Why Respect is a key ingredient for your Organisation and not just a Buzzword

Disclaimer: “The views stated here are my own, not those of my company.”

John has been a loyal employee for a couple of years at ACME Inc. He knows there is a rough culture there: indeed it is a competitive environment! Since day 1 he has seen people attacking each other, so he just assumed that in Companies it necessarily works this way. However, after a couple of years of aggressively imposing himself over their peers and always achieving his targets, he starts to lose motivation. Monday becomes the worst day of the week, and he can't wait for Friday to begin. He can't understand what is going on: he likes the job, he likes his clients. One day he is unable to get up from bed, and eventually he calls for a month sick.

Did this ring a bell? Probably you have heard stories like this every day. We hear a lot about respect nowadays. People tell us it is important and that it is a key ingredient for a high performing team. It is also at the basis of our Society. Is it true?

The True Value of Respect

Chron.com cites some interesting studies. People were asked in a survey about how they felt after receiving disrespectful behavior:

• 78% said their commitment to the organization had declined.
• 66% said their job performance suffered.
• 47% said they intentionally spent less time at work.
• 38% said they deliberately decreased the quality of their work.

How can you quantify respect?

Let's do a bit of math here. Imagine you have a team of 50 people, each one working 40 hours a week maximum:

• The team combined produce 2000 units of output per week
• In the team there is no respect culture and guidelines. Peers do not show respect between each other and management call names and yells to people whenever something goes wrong. Think about the "Glengarry Glenn Ross" play. Because of this, over time people are "mysteriously" calling on sick very often, and the manager notices some of your people being very disengaged when in 1:1. As a result, the manager further yells at these people and threatens to end the working relationship.
• Managers start to quantify a lost productivity impact. People would normally produce 2000 units per week, but you have a % of lost productivity due to sick leave, disengagement and underperformance.
• This lost productivity is accepted as normal. Not respecting people is so ingrained within the culture that the Senior Leadership assumes that people are "inherently lazy". They constantly bash people as a consequence, and this makes things even worse.

What a Wise Manager would do?

We used to think in traditional economics as simple input and output sometimes in quantitative terms. You add more HCs, you increase the total output produced. It seems fair according to our Microeconomics book. But what if you might save costs, just because you decide to build a culture around respect? And how does it work in the first place such a concept? There are a few myths around respect, which needs to be addressed in order to build a proper Team culture:

• Respecting a person based on title and/or achievements. You don't have to respect people because they are colleagues, managers or Directors but just because they are, well, people like you!
• Respect must be earned. It is not. Respect is a right and it is also recognized in legal systems as such. Because of this it can even imply a legal risk when it becomes abused.
• There are instances where not being respectful is justified. This is simple, I had this reaction BECAUSE and then some justifications follow. Common justifications are: "I did not show him/her respect because of he/she..."

1) ...didn't do what I told them to do, and i "expected" the person
to do that
2) ...made me do that. Usually I won't react like that
3) ...made a mistake, and I told the person so many time
not to do that mistake
4) ...didn't comply with the assignment. As Leader I can call this out
5) ...I felt unfairly treated

Think about a Wise Leader. Would this person really thinks that you can be allowed not to show respect because of these conditions? Or are they just excuses to justify an unjustifiable behavior?

How to build a respect based culture?

The first step to build an effective respect culture is to recognize that respect is unconditional. Full stop. No exceptions allowed. Once you recognize this, you can still steer your boat. Now you have two choices: 1) Invest additional resources in HCs to counterbalance sporadic sick leaves, disengagement, and people turnover. Invest a % of said resources in learning resources to slowly changing team norms, then truly leave the principles and lead by example. then reinvest the remaining % in other value-added activities. Or just save the remaining amount of resources in your Cost department

We can choose the latter over the former by building a culture of respect:

1. Define clear written norms and guidelines for respect at Peer and Management level Alike
2. Define anonymous channels through people can report respectful behavior while guaranteeing a "no retaliation" policy for escalating cases to the management
3. Build an internal team to investigate cases submitted
4. Define clear and fair procedures by which the investigation will be carried out
5. Make sure you are the right people! People that, besides experience and technical abilities, they really value people.
6. Promote a culture based on frequent interactions and Coaching sessions with your employees
7. Give trust and freedom to your employees as much as possible

What are the benefits of creating this culture?

• Higher employee engagement and morale
• Higher productivity
• Higher Team output based on a better synergies
• Lower turnover rate (remember! People leave people, not companies.)
• Lower sick leave logged
• Increase in hours worked
• Possibly, increased productivity per hour
• Lower cost due to less hiring expenses

Do you still think respect is a buzzword?