Written by: Rhett Ogston, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
In the past, emotions in the workplace were strictly taboo. If an employee had an emotional issue, it was best left at home — it certainly had no place in the work environment.
In our current working environment, however, studies demonstrate the effect that emotions have on creativity, productivity and career success. This information has brought to light the significant role that emotions play in a company’s ability to perform and compete in the global marketplace. Indeed, the business world has responded with a plethora of audiobooks, books, surveys and questionnaires designed to measure and develop employee emotional intelligence. This new paradigm has executives understanding that the emotions their employees are feeling need to be acknowledged and dealt with. They are no longer taboo, nor should employees be expected to leave them at home.
The bottom line is that if you do not have emotionally stable employees, you are costing yourself and your business money!
Observation of the modern workplace now shows that management realises that the organisation’s success is directly linked to its employee’s emotional states. Organisations comprehend that an employee’s ability to maintain a positive emotional state is a primary factor in their success or failure.
Weiss and Cropanzano developed the Affective Events Theory (AET) in 1996. AET states that work-related events (‘affective events’) that take place in workplaces cause specific emotional reactions in employees, which in turn lead to employee changes in both attitude and behaviour. AET is significant because it was the beginning of studying emotions at the personal level within an organisation.
AET further states that employees who are exposed to hassles and uplifts will experience specific emotional reactions. Employees who experience hassles will have a negative emotional response, such as sadness, fear or anger. Employees who experience an uplift will feel positive emotions, such as excitement, pride or happiness. Each of these emotional reactions leads directly to changes in employee behaviours and attitudes. For an employee to experience a negative shift in consciousness around their job (e.g. decreased job satisfaction), a hassle must either be recurring or unresolvable. Hassles that only occur some of the time do not strongly influence employee behaviour. Most employees are proficient in sorting an occasional hassle in the workplace. If the hassle is ongoing or more permanent, that is when managers observe the traits of an unhappy employee, for example, employees feeling frustrated, displaying rebellious behaviour, taking ‘sickies’ and performing poorly. This situation is common in workplaces that display poor leadership, pay substandard wages and do not reward initiative.
The main reason for understanding employee emotions is because they directly impact on the five major sources of competitive advantage in today’s marketplace.
1. Intellectual capital
Any organisation’s success is directly linked to the knowledge, expertise and innovative capacity of its workforce.
In our current age of innovation based on consumer need, the knowledge or intellect of an organisation is what will be solely responsible for success. The smart and adaptable are the ones that will flourish. A key role for managers in this climate is to cultivate, manage and engage the intellectual prowess of their employees. As stated earlier, employees who feel uplift (as opposed to hassles) perform better emotionally and mentally. An employee’s ability to contribute creatively is a key component in both the ‘amount’ and ‘liquidity’ of an organisation’s intellectual capital. An employee’s emotional state affects how they think, which directly impacts on the amount of intellectual capital.
There could be many possible patterns of relationship between hassles and uplifts. For example, people who seek many meaningful experiences or have strong and varied commitments (e.g. to work, achievement, social relationships) would be likely to encounter numerous relatively minor victories and failures while actively engaged in their pursuits, and would therefore probably experience a high incidence of both uplifts and hassles. People with a higher proportion of hassles to uplifts, conversely, might be maladjusted, unhappy and more frequently ill.
This research indicates that employees who experience hassles suffer from more rigid thinking. They are less discerning and less original than those who experience uplift in the workplace. Often this rigid thinking is associated with feelings of apathy, dispiritedness, a lack of interest and decreased energy for the creative process.On the other hand, George and Brief proposed that ‘a positive mood facilitates organisational spontaneity, which includes voluntary behaviours relevant to initiative and innovation, such as making constructive suggestions, developing oneself, and helping co-workers’. Employees who experience uplift associate with feelings of security, power, confidence and passion. These feelings are directly linked to their work, and as such these employees are more likely to invent new strategies or possibilities, generate positive solutions and make better decisions.To effectively compete in an intellectual, knowledge-based and innovation-driven economy, an organisation must be able to quickly and easily share information, comprehension and know-how throughout the whole organisation. The better the ‘liquidity’ of intellectual capital, the more freely it is distributed and effectively it is used, leading to greater success for the organisation.To put this understanding bluntly, employee emotions affect this liquidity. An employee experiencing hassles may feel insecure, angry and undervalued, and is more unlikely to contribute their knowledge and know-how for fear of losing their position within the company. The converse is true in that an employee experiencing uplift is more likely to make their intellectual capital liquid (i.e. available for use by others) because they feel respected, committed to the organisation and safe in their position. The take home message for an organisation is that negative emotions caused by hassles will adversely effect intellectual functioning, capability and employees’ eagerness to share their ideas, knowledge and know-how with others.
2. Customer service
A whopping 70% of the economy is customer service-orientated. Central to an organisation’s success is its ability to give the customer excellence. Research based on customer loyalty clearly demonstrates that an organisation’s success is intimately associated with its ability to deliver service so exceptional that the customer craves more, leading to repeat business.
The link between an employee’s emotional state when experiencing hassles and their providing less than exceptional customer service is obvious. A negatively charged employee will deliver service that appears abusive, hostile, disinterested or demoralised. The end result is an extremely negative service interaction and brand damage caused by a negative experience. Research conducted on customer service demonstrates that 68% of customers desert an organisation because they perceived that they were treated with an attitude of indifference. Their desertion is directly related to employee emotions, including apathy. It is logical that when an organisation reduces its desertion rate, its bottom line can improve. Beyond the immediate cost of bad service is the cost of losing employees. How much does it cost an organisation to lose an employee? According to data drawn from 30 case studies taken from 11 research papers on employee turnover, it costs at least 20% of their salary when an employee leaves. These costs reflect the loss of productivity from the departure, the cost of finding a replacement and the reduced productivity while the new employee gets up to speed. The intangible costs are lower morale, poor organisation culture and the inevitably higher turnover of employees. The economic consequence of failing to address employee emotions is disastrous. Keeping people in the organisation and maintaining their happiness will encourage more people to stay.
