Presenteeism: The Ate2D virus is everywhere
("How many unemployed people do you have on your payroll?")
The Total View Newsletter March 18, 2009
From the Desk of Ira S Wolfe
This is B. Raking News reporting from WWRN-that's Whatever Works Right Now! The station that sounds great but never gets results.
While hackers worldwide are circulating the internet and invading your computer, the AtE2D Virus is infecting your employees. Business owners and managers representing organizations of all sizes across the country are reportedly under attack from a new virulent strain of the AtE2D, commonly referred to as the Attitude Virus.
Experts in employee motivation and attitude report that this virus can be difficult to diagnose in its earliest stages. But according to Dr. Mo T. Vation, The virus is everywhere. It's contagious, and it can spread in minutes before anyone knows what has happened.
Early estimates on lost productivity and profits due to the effects of the Attitude Virus are in the billions of dollars. Dr. Mo T. Vation warns that non-performing and poor performing employees carry the virus, and innocent and misinformed managers have been identified as hosts.
The Attitude Virus, Mo T. Vation continues, infects the healthy worker and threatens the bottom line in a short time. Motivational regulatory agencies around the world recommend immediate immunization to cure Negativity in the Workplace through rapid onset retention programs.
This is B. Raking News reporting from News Central.
The Attitude Virus seems to be everywhere. We know that there are lots of layoffs, morale is down, and productivity is suffering. We see the symptoms every day as rudeness, poor service, lack of motivation, and increased job stress. Managers feel the pain of the long-term effects of the Attitude Virus with employee turnover, lost productivity, customer complaints, increased worker and consumer liability, and a drain on profits. But the greatest damage the virus has is that it leaves the workplace vulnerable to other attacks and opens the back door for healthy workers to escape.
Employees, managers, and owners with bad attitudes seem to spend the better part of each day figuring out ways to avoid work, complaining about the work they have, or redoing work. These behaviors have recently been reported in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine as a workplace condition called presenteeism-showing up for work but not being very productive. It's like absenteeism ... but worse. With presenteeism, employees are still showing up and still receiving a full paycheck. But they likely are disrupting and demoralizing the other workers and not doing the jobs they are being paid to do. The cost of this presenteeism in the U.S. alone is in the hundreds of billions of dollars and results in over 2.5 billion lost workdays per year. The effect of presenteeism is like having unemployed people on your payroll?
Who are these workers infected by this Attitude Virus? Depending upon the strain of the virus, these workers show up as any of these culprits.
- Perfectionist, the worker or supervisor who can never be pleased
- Resister, the employee who puts all his or her efforts into resisting any improvement or change
- Not-My-Jobber, who refuses to do any task, no matter how simple
- Rumor-Monger, who delights in spreading baseless, negative rumors
- Uncommitted, whose indifferences place additional workloads on the other employees
- Pessimist, who sees doom everywhere and works very hard at making everyone around feel down and gloomy
The burden to fight off this threat is falling upon the shoulders of supervisors and managers. Unfortunately much of the perfectionism, resistance, rumors, lack of commitment, and pessimism comes from these very same supervisors and managers.
What can an organization do to immunize the workplace and end bad attitudes?
- Diagnosis. Recognize that there is an attitude problem. This requires an honest assessment of the organization from the top down and collaterally including vendors, suppliers, and customers. Acknowledge any underlying causes of the Attitude Virus and take responsibility for removing them. Determine the capability of your supervisors and managers to manage and inspire. Arm them with the tools and training they need to detect and treat the infected worker or new hire before they leech out the morale and motivation from the healthy workers.
- Therapy. Take responsibility for upgrading the skills of your first line of defense, the front-line supervisors and managers who fight the "infection" and "exposures" on a daily basis. Develop and train supervisors to have the skills to "treat" or quarantine the infected workers and coach them back to health. The virus is mutating almost daily, and continuous learning is crucial.
- Monitor, monitor, monitor. Taking a weight loss class and not changing your eating habits but still expecting the pounds to drop off is ludicrous. Taking skills training without reinforcement and feedback and re- assessing is equally bad. Identify the skills that differentiate your highly effective managers from the average performers, develop training that is specific and responsive to those specific skills, and provide ongoing feedback and post-assessment to monitor progress and ensure protection.