Ideal Workplace or Cesspool of Stagnation?
By Kevin Herne
Imagine this: you work in an office where your colleagues remember your birthday every year and celebrate with a cake, (ablaze with the right number of candles), brought out at lunchtime.
When you go into the lunchroom, there’s always milk in the fridge, (never left out on the sink), and there’s always clean dishes and cutlery because someone never fails to stack, and later empty, the dishwasher. (Yes, your company provides one).
Unlike other workplaces, the fax machine never runs out of paper at 6pm on Fridays because your office has a stationery cupboard that is never bare.
You go out to lunch a lot with your boss and your colleagues and you always have a great time. Everyone is very nice to each other, and there are never any arguments. You can’t remember the last time someone resigned.
In a decade where words like downsizing, rightsizing and restructuring are a part of every day corporate parlance, a workplace seemingly without conflict might appear to be an oasis in an otherwise war-torn organizational environment.
But this is not necessarily the case, says Laura Impastato, a UCSD Professor specializing in conflict management and communication training.
“It’s an ideal world scenario where everyone holds the same values,” says Impastato. “This is an environment filled with ‘yes’ people who believe they come to work to do, not to think. They are never encouraged to make decisions – they leave that to the boss.”
Impastato argues that some companies, already stripped bare by at least one round of retrenchments, try overly hard to avoid the unhappy workplace scenarios which have been regularly reported by the media since the mid-1990s. Workplaces which are characterized by anger, tension, harsh words and silence and where there are high levels of absenteeism coupled with low levels of productivity.
Some companies, argues Impastato, have been seduced into thinking that by promoting a workplace where there is no overt conflict, the staff which have survived the restructure, will stay.
These companies know the “survivors” of a corporate restructure are people who are crucial to the continued operation of the business and, as employers, they have to offer some kind of recompense for the expectation that staff work harder, for longer hours, and only incremental pay rises.
“Organizations which allow workplaces without conflict are never going to be able to tap into the valuable resource of creativity within the people they have working for them,” Impastato says.
“The biggest problem with complacency is that there’s no room for attitudinal change. Staff must feel that it is safe for them to have an opinion and to be wrong, so they can learn from their mistakes.
“To achieve that, managers need to promote a culture which is open and expansive, where people are able to think and be creative.”
A good place to start is to allow a degree of expression of conflict, but to carefully monitor disruption so that it does not get out of hand.
“There will always be people in an organization who are disruptive – someone who plays the “devil’s advocate” and throws up other suggestions,” says Impastato.
“When there is a person with different values in the team, they can be seen as a threat, but a manager needs to recognize that this person may simply be offering a different view. If this is the case, the manager should use that opinion and those ideas to the greater good of the organization.”
Kevin Herne is an independent writer based in Torrance.
