Early one morning this week, two guys were talking loudly in the next aisle of lockers at the gym, and I couldn’t help overhearing. Here’s part of the conversation:
Matt: You still working at Mountain Lumber? (I changed the name, but it’s a large retailer.)
Jim: Oh yeah, and listen to this. I’ve been telling them I want a certain day off for two months. I go in yesterday and sure enough, when I look at the schedule, Cathy has got me working that day. I tell them I’ve been asking for that day off forever, and she says it’s too late. She says I should have told her when the schedule went up on the weekend, but I have my days off on Saturday and Sunday so how could I have known? She said that was my fault. It was my responsibility to check the schedule the day it goes up.
Matt: Huh. So what do you do?
Jim: I told them (he coughs) I might come down with the green flu that day. They can fire me if they want. That way I get 18 months of unemployment.
Matt: Or they could just make your life miserable.
Jim: (Grunts in agreement) They put me on the counter yesterday. That’s the worst. I have to be the highest paid guy ever to work the register.
Unfortunately this kind of dialogue happens thousands of times a day around the world. In our 200,000-person research study for The Carrot Principle, we found a vast majority of employees view their managers as little more than “time keepers” and “task masters.” Very few employees saw their supervisors as motivators. And very few believed their managers were understanding or sympathetic to their personal issues, and yet that issue alone has been reported as the third most important in employee work satisfaction (after recognition and communication).
In the best work places, employees call their managers “relevant” to their positive work experience. They say their managers are considerate of their goals inside and outside of work, and because of that understanding they give more discretionary effort and stay more committed.
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