What are your thoughts on office drama?

Is it inevitable?

Is it preventable?

Do you enjoy hearing the latest gossip?

Are you actively fanning the flames?

Whether you have put much thought into it or not, office drama is costly. A study in 2008 discovered that employees in the United States spent 2.8 hours per week dealing with conflict which CPP estimated as costing over $359 billion in paid hours or the equivalent of 385 million working days.

Are you still a fan (or bystander) of drama in your office?

• Will you continue to approach it with the same perspective and effort that you previously held?
• Are you willing to allow those productivity losses to continue to leak, flow or flood out of your organization?   

What is that costing you if each of your employees is spending 2.8 hours or 7 % of their 40 hour work week on office drama? Our organization is a boat. We want our team members rowing together. We want to move water with our oars not be taking water into our boat. 

The calculation above doesn’t even account for the collateral damage related to the fallout from office drama. What would you gain as an organization if every employee in your office could increase engagement and efficiency by 7%?

When we don’t address the leaks, we expend energy plugging holes rather than rowing. In service based industries such as property restoration, organizations are struggling to attract, develop and retain good people. We respond to floods that cause water damage to homes and businesses but we should not be allowing floods of dysfunction to needlessly drain our team’s energy.

Drama that goes unaddressed by leaders leads to water flowing into the boat and resources flowing out of the organization.

We need to intentionally develop:

• Our hiring process to bring the right people into our boat
• Our employee development process to clarify and build our rowing culture
• Our internal alignment of vision, values and habits to keep us moving rather than sinking 

Turnover is a symptom of a leaking culture.

Are you frustrated by high turnover?

You feel the burden of having to continually recruit and train new employees. Beyond that pain there are hard costs for your organization as well as the demoralizing toll of strolling through the graveyard of co-workers past. Poor hiring habits and turnover are energy drains.

The cycle of hiring, training and losing employees is costly.

If you want to stop taking on water start by developing clarity on vision and values. Apply this clarity to the hiring process. Don’t waste your time recruiting people that have skills but are not good value or cultural fits.

​While you cannot control everything your team members do once they are in the organization, you can control who you allow on the team. Start respecting the process.

The Blueprint of Success hinges on your ability to intentionally develop your people and your process. You need your people in order have a team and you need a team in order to pursue your vision. When drama starts to leak through the organization, it is important to catch it early before it becomes a flow.

​We tell ourselves that we don’t have time to invest in development but somehow we have time to continually plug the holes, pump water from the boat and chase drama around the office. Start the process of facing the facts and making some progress in your process. Nothing is more important to progress than rowing together.  

Many organizations are struggling to attract, develop and retain good people. People in a position of leadership are asking themselves and their circle of peers what can be done to gain on these issues. Businesses know that they need people in order to provide their products or services. Even though people are a necessary component to any successful team, managers often struggle to solve the people issues of their day. 

If you fish, you know the value of having the right bait. The more you know about who you are fishing for, where you will be fishing and what the condition are, the more successful you will be. Fishing teaches you that you must be patient. Do some research, ask local fishermen, adjust to the conditions and trust the process.  

Are you frustrated by high turnover? You feel the burden of having to continually recruit and train new employees. Beyond that pain there are hard costs for your organization as well as the demoralizing toll of strolling through the graveyard of co-workers past. Are you clear on your vision and values? If you can communicate those core components, have you analyzed whether your hiring process is in alignment with your vision and values? Too often organizations recruit people that have skills but are not good value or cultural fits. 

Whether you have a good team or you are committed to building one, who you let in the door is a critical decision. A bad hire costs more than a good one and the ripple effects can set your momentum back for an extended period of time. Conversely, as Gino Wickman points out in his book Traction, "If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time." Does this inspire you? Isn't that what good leaders want - a team with members who are rowing together and dominating? That process starts with an organization clear on their vision and values. 

In his latest article covering change management, author and coach Lex Sisney shares the Stop-Start-Ideal methodology of communication. While he shares this as a means to better communicate with team members who need to adjust their actions, it also serves as a metric for adjusting our own thinking. If you find yourself doing things that are not getting the result that you want, it's time to stop doing the things that are setting you back. Get some clarity on your ideals. Start acting in alignment with your vision and values. Learn to fish with bait that attracts the type of fish you want in the boat. 

If you have found something to be true from your professional experiences and then find a respected publication that echoes those concepts, is this still confirmation bias?

The reason many industries fail to innovate or self-disrupt before it's too late is that they only look for industry insiders to add to their organizations. We want the books of business and the low hanging fruit of a professional who is ready to hit the streets from day one. Many leaders know from painful experience, hiring carry overs from a competitor carry their own challenges and/or baggage. Hiring from a short list within an industry bubble does not create a lot of room for introduction of new ideas, perspectives and strengths.

While I strongly believe that an organization should promote from within they also should be looking to extend their pursuit of quality individuals beyond the industry bubble. A company that spends all those resources to build a culture and a team that rallies around core values are too valuable to thin or disband through the lack of local progressive opportunities for people who have earned such through building the team. This commitment to internal growth does not mean that an organization should only build itself from those who are already versed in the field of operation.

I am glad to hear a respected publication promoting this idea of recruiting candidates who either have no direct experience or who may be a bit of a gamble as they are not industry versed prior to joining your team. Author and CEO/Founder, Liz Ryan shares this challenge and insight, "When you hire someone who lacks industry experience, it challenges you as a manager. You get to see your new hire encountering your world, and that is an instructive thing to experience. You have to train your newcomer differently. You have to ask and answer questions you may not have considered for years — or ever."

Too often we come to a point in our career where we are confident, if not comfortable, with what we know and we begin to first assume that everyone should know what we know (we got our elbows deep in the mud earning our experiences) and secondly that we forget to re-invest those nuggets of wisdom into our teams. We forget that it took many years for us to get where we are and we want immediate results from those who are working on our teams, we lose a bit of our patience when we lose our connection to the ground floor. 

We want a mix of backgrounds, perspectives, ideas and strengths on our teams so that we will continue to challenge each other to be the best that we can be every day. Business is sport, its a competition against our opponents as much as it is against ourselves to not settle in the victories already won. Unfortunately, in the current climate you are either growing or you are dying, there are no other options.

So what do we do? Do we just hire the next ugly duckling that comes along and turn them into the star quarterback? That's not the concept as this should not be about bolstering our already inflated egos but rather a means to challenge and build our organization by infusing it with new perspectives, strengths and potential.

In our experience we believe the criterion has been fairly simple, is the candidate 1) honest, 2) hard working and 3) willing to learn? If they can bring these three character traits, items that we cannot give them, then we can train them to have the opportunity to be successful in our industry. Anymore we are looking for relevant as opposed to direct experience. Someone may not have the technical skills in our industry but if they have the work ethic, relational strengths, a track record of team building, or other strong qualities that will help our team, we want to bring them in. "You will shake up your own thinking," states Liz Ryan, "When you hire outside your industry -- and that may be the best gift of all!"


Resources: 
Liz Ryan - https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2017/09/24/five-reasons-to-hire-someone-with-no-industry-experience/#720b80656de3

More from izvents - Attracting Talent, What To Look For and Hiring, Three Character Keys.