Removing the Gas in the Workplace

Some relationships are naturally adversarial. Cops and robbers. Cats and dogs. Banks and customers. Bosses and workers. A phenomenal amount of time and money is spent on boss bashing, fueling an entire industry. You may have thought the dot-com rush was big, but the goofy boss product rush is just as big and has more staying power. Open the comics section of the newspaper, turn on prime-time TV, or surf the net and you’ll find boss bashing everywhere you look.

On the other side of the desk, bosses spend just as much management time and money on seminars, publications, training, and consultants designed to motivate and shape up their employees. No one actually asks whether the employees need to be shaped up. It’s just taken for granted.

Yes, it’s clear that bosses and workers are truly unmixable substances, just like oil and water. Right?

A few years ago a scientist in Australia, Ric Pashley, found a way to not only get oil and water to mix, but to mix spontaneously and even stay that way indefinitely. The trick? He first removes any gas that is dissolved in the water.

Bear with me for a moment, and let’s see if we can find any gas in the workplace. Let’s say the gas, or hot air, in the workplace is this: If you’re a worker, you have a tendency to believe that bosses are there to interfere with your ability to get your work done. If you’re a boss, you have a tendency to believe that the workers are at work to get away with doing as little as possible for their paycheck.

But if you ask people individually to tell you why they are there, you’ll never (alright, almost never) get those same answers.

Everyone that goes to work does so initially to make money, because we have to have money to survive. But what motivates people to actually do their work is often very different. In fact, if you boil down the results of hundreds of studies and surveys on what motivates employees, you find the same results for everyone, no matter whether they are a boss or a worker. And the fundamental thing that motivates people to keep coming in to the workplace and making an effort is that they want for the way they spend their days to matter.

People want their days, their time, their life, to matter.

Once you know this, no matter what your position is in the workplace, you can begin to remove the gas. If you’re a worker and you know that your boss wants his or her work to matter, and you know that the boss is judged in part on work that you actually do, you can begin to see why your boss may be over controlling.

If you’re a boss and your workers seem to resent your instructions, you might begin to see why those workers might feel like their own work doesn’t matter if they are never allowed to do it without someone looking over their shoulder every step of the way.

Removing the gas might let us stop spending so much time trying not to mix, which might lead us to a truly productive workplace. A workplace where all of our work matters.