This is a response to Sea Breeze’s blog post, as a response to Avisha.
Blog 7.1 Response to Avisha Advancing Organization by Conflict Resolution
What Sea Breeze has mentioned in her blog post is one of my pet peeves in terms of how organizational leaders do not value an employee’s time. Sea Breeze in her post mentioned:
“In public education, all of our meetings happen outside of our work day on our free time after school is out. This is one grey area that I do not feel is right. Teachers should get paid to attend meetings that go outside of our scheduled work hours” (Sea Breeze, 2018).
I realize the idea behind a manager’s or leader’s decision to arrange for work meetings could be born out of practicality and necessity rather than being mean-spirited. There are only limited hours in a workday and it is already occupied by regular tasks and responsibility. So the logical choice for the manager is to arrange meetings that are outside of those hours. In a similar example, my wife works at a medical imaging organization and they often arrange staff meetings and medical rounds during lunch hour. Staff who attend these meetings will be paid for their time as well as permitted to have their lunch during the meeting. However, then the staff members will lose their required meal-break, a time that is personal and potentially required for someone to work at a high capacity.
What managers and leaders fail to realize is these type of arrangements is a way of disvaluing staff member’s personal time. It is the organization saying, “my time is more important than yours” and so the employees must make the sacrifice in their own schedule, rather than adjusting the work schedule to accommodate work-related meetings. This will essentially negatively affect staff morale and to lead to resentment from staff and more disengagement.
On the flip side, when managers and leaders are scheduling mandatory meetings within paid work hours, it will increase staff engagement and attendance of these meetings and also reinforce the importance of participation and how the organization is making this a priority rather than normally scheduled work. In some ways, this will also be an incentive for staff members, acting as a reward system (Galbraith, 2014). What I tell my wife with regards to the practices of her organization is:
“Imagine if your company decides to close the clinic early by booking down a few patients and have your paid staff meeting during the last hour of the day. Does that not make you feel valued as an employee? Does it not say to you the company rather puts employee’s time first rather than making money?”
I believe organizations who strive to be effective companies should consider the value of time and how that could potentially affect the organization’s morale and health in the workplace. The transformational servant leader would prioritize staff member’s needs and determine how that can be aligned with organizational priorities.
References:
Galbraith, J. R. (2014). Designing organizations: Strategy, structure, and process at the business unit and enterprise levels (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Layla in her blog post shared some very insightful experiences working at State Grid, a national electric utility monopoly of China. In particular, Layla mentioned within the context of a Communism, the impact of conflict in the company and how the company deals with conflict is quite fascinating. While this type of leadership can be more efficient in terms of eliminating conflict, the nature of the communistic style of leadership is being authoritative and coercive. As Layla was eluding to, on the surface of the organization seems to be working as a highly cooperative team; however, underneath is a conflict-ridden environment where staff members seldom listened to or ideas being ignored. In the short term, conflict avoidance may be helpful in avoiding and postponing confrontation and may be able to maintain a relationship, otherwise could be hurt after the confrontation. However, in a long-term may intensify the conflict itself (Lepsinger, 2010).
Another point that Layla mentioned in her post is the very last one, where there is gender bias in the company and how some of the staff have accepted this as the “invisible policy”. Northouse (2013) describes these gender barriers as “leadership labyrinth” for women and has three factors:
The need for a vision statement will always be a “top-down” directive, but its development needs to come from the “bottom-up” (Chaneski, W. S., 2011). When the vision is created and handed down by top executives and management, it is often difficult for frontline staff to appreciate the reasons and explanations behind the corporate vision. When there is no understanding and no ownership to the process of developing the vision collectively, it leads to very little buy-in. I have also mentioned this in one of my previous blog posts as well (https://create.twu.ca/chiefanalyzerofthings/2018/10/24/strategic-renewal-in-health/):