtime. I operated on that premise for almost six years as a manager, and did very well out of it.

I had to learn to build the relationships as a manager of teams because that is about spending time with people and getting to know them, not making assumptions about their abilities, and that takes time. Slowly, I learnt that, and I did well, and I was consistently promoted during my time working for that very large corporation in the 1980s.

So What’s Changed?

Nowadays, everything has become so fast paced. We have fewer breaks.

This was not the case in the 1980s. The corporation I worked for allowed a twenty minute break for four hour shifts and the same morning break plus an hour for lunch for those working full time. The twenty minute break was taken between 10: 15 a. m., and 11 a. m. The hour for lunch between midday and 2 p. m. This worked extremely well in all the businesses I ran. I ran 6 altogether over a five year period, ranging from a small concession to a two-storey shop in the city taking thousands of pounds with my own cashier.

I think that the set breaks allowed employees to relax; and facilitated the ability to build relationships; it is harder to build relationships without a balanced working environment.

I think that this current fast-paced culture is detrimental to running good businesses. People look unhealthy; they make poor choices about diet, and they skip lunch in order to drive the business forward and they neither know, or get to know, their work force. This fast pace has the opposite effect on productivity because people can become unable to perform basic functions when requested unexpectedly, due to the stress of overworking. Their minds have no rest, so they cannot focus.

In recent decades, I have had the opportunity to observe people who were placed, or had placed themselves in this overworked position, and I became aware that I myself had acted like this in at least one role when not provided with adequate support. My response was to work overtime and I had to skip many already inadequate breaks too. My assistant manager had recently resigned and I was under pressure to meet all my KPIs before the 6 month deadline of keeping my contract (a stupid idea because a business takes more than a year to build). Not only that, but I had the problem of winning over the local community in the process, and managing a large team that I had not recruited. (Have you ever been in the situation where you had to win over a team that you had not recruited? It takes extra time and care to build relationships ans this is another problem for managers who are too busy to speak to staff.)

But what was that question that my father-in-law asked me? Well, it was this:

‘Are you an optimist or a pessimist?’

Now, at the time I was resistant to this question because I thought I was neither one, but I didn’t want to answer the question straight away, I wanted to reflect on it. I don’t think I am either, and I tend to answer that I am a realist when asked this question nowadays. I don’t arrive at a situation and think it will go one way or another. I simply observe. Now, I had to learn to do this through experiencing what happened once when I went into a shop as manager and tried to run things my way. It is usually better to observe people and to find out how they operate rather than to impose your own way of working or thinking on them. Of course, that works if you are relaxed about when your processes happen and you have a robust training programme with checks in the early stages of the training programme as well as a well-planned, functioning system of delivering your training, and managing your business, but so few small businesses have this in place. I know this because I have worked in several. Not only that but businesses are liable to break their own rules; some of those are detrimental to the smooth running of those businesses. The answers the leaders of those businesses have given me are that they are making do because they cannot get the staff. This seems to me to be a problem with the wrong HR leaders being in power.

If you are not a good judge of people, you will not be able to recruit the right people and you will not have a good work force from day one. This sets you up for failure. Another problem is when you do not have clearly defined processes. It is all very well having KPIS (Key Performance Indicators), and a good team; but you must now lead them, or go home.

Another problem is that people with degrees are assumed to have no ‘common sense’. This is a favorite slogan amongst people who do not mix with people from different backgrounds and assume that adademic ability is some sort of alien quality they themseves couldn’t attain because they have some sort of practical superpower that is not available to academics.

Sometimes you have to lead from the bottom up when you are confronted with colleagues who will not take responsibility for poor practice, or raise it as an issue.

Health and safety is the responsibility of all people in the work place, but how many of us understand what that means? How many businesses value it when a colleague pays attention to health and safety? Why is this not a KPI? For example, putting cold produce in a fridge within half an hour to an hour of delivery is better than not putting it in the fridge at all and leaving it on the shop floor at room temperature, especially if you have placed it to hand and can move it as soon as you find out exactly where it should be placed.

We undervalue and underplay key responsibilities to the detriment of our businesses, and we ignore important principles of running robust businesses with structured, functioning, operational systems, at our peril.

More than that, we undermine the very team we seek to build when we do not provide adequate breaks and opportunities for refreshment for them.

People need good fuel and rest to produce results. They also need to see that effective systems are in place that are functioning well and consistently in order to place trust and confidence in those people who wear the badge of leaders, and in order to carry out their work effectively.

A culture of openess and honesty is a good place to start. Unfortunately, when staff members are unwell, this can prove difficult, due to confidentiality. But if a staff member has to double their work load because others are unable to support them, this needs to be acknowledged.

Clearly, achieving a top notch business strategy is not easy, but with the right attitude we have the chance to succeed. I think I have a realistic view on that. I am hopeful that it is possible to run businesses well with the right approach.