When employees are well engaged, attitude and productivity are very positive, it is the employer to try and manage this work factors that could prevent the employees from developing a negative attitude. My thoughts here are; “attitude is the strong link between the state of a work place, the happiness of employees and productivity.” Why so? Employees will feel happy and develop a strong positive attitude when their employers set the right environment to the work place. This, over time will result to greater productivities. For instance if you set a working environment where there is no room for mistakes, never expect generation of new ideas as employees would fear that if an idea fails then that’s a mistake. You know, humans failure to travel long distance on foot led to the invention of automotive.
Some of the factors that break the link and affects productivity is the psychological contract. This isn’t a legal contract but more of an agreement between managers and their employees or direct reports. Most managers do not know they have engaged in such contracts so they are never aware of its effect when they fail to meet this kind of contracts. So as it is, physiological, it’s the conceptualization of a bond between two parties. In a work place scenario as a manager, you organize for coffee chats with employees, set expectations, and promise a change in action on certain things. As a manager at the end of the discussion you mark off your calendar or to do list that you have had a monthly chat with the team outside work. Now the little promises you make to an employee either who is directly or it’s a dotted line management would change the way they view their roles and how important their addition is to the team, if you fail to meet your part, a report may feel the mutual agreement has been broken and could negatively impact job satisfaction. Managers please be aware!!
Negative attitude could arise from external reasons, an employer has no control over but could result to an employee bringing negative attitude to work, managers in this case could try to manage attitude by supporting and shaping employees attitude. We say prevention is the best cure, by allowing an employee a right to raise his concerns even if it’s not related to work could go a long way. Giving employees an opportunity to express themselves and helping them to find solutions has always worked out on setting the place of work right for productivity. Using the pareto’s principlal 80/20 rule, 80 percent of the productivity challenges could be caused by 20% of the problems an employee could be facing and possibly 80% of the problems are external so listen to them more and do not promise if you are not sure.
Setting a great workplace is something I will encourage but I will caution you that no matter how great the environment is you will at some point face negative attitude staff in your team, take that to the bank, not everyone is from the same school of thought as you. I have met individuals who are always bitter with everything, you introduce a bonus structure, they feel it is low, you remove, they want it back, you increase, they feel it was unfairly done. There this kind of people, the earlier you recognize them the better, otherwise they bring along negative attitude to the whole team which is contagious as the whole team loses sight of the big picture. The earlier you identify the impact their action is to the team the better for your team’s productivity cycle.
Hope this helps you become a strong leader from wherever you are reading this post from.
© Sabwa John Milton, 2018