For top employers, healthy business is motivated staff

If there’s one thing the winners of The Boston Globe’s 100 Top Places to Work have in common, it’s this: They all believe it’s good business to keep employees satisfied, motivated and working hard.

“Show them respect,” says Shirley Leung, assistant managing editor of business news for the Globe.

But not every company is so lucky. In fact, many organisations are bastions of dysfunction, where overwork and stress fuel negative and aggressive behaviours.

For example, take bullying — one of those behaviours that tends to increase during stressful times.

One recent study states, “37 per cent of the US workforce (an estimated 54 million Americans) report being bullied at work; an additional 12 per cent witness it.

Simultaneously, 45 per cent report neither experiencing nor witnessing bullying. Hence, a silent epidemic.”

If this sounds like your company, maybe you need an office intervention.

Some say dysfunctional workplace behaviours, such as bullying and aggression, are an inevitable part of work and don’t affect the bottom line.

People should just “knock it off” and get back to business.

But this rationale negatively affects business.

“The threat response is both mentally taxing and deadly to the productivity of a person — or of an organisation. It impairs analytical thinking, creative insight and problem solving,” says David Rock of Strategy & Business.

For one such company, an employee engagement survey revealed poor morale, rampant relational aggression and a bully at the centre of it all.

Leadership hadn’t addressed the dysfunctional dynamic, and staff members weren’t held accountable for workplace relationships.

As advisers to this company, we focused on changing the entire environment and required that leaders be intimately involved, claim full responsibility for the state of the workplace, include and support human resources, and make a public commitment to do what it takes to create a thriving, functional workplace.

People promoted