As
we start to think about the toll that employee turnover and “Quiet
Quitting” is taking on our businesses today, it may be best to understand
why our organizations may have problems with attrition. An article in American City Business Journals‘ by Marq Burnett starts to get at some of
the main underlying problems many businesses face today: Toxic Work Cultures.
I
found this statistic hard to fathom – “…a new report from the MIT Sloan
Management Review recently found ‘a toxic corporate culture is by far the
strongest predictor of industry-adjusted attrition and is 10 times more
important than compensation in predicting turnover.’ ” It makes perfect sense.
We discovered this in our June executive session of our Twin Cities COO Forum Chapter Meeting: throwing
money at the attrition problem doesn’t change it, and in many ways only
exacerbates the problem.
Busy
executives are sometimes the last people to know that they are partakers (or
even the instigators) in toxic workplace environments. Taking the initial
temperatures of your teams and seeing where they land on any number of
measures, gives you a better benchmark.
But,
there are underlying problems with trying to take the initial temperature of
your organization’s culture, if done in the wrong way:
·
Many
employees are leery of answering open-ended questions. They fear their comments
will be easily attributable back to them, with possible punishment not far
behind.
·
If
the organization already has a toxic workplace culture, employees fear backlash,
retaliation, or removal from their department/division, therefore they won’t
answer truthfully.
·
Team
members may feel that issuing the benchmark survey is an attempt of management to
placate employee feelings without actually doing something with the results. It
is the “flavor of the month” – one in which they don’t have to change anything
as long as they play along with the flavor. They know management doesn’t
actually mean to do anything with the results, so they take it but revert back
to their current workflows soon afterward.
·
Or
they will answer likely answer with “mid-line” answers – neither
“yes” nor “no” to every question even if they have strong
feelings about the them. This can do triple damage: obstructing real problems
from being seen, working on the wrong problems, or intimating that nothing is
actually wrong.
This
doesn’t help your company learn from its mistakes but keeps everyone in a
status quo situation where nothing changes.
Even
worse, this is where silos and politics increase their progress inside your
organization.
Psychological
safety is THE issue at stake in today’s businesses and on the front-lines of
attrition.
However,
this is the one metric that can change any organization. If you change your
organization’s Psychological Safety, it will give you three unique things:
·
the
ability to dissolve currently existing silos and turf wars, and start mending
other toxic behaviors,
·
an
incredible capacity for all employees to vet any topic, solution, or problem to
create the best options and paths forward, and
·
engaged
employees at every level feel heard and valued for what they bring to their
teams, even if they speak initially hard-to-hear truths.
The result of this last outcome
is that employees are more apt to stay even if there is a problem inside the organization.
They will also be more likely to help find solutions to the problems themselves.
Growing
psychological safety in an organization can be done but it takes a leadership
team willing to hear and humbly explore what employees voice as concerns.
Sadly,
many leaders would rather protect themselves rather than their employees –
leading to the further eroding of psychological safety and then attrition from
the company. This is one reason that legitimate whistleblowers will leave after
they’ve blown the whistle.
Until
you know where you truly stand in an anonymous benchmark survey that only uses
Rating or Likert scale questions (no open-ended questions), you are stabbing in
the dark at what you think might be the problems. Wouldn’t you
rather know what they might be so you could fix them?
If
our leaders cannot get accurate measurements on the most important questions
from their employees’ perspectives, they may try to fix the wrong things.
As
part of a global consortium, we’ve been studying teams and their needs for
years and have come up with 11 metrics that we can follow to some needed
conclusions. Here they are, in order:
- Foundational Level
a.
Emotional
Intelligence – We seek to understand others, as much as we seek to understand
and regulate ourselves
b.
Psychological
Safety – We feel safe among each other
c.
Team
Structure – We know what to do and are structure to attain it
d.
Team
Effectiveness – We think, act and decide together
- Level 1 – Direction
a.
Complementarity
– We value what each member of the Team brings to the Team
b.
Results-Driven
– We have a drive to achieve our results, goals, objectives, and ambitions
c.
Customer-Driven
– We know our customer, inside and out
- Level 2 – Belief
a.
Conviction
– We believe we can achieve
b.
Values
– “We” supersedes “me”
- Level 3 – Fluidity
a.
Agility
b.
Co-Creation
Unfortunately, many teams feel that they have achieved Level 2
or 3 attributes so that they don’t feel the need to pay attention to the
Foundational aspects of their team.
Then we have to ask:
·
Can
a team truly have Agility if each member doesn’t understand or embrace their
own Emotional Intelligence? Or
·
Can
a team have great Co-Creational abilities if they fail the Psychological Safety
benchmarks of the team?
Not obtaining Foundational Level learning sets teams up for
failure. In these cases, the team has pseudo-Agility or pseudo-Co-Creation, but
trips over its immaturity. This results in abnormal team development where the
team must regress before it can again go forward.
Therefore, finding out where the team falls on each of these
levels can help us determine the team’s developmental needs earlier rather than
later. We learn to crawl before we walk, and walk before we run, skate, or ski.