The Power of Emotions at Work by Karla McLaren

Author:Karla McLaren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sounds True
Published: 2021-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

PART 2

Building Your Unique Healthy Workplace

5

Creating Communication Workflows for Everyday Emotional Issues

I have yet to find a workplace — in more than 40 years of searching — where there are defined and accessible processes to help workers deal with everyday social difficulties. I’m not talking about big problems such as workplace injuries, workplace bullying, or sexual harassment — there are formal HR processes for those situations, plus labor laws, labor commissions, and each country’s version of OSHA. What I’m talking about are very simple communication difficulties that may occur several times each day.

I always ask, “Do your workers have a process for requesting attention from a busy person or asking someone to take over a task for them?” And I am met with blank stares. “What about asking a sensitive question without offending someone? Asking for help? Admitting that they made a mistake?” More blank stares. Crickets even.

When workers aren’t provided with reliable ways to communicate about everyday interpersonal situations, they must cobble together methods from their private lives, from their schoolyard training, from previous jobs, or from thin air. This is an absurd waste of everyone’s time, and it impedes workplace efficiency and emotional regulation from the word go. When workers don’t even know how to ask each other questions or communicate their concerns, they’ll trip over each other and create mini conflicts throughout each day — usually without meaning to. They’ll also have to ramp up their unpaid empathy work and become Peacemakers just to navigate through unspoken issues, unmet needs, mistaken assumptions, and difficult relationships — and they won’t be able to speak openly about any of it. Belonging and relatedness will suffer, multiple repair stations and gossip networks will have to arise just to keep everything (sort of) functional, and the workplace will be uncomfortable, inefficient, and wildly more likely to create the conditions that lead to employee silence about serious workplace problems.

When people don’t have the tools they need to deal with simple, everyday communication issues, they won’t develop a sense of interpersonal competence, and they’ll often be too preoccupied or drained to deal with larger issues. Poor or nonexistent communication processes leave people unsupported and create unnecessary conflict throughout the workplace. This is an unsafe situation for everyone, but luckily, the solution is simple: Help workers develop effective skills for everyday difficulties, and they’ll have the energy, support, competence, sense of belonging, and skills they need to communicate effectively when critical problems occur. We’ll explore those skills in this chapter.

Another requirement in any communal environment is that people need to have access to privacy, relatedness, and comfort — physically as well as emotionally. These spaces help us rest and regulate ourselves so that we can work more effectively, but sadly, this is yet another place where the workplace fails us and creates unnecessary and unprofitable conflict and discomfort.

Healthy and emotionally well-regulated organizations should provide dedicated, welcoming, and communally agreed upon break areas; ways to find quiet and privacy; methods to share crucial emotional and

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