Recent studies find that between 50 percent and 70 percent of American workers feel disengaged and disconnected in their workplaces. Why?
Betsy Myers is the founding director of Bentley University's Center for Women and Business, in Waltham, Mass. She also served as the chief operating officer for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and worked in the Clinton White House as deputy assistant to the president.
Now, she's working with Fortune 500 companies to help them become stronger and more profitable by helping them, and their workers, reverse those trends of disengagement and disconnection.
In 2011, Myers wrote Take the Lead: Motivate, Inspire, and Bring Out the Best in Yourself and Everyone Around You, a book that, as she writes on her website, seeks to answer some questions:
“Why are some places such great places to work, while others feel grueling? Why is it that one teacher is beloved by students while another is loathed and feared? What is that magical quality that brings out the best in people, and is it a secret held by a precious few or something available to us all?”
In a talk earlier this year at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Myers said that the companies that keep their employees “successful, engaged, and happy” are also the most successful.
“People don't leave a job,” Myers has said. “They leave a bad experience. It's not a great secret, but it's all about human decency and teaching managers to value their people.”
According to Myers, workers are more productive - and more likely to stay in a job - if they believe their employers value them and encourage them to work at their highest level.
On one hand, it's discouraging that the leadership principles of self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and personal authenticity have become so rare in the workplace - whether in human nature, or something perhaps not properly developed in management and leadership training - that people like Myers have to go into some of the biggest companies in America to teach managers the business value of these skills.
On the other hand, it's encouraging that more leaders have come to realize the importance of what Myers says are three of the core principles of management: that leadership is a function of self knowledge and honest self reflection; that the strength of leaders comes from their willingness to ask questions; and that leaders draw their power less from what they know, and more from how they make people around them feel.
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For those who question why employees at the Brattleboro Food Co-op voted recently to be represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, and why employees at the Brattleboro Retreat are engaged in a bitter dispute with management over safety and staffing issues, the common thread between is the feeling among the workers of both entities that management neither values nor respects them.
Those who believe the Co-op union drive was focused exclusively on pay or benefits issues miss the bigger picture. This push was totally driven by a demand for consistent dignity and respect, of which a livable wage is only one of many expressions.
The Retreat's caregivers are negotiating with management over pay and benefits, yes. But the caregivers are also seeking fair treatment generally and for management to take seriously very real concerns over patient care.
Both institutions deny the charge that they are out of touch with the needs of their respective employees, and some good, committed, conscientious people work in the management and governance of the two operations.
Yet to the outside observer, it is almost impossible to understand the degree, the magnitude, of employee anger and resentment that we hear on the streets and see in these pages without concluding that that disconnect that Betsy Myers described has been present at both businesses and has been present for a long, long time.
U.S. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has left an enduring mark on political lore with his quote, “Corporations are people, my friends.” We can interpret that phrase as an endorsement of the mind-bogglingly horrible ruling of Citizens United.
Yet, taken literally, corporations are only as good as the people who show up to work. Their value to society and to shareholders alike depend on both employees and management working hard, working well, and working together.
Both workplaces have had their share of challenges and trauma in the past few years: fiscal instability at the Retreat and the gut-wrenching tragedy of a colleague shot and killed at his desk at the Co-op, to name two immediate examples. Both workplaces have seen their context and environment change, with the chaos of construction and expansion at the Co-op and the assimilation of state patients into the Retreat's population.
Their respective employee-relations issues have become grist for the public mill because of our small-town roots and because of their size, their history, and their respective social missions.
Private corporations - for-profit or nonprofit alike - are, of course, free to do as they please within the constraints of the law. They are not accountable to the public at large, nor are they accountable to a newspaper's editorial page.
But in practice, no corporation operates in a vacuum in a small town. It is rare not to know someone whose life is or has been touched by either or both the Co-op or the Retreat.
Accordingly, the well-being of the work force becomes a concern to all of us, including those who care about those directly affected.
And one of the best hallmarks of Windham County is the myriad ways in which the people who live and work here care about others. When someone we know is hurting, we make it our business.
At both businesses, employees have recounted work environments made toxic and stressful for any number of reasons.
Some reasons are certainly reasonable and some are certainly explicable. But stressed employees are, ultimately, neither happy employees nor productive employees. That much is certain.
As the Co-op moves into the next phase of its employee relations (and that will bring even more stress and change), and the Retreat continues its tense negotiations with its union, management at both of these institutions must look at employee relations. Hard. And with a fresh eye.
They must confront with honesty and humility the systemic lapses that have had so many good and reasonable employees saying “enough.”
Maybe Betsy Myers has some solutions. Certainly other organizational philosophers have other ideas.
The Brattleboro Retreat and the Brattleboro Food Co-op are too important - to the region, to the economy, to the clientele they each serve in this small county - for that self-examination not to happen in some meaningful form.