The CEO of a large infrastructure company says a diminishing order book remains his biggest problem, but he is equally worried about the long faces in the scores of cubicles outside his corner office. “The office may be brightly lit, but the environment is like a dark rain cloud,” he says.
His counterpart in a fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company shares the feeling. Though his business is doing well, he cannot figure out why so many people whine endlessly about how hard life is or grumble about the amount of work they are juggling.
Psychologists have a more clinical description for this – negativity in the workplace – and it has little to do with how well or how badly your company is performing. Though occasional griping is a natural part of our lives and stressful economic times do make for stressed-out employees, the fact is the negativity virus is spreading fast in many organisations. And the overall slowdown has only helped the virus to prosper.
The signals are all around you. Senior executives of many companies say the number of colleagues with sour expressions or passing snide comments for every organisational initiative or objecting to every idea is suddenly showing a sharp increase.
Here are some tell-tale signs of negativity in the office: every idea is met with a reason why it won’t work; sarcasm is seen as an acceptable response to business communication; the flow of new ideas has slowed or stopped; and people present problems without solutions.
The problem becomes acute when a change initiative is taken. Although CEOs may be optimistic and energised about the change, employees remain confused, anxious and fearful about the potential personal impact and risks. As the senior team enthusiastically tries to move forward, employees continue to drag their heels. The usual first reaction of CEOs, who are eager to forge ahead, is that they get impatient with employees questioning the vision.
At the root of the problem is this: most CEOs still consider informing employees and dealing with their concerns a soft and fuzzy exercise that can be tackled by HR managers, who, incidentally, are always the last to know.
The HR departments have to act fast to stop such workplace negativity in its tracks. After all, working in an office weighed down by negativity is perhaps more common than they think.
HR experts say if one is to avoid polarisation – with a handful of members of a change management team dictating strategy and the remainder of the company viewing the moves with suspicion – what is required is communication that could help create the critical mass required to make change efforts successful. CEOs may feel they are too busy to communicate, but the resulting aloofness can breed suspicion and distrust. Some CEOs operate on a need-to-know basis, which means they will only inform selectively. This can often backfire since nobody feels empowered enough.
Some CEOs publicly humiliate people who make mistakes. A better way would be to offer constructive criticism in one-on-one meetings. This, experts say, is one of the biggest sources of negativity in office. This is because even those who are spared such criticism would feel vulnerable to such humiliation some other day. Worse, even well-meaning people start sympathising with the habitual groaners, agree and join their crusades.
So the right question to ask is: how can I turn around the negativity that pervades my team? In a brilliant piece on the Harvard Business Review blog network (blogs. hbr.org/bergman), Peter Bergman has suggested a three-step process for effectively turning around negative people:
Step 1: Understand how they feel and validate it.
This might be hard because it could feel like you’re reinforcing their negative feelings. But you’re not. You’re not agreeing with them or justifying their negativity; you’re simply showing them that you understand how they feel.
Step 2: Find a place to agree with them.
You don’t have to agree with everything they’ve said. But if you can, agree with some of what they’re feeling. If you share some of their frustrations, let them know which.
Step 3: Find out what they are positive about and reinforce it.
This doesn’t mean trying to convince them to be positive. It means giving attention to whatever positive feelings they do show — and chances are they will have shown some because it’s unusual to find people who are purely negative. If they are purely negative, then make sure they see you supporting others who have shown positivity. Basically, you are transforming the downward spiral into an upward one.
The point, however, is that Bergman’s three steps are not easy to follow because CEOs have to fight their own highly emotional – and even reasonable – tendency to be negative about people who are complaining.
So CEOs should ask whether they themselves are part of the problem. The first thing to do when faced with a problem is to examine their role in it. Once this is done, it may be as simple as just tweaking their attitude or taking a more positive view.
