Thought you left drama behind in high school? Think again: It might’ve followed you into the workplace.
In her book No Ego, Cy Wakeman, an author and leadership consultant, describes how workplace drama can not only diminish employees’ happiness, but also tank their productivity. In an era some have dubbed the “Great Gloom,” where employees are the unhappiest they’ve been in recent years, according to research from BambooHR, her 2017 book takes on new relevance.
Wakeman told HR Brew what insights HR leaders can glean from her book.
In your book, you write that employees spend roughly two and a half hours per day engaged in workplace drama. Can you tell me more about this?
Drama was considered just a cost of doing business. If people were gathered, there’s going to be jealousy, gossip, collusion, or energy-resisting change, all the sources of drama. What I was able to do [in my book] is define drama as waste, an emotional waste, or any energy that goes away from results or well-being, which are the two things, in HR, that we’re very concerned about.
I was able to quantify it. Even our best performers spend two and a half hours per day needlessly feeling put upon, miserable, or suffering. For a business or organization to say, “We could have two and a half hours per day per headcount where people could be happier [and] produce better results” was a big discovery. Secondly, how do we address that?…If we modernize what we do in our development, our training, and our leadership thought processes, we can help employees and leaders simply adopt better mental processes. Then [employees are] happier, and we have better results, and a lot less drama.
How do you think workplace drama has changed in recent years, in a more hybrid work world?
My expectation was, since we’re giving people more flexibility and more direction over their work…[maybe] drama goes down. But, I would tell you, it is a static number. It has hardly changed. Why? Because wherever we go, we take ourselves with us...My location or my work situation, we don’t believe [it] impacts drama. Now, they saw some other issues, absolutely, but I may not be venting about a coworkers’ lunch that smells crazy, but I am venting about my neighbor that lets their dog bark all the time.
Quick-to-read HR news & insights
From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.
The mind and the ego will find something to focus on to be disgruntled, unless we are working otherwise for our own evolution. What HR did a long time ago was separate personal and professional development thinking that we could address personal development, like regulating our nervous systems and showing up at work. We even said: “Bring your whole self to work.” I often say, don’t do that: Bring your most evolved self to work.
How can HR leaders help employees think more positively?
“Edit your story” has been around in psychology a long time, but basically, one tool we recommend or a specific technique is you write down your story uncensored, just as if you were having a beer with friends and you are venting. Then, you go back, and you look at every sentence, and you take out anything that isn’t factual. Anything that assigns motive, anything that has judgment, anything that you can’t possibly know to be true, [or] anything you’re assuming. What you’ll find, in just that cleanup, when you apply and edit your story, is that you don’t have a problem to solve.
Let me give you a quick example. I had someone come to me and did this exercise. He was very disgruntled and upset. He’s like, “My boss called me in, he’s micromanaging, and he’s trying to set me up in front of my colleagues to not know what I’m doing. He called and checked on a project, turns out that it’s behind, and he’s trying to cancel the project. If he cancels it, I’m going to get fired.”
We [went through] all of that, and we took out all of the things I described, and all his problem was that his boss called and checked status on a project, which is well within the boss’ right…So much at work of what we start to solve as the problem, we can actually dissolve, and then what we’re working on is a real business issue that we usually know how to solve. It takes, like, so much stress out of it.