Results of Overstressing a Workforce

Nothing like starting off explaining the obvious… "Understanding and mastering people skills is important to achieving Excellence!" Why, because change is all about people. People are the engine and power behind everything our organization will achieve.

Therefore, like I have been saying for as long as I can remember, our leaders and staff must… “Either master people skills or become a liability.”

Best and Worse of People Skills

Over the years I have worked in a bunch of different industries and environments, either as a consultant, employee, facility, or leadership staff. I worked in government, construction/real estate, retail, agriculture, manufacturing, energy, oil and gas, defense, security, hospitality, entertainment, consulting services, and healthcare. I worked in some of the largest organizations in the world as well as some of the smallest. I’ve worked with people at every level of the organization from the top leaders (Presidents and CEOs); midlevel leaders and division managers; military officers and sailors, soldiers, and airmen; frontline and behind the scenes.

During my entire career, I’ve spent most of my free time (including vacation time) either moonlighting by teaching, speaking at conferences, consulting, or taking classes and workshops. This to train and educate me on the details behind each of the attributes of change management models that I developed. One of these is the Seven Attributes of Excellent Management (sometimes called the Mobile of Excellent Management).

I've seen excellent and poor managers in all types of organizations. Healthcare seems to lag other industries when it comes to controlling egos, empowering, and trusting highly trained technical people, removing internal conflicts and clicks, and until recently improving processes and systems. However, I must also add that a couple of the best leaders I have seen have also been in Healthcare. I have also witnessed a large utility, experiment with overstressing the workers as a catalyst to downsizing. By making them work very unreasonable hours, seven days a week in hopes to facilitate early retirements and voluntary reductions in force. This led to on-site suicides, many miserable people, and stressed families. So, what does that do to an organization?

What Happens When We Over Stress Our People?

Over stressing our people leads to long-term problems. Employee engagement is dynamically affected by the stress on the workers. Even the best organizations often have untrained managers with egos who cause negative long-term impacts. To the employee, the direct supervisor represents the culture of the company.

I created and used this graph for the past 25 years to explain the effects of stressing people at work. I originally created it for a large governmental organization during a Reduction in Force.

The bell-shaped curve on the graph above represents a normal workforce. However, in an excellent organization, the actual curve should be more skewed moving the average up. Nevertheless, the curve represents combinations of employees’ productivity, competencies, and readiness levels. The normal curve represents the distribution of employees with labels for those employees as Supper Stars, Above Average, Below Average, and (the politically incorrect title) People you have to help them tie their shoelaces.

The First to Leave 

The First to Leave when the organizational culture is highly stressed are those who have other options. Our "Superstars" are the most likely to have other options. Competitors, vendors, and clients often know of their reputations. If not challenged at work, you might recognize these people by how they succeed in other ways. They may be leaders through their church, social groups, or professional organizations. Many of the above-average workers often fit into this category as well. 

Most Likely to Hang On 

The people most likely to hang on, fall into two classes; the loyal, which is good, or the option-less. The Option-less often means they are either not motivated to or incapable of performing at the highest levels. In the past, loyalty played a bigger role in the decision to ride out stressful times. However, as downsizing and company profits over human capital became more pervasive, people become more self-absorbed, and as people become more used to an abundance of options, often the "hanger-on'ers" are those with fewer options. The below-average workers, less internally motivated, or those who are not proficient at their jobs often have fewer options. 

One possible exception to this is the youngest of the employees can find and often are looking to find different paths.

Short-term Results on Paper 

Managers who only see the metrics are often inclined to remove labor (even for the wrong reasons) to obtain some positive short-term results.

• In the short-term, the cost goes down!
• This means in the short-term profits go up!
• People often have to work harder by doing the jobs of those who left. Therefore, productivity spikes!

As our "short-term" metrics improve “on paper," the managers in charge look like heroes.

However, these are only short-term results. The snowball builds with the momentum as everything rolls downhill. Positive rewards lead these same managers to make other poor decisions to sustain positive metrics "on paper."

• They may decide not to maintain equipment nor invest in the future.
• They may take shortcuts on quality or safety and stop training programs.
• They may increase pressure and stress on the workers left behind by requiring higher outputs or longer hours.

All this saves more "short-term" money and makes the numbers look even better. However, what you do not see on paper is:

• Fear is high! People fear being next to lose their jobs and they fear for their family’s survival.
• The chemistry of high performing teams often changes as people come and go.
• As schedules slip and quality decreases, employees hear the complaints from customers and vendors.
• Stress is high as lower-skilled workers are held to the same standards that the superstars set. Often, surveys do not catch this because everyone suspects the managers will punish negative responses making the situation worse. 
• People tire and burnout.
• Accidents rise, and
• Equipment starts to breakdown.

