TWENTY FIRST CENTURY REALITY CHECK
This is the era of the professional worker, a worker more often than not trained for jobs that no longer exist. Compounding the problem, while everything is changing, our place of employment and we are not.
Workers are assigned, evaluated and promoted on the basis of criteria designed for another time with protocols that have little to do with skill base or job requirements. Corporations have the hubris to believe profits take precedence to workers notwithstanding the rhetoric to the contrary.
Once in the workplace, workers are managed, motivated, mobilized and manipulated to fit the mindset of outdated forms from position power hierarchies to ritualistic routines and practices, forms that contribute little to the bottom line.
A corporate carryover from the twentieth century discouraged workers from taking charge of what they did. Early in the last century, workers built it right, built it safe and dependable, took pride in work and wasted little effort. They sued for safe, healthy and humane working conditions, and won, and were given pay and entitlement concessions, but at the price of control of work.
Now, when brainpower more than muscle power is in demand, when creativity and initiative are called for, workers are suspect of management if not paranoid and reactive. They feel ripped off in an assortment of ways, from overpriced meals in the cafeteria to stolen seconds of coffee breaks to denial of personal days off for emergencies to arbitrary discipline to hazing and harassment by number-driven managers.
This used to be confined to blue-collar workers. Now, professionals are feeling the same aggravation, and taking it by retreating into paralyzing passivity, doing as little as possible to get by not as much as they are capable of doing. It is the same old Swan Song, only more crushingly debilitating today.
Blame it on the explosion in technology, which has only widened the gap between people and profits, professionals and performance since “The Worker Alone!” was first published. Palpable corporate distrust has resulted in spiraling costs to employers and constant frustration to workers. The purpose of a company is what it does, and what it does often is not consistent with that mission.
Against this reality, the “system” engages intractably in “business as usual” practices with implacable mulishness despite setback after setback, operating as knowing institutions rather than learning establishments.
It is easy to point fingers why this is so, but that does not address the issue. Nor does it deal with the larger problem of corporate obsessive fixation with the status quo.
Workers wait for someone to take charge and lift them out of this malaise when only they can. They wait for someone to lead when only they possess the tools. They wait for the vested powers to finally come to their senses when they have too much invested in things as they are.
There is neither an upside to hope nor a downside to courage, as courage is the engine of survival and the instrument to prevail. Does this call for revolution, for replacing our capitalistic profit system for some utopian idea such as socialism? Would workers than take command? I don’t think so.
History tells us that the wealth and power of a nation remains essentially in the hands of the upper two percent of society whether the system is feudalism, monarchy, communism, socialism, fascism, capitalism or a democratic republic, or with hybrid of economic systems.
Ideology caused little concern when we had a vibrant working middle class after the boom years following WWII. But like a profligate spender, corporations were willing to give workers everything but the kitchen sink when “buy America” was the cry across the globe.
Corporate minders and well-paid workers colluded in the faulty utopian belief that the status quo would last forever. Not considered was that Europe and Japan would climb out of the rubble of war, or that new places with find their legs such as China, Indonesia, Korea, India and Brazil.
The American Century is over. The United States is no longer safely separated from the rest of the world by two giant bodies of water. While America slept, the world caught up. Against this reality, we find America’s energy and ingenuity bottled up then dissipated in senseless conflict and animosity, contemptuous discord and gridlock, often between labor, which is mainly professional and management, which is mainly redundant. It is not a pretty picture, but change is the only option.
Change has its own momentum but no conscience. It simply is.
Change in the workplace is of only secondary importance. Change will come about naturally once workers and managers first bring about change within. Order comes from having a center, as it is a behavioral construct.
To establish order takes more than a change in attitude, more than good intentions, more than catchy slogans, a positive work climate, or a generous confection of incentives. Order requires a radical change in mentality, a structural change in the way workers and managers perceive their role vis-à-vis each other.
Order calls for the individual to go against the grain of the status quo. It is time for workers to take charge! That does not mean to sabotage the system. Workers have already done that with their passive aggressive behaviors. The times call for quiet heads to prevail. The factory mentality that has dominated our schools, churches, associations and workplaces is now passé. Time will tell if this also true of our corporate infrastructure.
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The luxury of “do everything you can for workers and workers will do everything for the company” is a mantra companies can no longer afford, a strategy that has proven counterproductive to the extreme.
Entitlements and perks were meant to increase worker creativity and productivity. These confections instead have resulted in reactive counter dependent workers trapped in learned helplessness.
When the connection between contribution and compensation was lost, workers became isolated from the reality of company dynamics. In a capitalistic society, if an enterprise fails to make a profit, it goes under. Traditionally, workers have not been interested in this detail as they saw themselves as renters not owners. Moreover, they worked 8 to 5, unaware or indifferent to internal stresses and strains of daily operations or the accelerating demands in the marketplace. Treating workers like children, management saw such details only the domain of grown ups.
