Do you trust your employees?
If you’re an employee do you feel trusted?
Are you allowed to set your own schedule? Or are you required to arrive and free to go at specific times set by your employer?
Are you free to complete your work the way you think is best as long as you deliver results? Or are you required to follow procedures and orders even if they don’t make sense?
Are you encouraged to provide input and confident that your voice will have an impact? Or are requests for feedback rare and empty?
Many companies don’t trust their employees and it shows through command and control structures and rules and regulations designed to prevent employees from screwing up or wasting company time and resources.
Now think about how it feels when someone doesn’t trust you and treats you like a child. Are you motivated to help someone who doesn’t trust you?
When you treat someone like a child, you’re telling them that you don’t value their judgment. If you don’t value someone’s judgment, they’re expendable and replaceable. If your employer doesn’t value your judgment, why would you try to share your insights? If you’re employer treats you as an interchangeable cog, why would you optimize for anything other than your own self-interest?
Companies that don’t trust their employees expect and plan for the worst from their people and in return receive the worst through a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A lack of trust is one of the many ways the dominant organizational structures are broken. We’ll poke at the other problems and explore the alternatives to better understand how to unlock the hidden potential of business.
2 responses so far ↓
Bus Owner // Nov 20, 2007 at 7:56 pm
It’s a little one sided don’t you think!
Most employees only work about 4 or 5 hours a day, the rest is spent online or who knows, yet they feel untrusted and under paid. What about the employee theft issues most business also have to deal.
I think most business know which employees are honest and have good work ethics and which ones the business feel waste time, poor work ethics and need to be supervised.
Without some rules and regulations designed to prevent employees from screwing up or wasting company time and resources most companies would not be as profitable and would result in hiring less employees and paying less for the employees.
kareem // Nov 23, 2007 at 10:45 am
Bus-
If your people can work for 4-5 hours a day and spend the rest of the time online, look at your own systems. Why is that allowed to happen? Are your people allowed to work on stuff they like? Who tells them what to work on? How are they held accountable?
If you have a confrontational relationship with your people, they’re going to try and get away with as much as they can. If they can help chart their course, they’ll run through walls to get stuff done *because they want to*.
Rules and regulations encourage learned helplessness and discourage individual thinking. If you want a business that maintains status quo or worse, overdoing it on the R&R is the way to go.
And if you have employees stealing from you, no amount of rules & regs will help that… you’ve got to get rid of them asap!
Thanks for the comment.
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