Often before things start to fall apart, the managers who caused these problems have moved on to more prestigious positions or may have left the company with great stats on their resume. This is when you start uncovering the problems. As new replacement managers fill the voids they discover unsustainable practices. So, what do the new managers face?

Long-term, Cost is higher than before, and productivity falls! 

Often cheaper labor and less experienced people are hired to replace the above-average employees who have left. Of course, this has a major expense associated with finding the right cheaper workforce. But even the "cheaper part" may not play out the way it was planned. Historically, replacement salaries are often higher than the normal 2 or 3 percent cost of living increases we were paying. This causes more internal conflicts as newer salary standards clash with older salary standards. Furthermore, often our newer or younger workers have other plans. They may want to jump around from job to job for adventure or as a way to climb corporate ladders. They may have other loyalties to self and self-actualization.

Our new replacement managers find that even positive changes are changes! Every change brings with it a natural dip in productivity, quality, and other performance metrics. Hiring new people is no exception. It means training new people and learning curves. This process draws more time away from other work and brings with it a dip in productivity. Also, people go through a readiness cycle from incompetence to competence and timidity or insecurity to a higher level of confidence or willingness to serve.

As a consultant, I have witnessed that even with the best leadership and recruiting programs, many times we have a wide range of employee readiness and engagement. This fluctuates over time as people go in and out of seasons of encouragement, engagement, frustrations, competencies, and energies. Often this is driven by leaders but it also fluctuates with the daily trials and tribulations of life, with the normal business/product lifecycles, and with changes in technology, responsibilities, and operational programs, and today with political conflicts and power struggles. We likely will find that for a complicated change it might take a year for a new person to reach productivity expectations or even learn the systems. We can improve on this by creating systematic and repeatable (but not rigid or highly bureaucratic) processes and systems.

In the short-term, our customers may have not noticed or based on a good relationship, overlooked the lowering of productivity or quality. However, as our current employees start to burnout and as the quality of work diminishes, longtime customers notice. Customer satisfaction changes with the chemistry of the relationships. Goodwill and the demand for our services and products drop. Soon, other poor decisions are starting to break the surface:

• The lack of preventative maintenance shows up in the destruction of equipment that must be replaced.
• The lack of innovation places us behind our competitors in both our lack of capacity and our outdated core competencies. The core competencies are not just the skills of our workers but are also the processes and systems that we develop and are required to compete and even operate the newer innovations.
• The loss of the configuration management found only in the minds and collective experiences of the seasoned practitioners and professionals start to surface. All the unrecorded changes and systems' idiosyncrasies start to evade the newer workforce.
• By now, fear is high! Fear drives hate! Hate often leads to sabotage!
• Worker engagement is lowered, and loyalty dies. Relationships are sabotaged and quality has deteriorated. Therefore, both Quality and Productivity decreases.
• As more experienced people are replaced, the cost of waste raises from reworking mistakes. This takes more time away from doing the job right the first time and lowers productivity more. 

Now, even the best of the new managers look inept by the same metrics used to measure the older mismanaged operations! The playing field has tilted so that even the best managers could not compete with the metrics that mismeasured the poor long-term decisions.

A NASA STORY

One of my most fun jobs was that of an Organization Development Coordinator for NASA’s Marshal Space Flight Center in Huntsville Alabama. I would interact with every department as part of the HR training group. During one of the orientation sessions for new employees, I was able to talk with one of the Directors of Engineering during lunch before his presentation.

I showed him the First to Leave Example above that I was working on at the time. He loved it but had some observations related to NASA. We redrew the model to look like the one below.

He explained to me that the model I drew was correct. But he wondered if things changed based on the organization. He went on to explain that often in NASA the superstars stayed because of the type of work they are doing. Those people who made it to the top of the NASA community were doing fun and exciting things. Therefore, you could stop paying them and some of them would stay, just to do exciting things.

However, the bulk of the work was performed by those people in the middle who were making the rest of us look good. Then as economies changed, Reductions in Force (RIF) often targeted this group. This hurt NASA because these people were usually essential in getting work done.

The group at the bottom often were there as helpers who might have disabilities. Since NASA is a government-funded entity, we were unlikely to be able to remove them even if we wanted to.

Moral and Disclaimer

Therefore, the moral of the story is this. As in all the examples I give, these are often just examples of how the world likely works most of the time. But every organization is different and each of these organizations is driven by its leadership, institutional norms, and organizational culture. The bottom line is long-term goals are affected by the way we treat our workforce and an entire systems approach is required to understand these effects as we make decisions.