Since becoming a direct hire at my place of work, I have attended a number of training sessions and workshops on a variety of topics, from "how to manage up" to "conflict within the workplace." Without fail, all these boil down to a single message - it's all about communication.
What I just cannot understand is how, despite attending these numerous sessions, despite proudly listing them on our list of accomplishments at the end of the year for performance reviews, despite our best intentions, we inevitably go back to our damn desks and continue to fail to communicate. How?! What goes wrong? Where do these courses fail us? Where does the bridge break down?
Are we so desperate to somehow make ourselves more important by withholding information or only sharing it with a select few? Are we focused on ourselves and our own needs so much that we forget the rest of the people we work with? And I'm not talking about information that's clearly not meant to be shared. I'm talking about taking a team of 10 and in that team having only 4 people with complete information while the rest are left to guess what's going on around them. I'm talking about a team of 4, with one being constantly out of the loop. Does it happen on purpose? More often than not it's not deliberate. Sometimes we simply fail to consider how our actions are perceived by our employees and colleagues. However you look at it though, it's an issue that keeps happening. It keeps happening despite attention being drawn to the lack of communication, to the lack of transparency. It keeps happening despite bosses dutifully taking down notes in their notebooks after nodding their heads in empathy and understanding. Hell, I'm sure I've been guilty of it myself on more than one occasion. Everywhere we look - it keeps happening. I mean, just Google, "lack of communication in the workplace" and see how many articles pop up.
It shouldn't be this hard, when we look at the issue objectively. And if we make it hard, we shouldn't wonder why our team's morale is down, why some people thrive while others slowly wilt away, why rumors become wilder, why people complain about the lack of transparency within the workplace.
It's seems so simple, really. If employees perceive inconsistency within the workplace in terms how how people (particularly those of the same rank) are treated, we have a recipe for disgruntled employees on our hands. If employees perceive that some people are privy to information while others are not, we will have disgruntled employees on our hands. If there is no information passed from the top down to the rest, we will have disgruntled employees on our hands. If we pretend none of it is happening and ignore the complaints, we will have disgruntled employees on our hands. Yeah, yeah, we get the point. And actually, we all know this already, if not from our trainings, then from all those articles we read, right? So then, why does the problem persist?
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