3. Organisational responsiveness
Adaptability in the current marketplace is paramount to success. An organisation must adapt swiftly to changes in customer demand, trends in the marketplace and innovative technology. A key component to adaptability is emotional health. Emotions affect how rapidly and flexibly an employee can respond to a situation, and because employees make up your workforce, ultimately emotions control the rapidity and flexibility of your organisation’s response to these changes. If your employees are tired, emotionally overwhelmed or stressed, they are naturally resistant to change. For example, even when logical evidence shows there is a better way to perform a task, they will remain stuck in outdated patterns of behaviour and exhibit outdated models that have been deemed inefficient.
Response to rapid change and adaptability are clearly evident in employees who are secure, safe and ardent. New technologies are seized with zest and enthusiasm, and change is seen as an opportunity to grow and expand their current skill set, making them essential to the organisation. There is no doubt that an organisation’s ability to adapt rapidly in the marketplace is directly dependent on the emotional health of their employees.
4. Productivity
Many organisations have seized on the new trend of thriftiness. In this ideal, they would like more done with less, and while this ideal is achievable, many organisations misunderstand the driving force behind this goal being attained.
Emotion is often referred as ‘e-motion’, signifying the belief that emotion is energy in motion. This makes logical sense. An employee who is excited to be given an opportunity can be readily observed being more productive than one who is disinterested in their task. The latter will even find problems with the task where there aren’t any. On the most basic level, an emotionally content or excited employee experiences uplift and the net result is increased productivity.
5. Employee attraction and retention
If you are not taking care of your valuable assets (employees), then the headhunters from the competition will have a target on them. The marketplace is ultra-competitive, and you do not want your highly skilled employees preferring to work for the opposition after you have trained them. Your organisation’s success is dependent on its ability to attract and retain high quality employees.By understanding how emotions affect the primary sources of competitive advantage, HR managers are uniquely positioned to assist their team to realise the essential relationship between employee emotions and profit. Addressing employee emotions is no longer a ‘nice thing to do’, but rather an essential component of business that clearly affects your organisation’s profitability. This is why smart organisations are seeking courses relating to emotional health to better care for employee emotions and increase their productivity and profitability.
What does this mean for your organization?
PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that ‘between 20% and 30% of the workforce will suffer from a serious mental health problem at some point in their working life, including anxiety, depression or obsessive compulsive disorder’.
Mental health conditions cost Australian workplaces $4.7 billion in absenteeism, $6.1 billion in presenteeism (being at work longer than necessary) and $145.9 million in compensation claims. It is estimated that every $1 spent on effective workplace mental health actions may generate $2.30 in benefits to an organisation — a 2.3% return on investment.
In 2017, just 27% of young people were in full-time work, compared to 48% three decades ago. More than a third were working part-time, compared with just 13% 30 years ago, and those with less formal education were less likely to be employed in 2016 than they were in 2008.
Forward-thinking organisations are seeking solutions that increase employee safety, morale and overall happiness. Companies are seeking emotional courses that assist employees to reach this goal.
So how do managers expect their employees to manage their emotions in the workplace?
Research indicates that most employees still do not want their co-workers to express any type of strong emotion in the workplace — positive or negative. The research demonstrates that there is still a taboo about emotions, and the only ‘appropriate’ way to deal with negative emotions in the workplace is for employees to hide them. Even when it comes to positive emotions, those surveyed reported that these emotions should also be expressed in moderation.
The easy way to resolve this issue is to provide employees with a quick, easy and effective way to process emotions, that can be done anywhere and any time, without others needing to be involved in the process.
Conclusion
HR managers are best able to assist their employees by creating a harmonious workplace and ensuring that employee emotions are acknowledged and processed. Ideally, companies should seek to implement self-directed procedures that can be used by anyone, anywhere at any time. Managers should find ways to help their employees to process their emotions and perform their duties better, all of which benefits the organisation’s bottom line. The ideal employee is one who is consistently experiencing uplift.
Employee emotions clearly influence every aspect of an organisation’s ability to be successful.
What if an employee could quickly and easily process an emotion so that it was transient, allowing them to resume their normal positive and productive emotional state? This would benefit all aspects of your organisation.
Emotionally balanced employees are happier, more productive, stay in their job longer and generate a better feel to the company.
Rhett Ogston is a business owner, founder of FlameTree: the personal development & healing system, the Process My Emotions essences and Universal Emotional Freedom technique (UEFT), plus author of The Eternal Warrior’s Smile to purchase your copy of this book click here.
Rhett Ogston, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Rhett has been providing life-changing experiences for individuals all over the world for over twenty years. Some were so inspired that they nominated Rhett for Australian of the Year multiple times, first in 2015. Having years of experience in the field of healing as a doctor of Chinese medicine, life coach, remedial therapist, Reiki healer, and armed with a Science degree with honours from Melbourne University, Rhett is positioned to offer you the most relevant, up-to date, no-nonsense information to support you in your thriving process. Rhett is the founder of Qi Health Clinic Pty Ltd, and has developed various ‘innate healing systems’ under the umbrella of Rhett Ogston Applications (ROAs).