Consequently, contribution saw workers drifting toward management dependent comfort, which has led to the complacency of workers counter dependent on the company for their total well being. Unwittingly, companies created a work force in arrested development suspended in terminal adolescence.
The American society that strives to be eternally young and therefore never to grow up has little interest in taking charge.
Workers across the land bring their bodies to work and leave their minds at home at a time when most companies are struggling to stay afloat in a competitive global economy.
Harmony is not the glue that holds a company on task. Managed conflict is. Workers have shied away from confrontation, from managed conflicts, from taking risks.
After a half-century of programming, we have a passive, reactive workforce unwilling or incapable of taking the initiative for fear of losing their jobs. Now when creativity is required companies are now paying for sins of the past.
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In the new reality, workers and managers are equal partners, but not before this happens:
(1) The performance appraisal system is phased out. PAS is an elitist management practice that defines its power, which has essentially gotten in the way of productive work. The new relationship is organic and interdependent.
Preferred is for workers to set personal and professional goals consistent with company objectives with the provision that management provides the coaching and counseling, and career development.
(2) Reward and recognition programs (i.e., cash and prizes) are marginalized. Meant to be incentives, they have proven to have a short life span feeding worker wants, which have no satiety, at the expense of worker needs, which fuel self-worth.
Workers prefer ownership of what they do provided they are given the tools to do the job, and the liberty (control) to perform the task in their own inimitable style, measured against agreed upon parameters. Reward is then in the work, alone.
(3) Inter group competition is suspended as intra organization collaboration is embraced.
Setting up departments or functions to compete against each other for some prize or recognition thwarts creativity and enhances imitation at the expense of the overarching objective. It is counterintuitive but nonetheless true that when each function or department is performing as well as it can, then the overall complex is not.
Conversely, when these functions complement each other, then the organization soars beyond its expectations. It is the nature of synergy.
(4) Cease and desist with micromanagement.
Over control creates reactionary workers. When failures occur, it is “not their problem!” They wait for management to solve problems only they have the moxie and tools to do so. Micromanagement weakens workers resolve and creates a vacuum where chaos takes residence.
Crisis management follows, perpetual cycle of management solving problems it creates, while workers take pleasure in the charade, failing to see they are its victims.
On the other hand, when workers are given ownership of what they do, they address chronic problems at their source, not waiting for management to intervene.
(5) Cease to see management as distinct from workers.
Managers are atavistic and management, as we know it, is anachronistic. No longer are eighty (80) percent of the work force unskilled blue-collar workers, and twenty (20) percent management and administrative support. Now, less than twenty percent of workers are unskilled while eighty percent are professionally trained.
Management today is essentially everybody. Therefore, workers need to have a sense of this new role and accountability where no partitions exist. Quality is not only a quality departmental function separate from human resources, engineering, production, administration, and sales and marketing. Quality is everyone’s responsibility, as all functions are now interdependent.
(6) Refrain from faddism.
There was a time when companies were “searching” for excellence, imitating successful companies to the nth detail. Many of these companies in the end failed. Duplication was often at the expense of the immutable cultural distinctiveness.
A company is as unique from one company to another as one individual is unique to another individual.
Each company has a distinctive history, value and belief system, infrastructure and relational heritage, along with proprietary highs and lows, and matchless secrets. Its essence stokes its (internal) aspirations revealed in its (external) propensities.
As fixated as people may be, this is more the case with companies. They run on the momentum that has brought them to this time, place and space. Mergers often end poorly because intrinsic ambient rigidity is not addressed.
The seeds for rejuvenation are never “out there!” The better wisdom is to create the new out of the ashes of the old. This taps the collective mind. Answers for survival are often revealed in the reticent majority. Too frequently in panic mode these voices are dismissed as unimportant and therefore ignored.
Instead, grandiose schemes and quick fixes are entertained. They range from “hot house” training programs to cutting edge technologies to tantalizing shortcuts said to ensure instantaneous course corrections to decades old faux pas. Stopgap measures carry the seductive scent of cosmetic change, merely postponing the inevitable. Change for change’s sake is no change at all.
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Twenty years ago it was “crunch time” for workers as professionals. This was essentially ignored. Professionals were too busy complaining to take hold. They populate an inherited dysfunctional system, which they failed to improve with characteristic insouciance. Now a new crop of professionals is coming into the system with heir heads down as well. They have invested heavily in education realizing a disappointing return on that investment. Once they have a job, there is little sense of security as the wrecking train of conglomerates can always be heard in the distance. They are as angry at “the system” as were their elders, failing to realize they are the system.
The Worker, Alone! is committed to the proposition that nothing changes until workers change. The game of catchy themes such as “empowerment,” “partnership,” “team concept,” and “communications” continue because they are safe, and they cost those in power nothing. It is up to workers to put this house in order. Neither ventilation nor pointing fingers will do. Workers must get off the dime and take charge of work, which is the only way to take charge of life.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
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