Employer Columnist

Turning workplace negativity into power

STOMP! SQUISH! BANG! BANG! BANG!

That is the sound of me stomping, squishing and banging away something called workplace negativity. Just thinking about workplace negativity makes my face curl up with wrinkle forming disgust. I suspect that it may be the same for many people. Most of us in our careers would have faced the sourness of an individual or the poison of a bunch of negative people who insist on flocking around each other. The appearance and presence of negativity in the workplace affects overall performance and when it is not tackled properly, can cover your entire office with lalang 6 feet tall, obscuring all view and making people hang out around water coolers more.

But it’s there, it has always been there. In many offices, negativity is the prevalent culture. Turning it around has always been a huge challenge. It is the topic of much training that deal with human relations, communications and leadership. Perhaps you might have a boss that chomps cigars, blowing his smoke all around the place, unwilling to notice the air of negativity that is choking everyone that works in your office. Perhaps you have a bunch of drama queens that meet up every tea and meal break to talk about everyone else’s imperfections. Perhaps you have the scowling engineer sitting next to the toilet (and he’s been there for 7 years) who thinks that hope is for silly people and that happiness is an alien concept and that the economy is bad, bad, bad. If you feel overwhelmed by the challenge, that’s normal and I understand, but for now let’s see how to use the best of the situation and turn workplace negativity into power.

Have you ever driven on the highway at night and come across hazard lights in the distance. As you get closer you realize that another car is parked at the side of the road with a problem. If you notice workplace negativity in your office, then you know that someone, or a group of your employees are parked somewhere off the highway with their hazard lights on. They are asking for assistance, they just don’t know how to ask for it and hey for sure have no idea how to fix their car. If you can see workplace negativity, you are lucky, that means you are now able to take action to assist in fixing the vehicle that is now stuck at the side of the highway.

Now that you can see that there are people within your organization that are asking for assistance, get good at building trust with them. The only thing you want to do now is to establish exactly where they are now in terms of happiness in the workplace and where they want to be and selling them on taking action. It is not unlike doing sales. Here’s a simple process. Find out their: -

As is:  Where they are now? What is their current happiness ‘o’ meter?

Should be:  Where they want to be? How they want to feel? What they want to achieve?

Barriers: What’s stopping them? What are they waiting for?

Payout: If they take action to get from ‘as is’ to ‘should be’ what would they get?

If they are unhappy at their workplace, there is always a cause and there is always a solution. Once you find this out, you can finally take action and stamp out negativity in this part of your workforce.

Another way to stamp out negativity and use it for positive powerful purposes is to have negative folks work together with groups of positive people. They will be of great service because positive optimists rarely see the downside or the dark details of the project they are working on, where as a negative person will see it clear as crystal and warn their team mates, hence averting disaster and produce a positive outcome. As long as you don’t allow groups of negative people to cluster in an organization, they become the key to successful projects. Always make sure that a project group has more positive people inside then negative ones.

And finally, Macaws (a kind of parrot) in the wild eat clay to neutralize the poisonous fruits that they eat. Always feed them clay in the form of positive encouragements so they don’t fall victim to the poisonous fruits that they are exposed to every day. Little by little, you should see a positive difference.

Here a title that I feel will be a valuable read: -

• Stop Self Sabotage – Pat Pearson

Written by Edmond Yap Education Republic www.edurepublic.com

Edmond is a qualified civil engineer who has been working in the engineering field for 5 years.  Switching career in motivational speaking and training, he was the performance consultant at the Malaysian chapter of Dale Carnegie Training. His love of motivating and inspiring people prompted him to starting up Education Republic with a few others. 

He can be reached at edmond@edurepublic.com