Labour matters, Davies Ndumiso Sibanda

MANY chief executive officers unknowingly run angry organisations that are characterised by low morale, fear and low productivity as they drive a conflict rather than a teamwork culture.

The saying that a fish starts rotting at the head is very true in business, for example, a board chairman or CEO who calls employees thieves, liars, lazy and dishonest people who have to be disciplined or dismissed is not fit to set the tone for productivity improvement. 

Many boards of directors in their selection of the executive team ignore an important area of skills evaluation, they do not check the labour relations skills of potential senior managers as a result the organization ends up with a team of technocrats with no idea of how to manage people to achieve results. The situation gets worse where the human resources executive has a lower grade than other executives or the HR executive has no spine to stand his ground against the rest of the management team. In most cases the CEO will gang up with other executives against the HR executive calling him “a glorified workers committee chairperson” and at the same time ignoring his or her sound advice.

Conduct as described above creates an angry organization, an organisation that is characterised by fear and low morale and employees adopt a culture of doing the minimum of their jobs and minimise the risk of doing mistakes. 

Middle managerial employees seek refuge amongst the non-managerial employees and in the process speak ill of the managerial employees, leak privileged confidential information to non-managerial employees as a means to gain acceptance and a measure of “security”. This is evidence of an angry organization where productivity levels are low.

I recall managerial employees in one organisation who were giving the non-managerial workers committee works council bargaining ammunition and begging the workers to push for more money so that they could also benefit. I also recall a case of documents disappearing from both individual hard copy files and electronically when there was a disciplinary case pending for one employee and as such, the employee could not be disciplined. The workers committee was boasting that nobody was going to be dismissed because they had the support of managers in disciplinary cases. Even the conduct of disciplinary hearings by middle managers were such that on appeal in most cases a dismissed employee will be reinstated. All these point to an angry organisation.

Successful organisations engage in employee relations surveys, which then form the foundation of the organisation’s labour relations strategy. In a number of cases, labour relations survey results will shock boards of directors and executives who thought they were running a progressing productivity focused organization yet they were running an angry monster.

The labour relations strategy should include executives team training on labour relations, people management, labour law and driving productivity improvement. They should acquire skills that allow them to thread a productivity focused labour relations culture down to the lowest employee, further, the HR team must be adequately tooled and have the skills mix that are required of human capital internal consultants and above all, the organisation has to respect advice and direction given by human capital experts. In conclusion, running an angry organization or leading a productivity focused team is a choice of the executive management team but it must be borne in mind that an angry organization does not go forward.

λ Davies Ndumiso Sibanda can be contacted on: email: [email protected]