remove stress from the workplace | Safety Excellence For Business

We are living through a period of extraordinary uncertainty. Our safety and our Leadership is in flux.

Two renowned scholars and two McKinsey experts recently illuminated the leadership imperatives of our time:

bringing people together,
energizing forward progress, and
reimagining normalcy.

This is exactly what we embrace with our Partnering through Collaboration Leadership Approach (at RNKnowles & Associates).

Stress in the Workplace

The COVID mess has driven us onto new and different ground. The virus, the vast amounts of conflicting information, the on-again off-again edicts, the shortage of workers, and the supply-chain problems are forcing everyone to rethink what and how we conduct our businesses. On top of this, we still must maintain our standards of safety, quality, and total performance. With such high levels of complexity, no one knows how to do all of this.

For the businesses having to impose and enforce all the edicts, we wind up pitting ourselves against each other. For example, suppose someone must be let go because the edict required vaccination and the person refused it for good health reasons, and then the edict is blocked in court the next day. What do we do? We can bring the person back to work, but then other, new changes are imposed. What then? How do we handle the pay issues? It goes on and on. These stressors are intense in our workplaces today.

Finding a Workable Way through this Mire

With everything changing around us, we must find a way to take control, and make sense of what we do. Perhaps we need to shift our way of working from a top-down, hierarchical approach to one of opening up and partnering with the people. Talking together and working out our problems, as partners, is extremely important.

Our top-down approach is faced with lots of questions. Who knows the “right” answers? What are the rules today? How do we operate our businesses for the good of everyone? Are we supposed to force people to get COVID vaccinations when some people have already had COVID and are immune or have some health issues that make having a vaccination dangerous? Is Management trying to force things and the people are resisting because they do not want to get pushed around? Is Management just an extension of the Government?

No one person knows the answers. Yet, when we partner, we can do a lot better. You do know your own workplaces and the people who work there. Collectively, you know what is best for you, and what will keep you from splitting up into various factions. You know the playing field you are on. Talk together so everyone has a good picture of what you are trying to do. Talking and sharing is important because everyone has a different picture. In sharing, a clearer picture can be developed by all.

Partnering through Collaboration (Leadership Approach) is your Guide

As you talk about developing a clearer picture of your new playing field, let the conversation move on to trying to figure out how to manage yourselves on this field the best you can. Your goal is to help each other get through all this confusion so everyone can work safely, people can keep their jobs, and your business do the best it can. Develop some co-created agreements about how you are going to manage and deal with problems so things can be the best they can be. Listen to everyone and explore the best ways to work together in these difficult times. In having this conversation, you are establishing the ground rules for working together as partners. Be open to the constant need to pay attention to what is happening around you so you can be resilient and flexible as things change.

Having developed a clear picture of your playing field and co-creating how you’ll play in these confusing times, to go and do what needs to be done. Do the work, adjusting together as you go. Help each other, share information, treat everyone with respect. Avoid blame and fighting which will tear you apart.

No one know just the right answers, so you will have to develop your own as best you can. If you just default to today’s edicts, you’ll have to change them tomorrow when some new edict is issued. Take control of your destiny as best you can.

The goal is to get through all this safely, keep your people and business thriving and active, building stronger relationships for partnering and working together. This is a tough challenge, but who knows your workplace and the people better than you. You can work things out together.

Remember these 3 tenets of Partnering through Collaboration (Leadership approach):

Understand the big picture – What’s your frame of reference?
Continually Build Relationships with all people
Share Information…openly, widely, often, in various ways

We at Richard N. Knowles and Associates help the people in organizations to develop partnering with our Partnering Through Collaboration approach. It is a specific Leadership process that we can teach you to utilize as you move through your stressors. We have a long, successful track record in this work. You can move forward quickly. To learn more about this, please give us a call at 716-622-6467 and see our web site at www.RNKnowlesAssociates.com. The calls are free.

The complexities and conflicting messages related to Covid, the shortages of skilled people to fill jobs, along with the related excessive overtime and the emerging supply-chain mess are driving stress through the roof.

This stress is hitting all sorts of businesses and organizations.

According to a recent AP story, a major hospital in Missouri has seen a big jump in violence related incidents. In 2019, they had 94 violence related crimes, including 43 assaults and 17 injuries. In 2020, they had 152 violence related crimes, including 123 assaults and 78 injuries. The American Hospital Association reports a big increase in violence related problems, but since most are not reported to the police, so the numbers are unclear.

Many businesses are struggling to get people to fill their open positions as business activity grows. But since the openings remain, the employees are forced into excessive over-time. Some organizations are running at close to 20% overtime, which is wearing the people out. In one organization we know, many people have been required to work seven-day schedules for weeks, which is not the right way to treat people. This causes excessive fatigue and is very hard on the families.

Now we have an emerging supply chain crisis. There are over 60 ships awaiting to dock and unload in Los Angeles because there are not enough truck drivers to move the freight out to customers. This is impacting businesses of all sizes.

In one automobile agency, I heard a salesperson telling a customer that she would have to wait for her car until at least January 2022. I was talking with a small business owner whose business is etching decorative glassware. He said he was suffering in his business because he can’t get glass ware for his customers.

All this increasing stress is leading to more injuries and incidents. All of us in each of our businesses and organizations need to be very cognizant of this and try to keep stress levels to a minimum. We need to help each other and care for each other. We are all in this together so let’s make the best of this and go the extra mile in being patient and helpful.

A different approach to solving our problems is needed.

In the scientific and technical world in which most safety people have grown up, the dominant approach to problem solving has be a reductionist one. We were taught to look carefully at a problem, dissect it, understand the parts, and fix what is needed. We were taught to depend on fundamentals like Newton’s Laws, for example. Using the reductionist approach to solve safety problems may be reaching its limit, based on the fact that, the number of fatalities is gradually increasing and the rate of drop in all injuries I very slow.

The speed of change and the complexity of the problems has increased so much that we need a different approach to solving problems. This different approach has been developing over the last 50 or so years. This is called systems thinking.

In this approach, we are taught to look at the whole and the parts together and try to understand their inter-relationships and interactions. All the problems are connected so we can only understand the system using a different thinking approach. In systems thinking we look at relationships, patterns, and processes, asking question about how things are related, about the recurring patterns of behavior you see and what are the processes of interaction happening over and over. This is a big shift from looking at things, to looking at how people are interacting.

It can feel like we are giving up our quantitative approach to something that is more qualitative. It felt like this to me at first, but as I shifted my focus away from things to the way people interact, our safety and business performance improved. As I shifted my focus and way of thinking, I found that everything changed. As I worked with people using this systems’ thinking approach our safety and total business performance quickly improved.

Systems thinking is something you need to learn in order to develop a higher level of your own performance.

If you read my book, The Leadership Dance: Pathways to Extraordinary Organizational Performance, available from Amazon, you can read about my own journey into learning about systems thinking, as well as offering some useful complexity tools.

Leadership: Moving Through the Mire … to a Better place

We are living through a period of extraordinary uncertainty. Our safety and our Leadership is in flux.

Stress in the Workplace

The complexities and conflicting messages related to Covid, the shortages of skilled people to fill jobs, along with the related excessive overtime and the emerging supply-chain mess are driving stress through the roof.

A different approach to solving our problems is needed.

This is a powerful, effective way of working, which I highly recommend.

Richard’s Newest Book

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