Why do organisations have values? Despite the ubiquitous organisational value statements, many organisational leaders continue to question their worth. Managing Values’ experience of working in the values area over the last 15 years is that organisational leaders reap three strategic benefits from maintaining values consistency in words and actions which are interdependent and therefore give added leverage to the possible positive benefits available. These are managerial creditability, workplace accountability and employee loyalty.
Critically these three planks can also be seen as the systemic source of efficient and effective workplace cultures. When core values are managed and maintained, they pave the way for employees to move to higher levels of operation associated with innovation because employees experience a greater sense of personal control derived from values consistency in words and actions.
Too often it is forgotten that values represent human needs; as such where they remain unmet, they become a source of distress. The core human values that employees look to have met in the workplace include respect, a sense of fairness and a sense of belonging. When these values are satisfied, employees are able to seek higher order values including a sense of contribution, creativity and competence that delivers personal pride in how goals are achieved. The inability of organisational leaders to nurture workplaces where these enabling values can be met is, perhaps, one of the systemic sources of employee underperformance.
A growing body of workplace research suggests that a failure to manage the values dimension of organisational life not only stunts organisational growth but can also push performance backwards. That seems to be the story of the UK public sector workforce which has been found to be 10% less productive today than it was a decade ago. Similar Australian research maps a deterioration in employee engagement with 33% of employees in central government saying they are disengaged compared with 46% in local government with 62% saying they are disengaged at work.
Building the business case for values management in the public sector has never been more critical, not just to offset economic pressures, but because of the knock on affects of low workplace morale. Workplace distress in turn spills into wider community life as employees’ families suffer the consequences of spousal workplace distress. A vicious cycle is created whereby the workplace itself is spawning community distress which then places even greater demands on already overstretched community support programs and available funds. In the private sector, the costs are reflected in the escalating numbers of workplace stress and bullying cases before the courts even though most cases are settled in-house away from the media glare.
The benefits of managing workplace values begin on the inside of the organisation and radiate outwards to include wider societal interests. Managerial credibility, for example, rests on employee trust. When managers fail to walk the talk and role model stated values, their people withdraw trust and cooperation. They downshift to minimum efforts to keep their jobs. 2008 and 2009 Australian research suggests that some 30% of public sector employees don’t find their manager motivating; in the private sector, 1 in every 4 employees is unhappy with how they are managed. Since most adults will spend most of their lives in workplaces, how that context shapes their sense of well being is of critical concern to the collective welfare and society’s sense of progress.
Workplace accountability and commitment are keenly sought-after workplace attributes which are in fact by-products of an employee’s sense of workplace membership. A sense of workplace inclusion remains one of the greatest unmet needs today. Increasingly for the younger generation this need has been met by social media such as Facebook but this may well have come at the expense of future workplace consistency, vitality and sustainability. Only time will tell.
Similarly, innovation emerges in workplaces that affirm their members. Where managers are experienced as unmotivating or even capricious personal accountability plummets. Focus is placed on protecting one’s back rather than task completion and both the individual and the organisation lose. One in four Australians have reported that they believe their employer is not doing enough to promote fairness at work while 80% agree they would put in extra effort if they believed their organisations were fair. The extra mile of effort traditionally associated with innovation, is very unlikely to emerge where employees remain so disengaged.
The school of positive psychology reminds us that what we focus on we get more of. Increasing numbers of compliance departments, where the focus is on telling people what they can’t do, do not bode well for the future. Instead leaders need to be telling their employees what they can do and how great they can be. Inspiration, after all, is a by-product of positive relationships between leaders and followers and, as Napoleon so famously stated, “Leaders are dealers in hope.”
Everyone wants the chance to shine; they want to sign on to leaders who will help them achieve this leaders who invest the time in values maintenance reap the benefits in terms of productivity, employee loyalty, innovation and critical stakeholder confidence. Values are enablers of organisational success and as such are just too important to be left to chance.
Dr Attracta Lagan, Principal Managing Values October 2011
As the economic juggernaut that is the Chinese economy rolls on through the old world, one of the questions asked is, where does ethics sit in this most managed-of-managed economies?
