Attitude Virus
Hacks Human Capital
Companies vulnerable to talent exodus as morale plummets
By Ira S. Wolfe
This article was published in Business2Business, September 2001
This is B. Raking News reporting from WWRN - that's Whatever Works
Right Now! The station that sounds great but never gets results.
While hackers worldwide are circulating the Internet and invading
your PC, the At-E-2D Virus is infecting your employees. Business owners
and managers representing organizations of all sizes across the country
are reportedly under attack from a new virulent strain of the AtE2D,
commonly referred to as the Attitude virus.
Experts in employee motivation and attitude report this virus can
be difficult to diagnosis in its earliest stages. But according to Dr.
Mo T. Vation, "The virus is everywhere. It's contagious and it can spread
in minutes before anyone knows what has happened."
Early estimates on lost productivity and profits due to the effects
of the Attitude Virus are in the billion of dollars. Dr. Mo T. Vation
warns that non-performing and poor performing employees carry the virus,
and innocent and misinformed managers have been identified as hosts.
The Attitude Virus, Mo T. Vation continued, infects the healthy
worker and threatens the bottom line in a short time. Motivational regulatory
agencies around the world recommend immediate immunization to Cure Negativity
in the Workplace through rapid onset retention programs.
This has been B. Raking News reporting from News Central.
What is going on in the workplace today?
The Attitude Virus seems to be everywhere. We know that there are lots
of layoffs, morale is down, and productivity is suffering. We see the
symptoms every day as rudeness, poor service, lack of motivation, and
increased job stress. Managers feel the pain of the long-term effects
of the Attitude Virus with employee turnover, lost productivity, customer
complaints, increased worker and consumer liability, and a drain on profits.
But the greatest damage the virus has is that it leaves the workplace
vulnerable to other attacks and opens the back door for healthy workers
to escape.
Employees, managers, and owners with bad attitudes seem to spend the
better part of each day figuring out ways to avoid work, complaining about
the work they have, or redoing work. These behaviors have recently been
reported in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine as
a workplace condition called "presenteeism" - showing up for work but
not being very productive. It's like absenteeism…but worse. With presenteeism,
employees are still showing up and still are receiving a full paycheck.
But they likely are disrupting and demoralizing the other workers, and
not doing the jobs they are being paid to do.
The cost of this presenteeism in the U.S. alone is in the hundreds of
billions of dollars and results in over 2.5 billion lost workdays per
year.
Who are these workers infected by this Attitude Virus? Depending on the
strain of the Virus, these workers show up as the:
· Perfectionist, the worker or supervisor who can never be pleased.
· Resister, the employee who puts all his or her efforts into
resisting any improvement or change.
· Not-my-jobber who refuses to do any task, no matter how simple.
· Rumor-Monger who delights in spreading baseless, negative rumors,
· Uncommitted whose indifferences place additional workloads
on the other employees.
· Pessimist who sees doom everywhere and works very hard at making
everyone around them feel down and gloomy.
The burden to turn this around is falling on the shoulders of supervisors
and managers. Notwithstanding that much of the perfectionism, resistance,
rumors, lack of commitment and pessimism comes from the supervisors and
managers themselves, today's supervisor and manager is faced with two
additional challenges.
Baby boomer and older managers are managing a multigenerational and diverse
workforce which spans four generations, a first for our country. From
the mature generation to generation Y, these employees want and expect
very different rewards from life inside and outside of work. The new young
supervisors and managers, however, who are less challenged by the diversity
of the workforce have never managed people in an economic slowdown. They
have only experienced prosperity and growth and now are faced with managing
a workforce under attack by shutdowns, cutbacks and layoffs.
If all that doesn't keep you awake at night, the Bureau of Labor Statistics
predicts near-zero growth in the 16- to 24-year-old age group for the
rest of the decade and a decline in the 25- to 39- year olds, the breeding
ground for future managers and leaders. The BLS predicts that the members
of these two age groups will trail employment growth by more than 5 percent
by 2008. The result is that one in four middle and senior management positions
will remain unfilled, something many organizations are already experiencing
with a 2.2 percent unemployment rate for professional and managerial positions.
While the workplace is being infected with the Attitude Virus and the
pool for talented workers and supervisors is depleted, a direct correlation
also has been established between employee turnover, the #1 killer of
profits, and poor quality supervision and the frequency of supervisory
changes (supervisor turnover).
The Prevention and the Cure
Teaching supervisors to manage and motivate effectively is then the prevention
and the cure for improving employee retention. Most supervisors have the
skills to handle day-to-day activities but only the top performers have
the talent needed to avoid the things that derail most people. The missing
skills that derail supervisors are the weak links in an organization that
leaves the organization vulnerable to more attacks and employee turnover.
What can an organization do to immunize the workplace and end
bad attitudes?
1. Diagnosis. Recognize that there is an attitude problem. This requires
an honest assessment of the organization from top-down and collaterally
to your vendors, suppliers and customers. Acknowledge any underlying causes
of the Attitude virus and take responsibility for removing them.
2. Test. Select only supervisors who have the skills or potential to manage
and arm them with the tools and training they need to detect the infected
worker or new hire before they leech out the morale and motivation from
the healthy workers. Effective supervisors hold the keys to employee retention
and profitability.
3. Therapy. Take responsibility for upgrading the skills of your first
line of defense, the front-line supervisors and managers, who fight the
"infection" and "exposures" on a daily basis. Develop and train supervisors
to have the skills to "treat" or quarantine the infected worker and coach
them back to health. The virus is mutating almost daily and continuous
learning is crucial.
4. Monitor, monitor, monitor. Taking a diet class and waiting for the
pounds to drop off is ludicrous. Taking skills training without reinforcement
and feedback and re-testing is equally bad. Identify the skills that differentiate
your highly effective managers from the average performers, develop training
that is specific and responsive to those specific skills, and provide
on-going feedback and post-assessment to monitor progress and ensure protection.
Now is the time to attack the Attitude Virus and to immunize your organization.
Attitude Virus-free organizations grow and prosper because they select
positive workers, quarantine their infected employees and either nurture
them back to health, or "delete" them before they infect other workers.
A work culture clean and free of the Attitude Virus is rewarded with a
healthy bottom line, high rates of employee retention, and continuous
productivity improvements.
Ira S. Wolfe is Founder of Success Performance Solutions, a training
and assessment center helping businesses to match, manage and motivate
employees. He will be presenting "Attacking the Attitude Virus", along
with five other hiring, retention and customer service programs, at the
end of September in Malaysia and Hong Kong. Ira also writes and speaks
across North America on The Perfect Labor Shortage: Why This Labor Shortage
Will Not Blow Over.
Ira can be reached at 717-656-4632 or iwolfe@super-solutions.com.
Ira can also be heard on WALE AM 990 (www.nabcinc.com) every Friday
morning at 7:00 -8:00AM, hosting BreakThrough to Success.
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