Summary

This episode of the Gnaw On This...Business Bytes podcast discusses the importance of addressing employee unhappiness in the workplace. The hosts emphasize that a company's brand is only as valuable as its unhappiest employee on their worst day. They highlight the need for organizations to understand the reasons behind employee unhappiness and to actively address these issues. The conversation explores the difference between a leader and a manager, emphasizing the importance of empathy and effective communication. The hosts also discuss the impact of leadership on employee happiness and the need to address systematic problems within organizations. They stress the importance of creating a safe zone for debriefing and building an aspirational culture. The episode concludes with a call to practice effective communication and empower employees to care about the organization's mission and values.

Takeaways

• A company's brand is only as valuable as its unhappiest employee on their worst day.
• Understanding the reasons behind employee unhappiness is crucial for addressing the root cause.
• Effective leadership involves empathy, effective communication, and addressing systematic problems.
• Creating a safe zone for debriefing and building an aspirational culture can empower employees and improve overall happiness.

#workculture #employeeengagement #happyculture #workplacewellness #jobhappiness #positivevibes #companyculture #motivatedemployees #worklifebalance #joblove #teamwork #gratefulworker #workjoy #appreciatedemployee #positiveworkenvironment #happyatwork #workplacepositivity #workplacehappiness #productiveemployees #positiveworkculture

If there's one thing we've learned about business and life is that people are the X factor. They constantly surprise us both in amazing ways and not so much. We're Ben and Sia and welcome to the Nod On This Business Bites podcast. This show is all about real life things we all deal with every day, how they relate to business and how to make some sense out of our daily chaos. Welcome to the show.

And welcome back to another episode of non this business bites. I'm Ben, this is Zia. And I'm going to let you in on one of my favorite sayings. Your brand is only as valuable as your unhappiest employee on their worst day. Let's say that again. Your brand is only as valuable as your worst employee, as your unhappiest employee on their worst day. It is amazing.

to me how few organizations understand.

They have unhappy employees for whatever reason, disgruntled, disadvantaged, underpaid, overworked, miscommunicated to, you know, disempowered. There's a million different reasons why people are unhappy in the workplace. They get ignored. They get put in a corner. Just don't talk to them. Let them be. And these people get angrier.

and angrier and they get more and more frustrated and they get frustrated with employees, with vendors, with customers, with senior management and everybody just walks on eggshells around them instead of saying, hey, what's wrong? I mean, the difference between a leader and a manager is this and this comes from Simon Sinek and this starts with why.

The manager sees somebody come to work late five days in a row and goes up to the person and says, hey, listen, you've been late five days in a row. You're late tomorrow. I got to write you up. A leader comes up to the person and says, hey, listen, you've been late five days in a row. Is everything OK?

We need to stop ignoring these people. We need to understand that they're human beings just like us. They're gonna have good days, they're gonna have bad days. And if we ignore them and we allow the situation to perpetuate itself, if we don't sit there and figure out what's wrong and help fix it, it hurts our brand. It hurts us as an organization. It sends good employees working elsewhere.

It sends good customers to looking for somewhere else to buy from. And it doesn't make sense in any way, shape or form. See ya. Let's know on this.

Do do do do do man. I you know, I feel like every time we talk about these types of topics, you know, we've all every single one of us that's watching listening now and for the end of dawn of time, we're all we're always going to have disgruntledness, disenfranchisement in some capacity. And there's two parts to it. Okay. One, it's you that needs to react.

to your surroundings and how you react to it and make lemonade out of lemons, you know, because life will always have lemons, which by the way are still grapefruit in its own right. But I do believe leadership, management, corporate, whatever you want to call it, either you work for a small business, your own business and or large corporation, you do have to take into consideration as to ask like you say.

Why is this happening? Is it just one person? So maybe they've got something personal going on. If it's a whole swath of team, like, I mean, I remember working at a smaller company, it was still global, but smaller. And, uh, you know, the CEO had the audacity to, and I will say this story up and down. There were cost cutting measures. He was basically announcing that he was going to be riffing a lot of people. And in his wonderful speech,

of ever basically finding out, oh, wow, a 10th of us are gleaving unwillingly. He pulls out a receipt and he goes, I went to the supermarket and I bought diet Dr. Pepper on sale because I'm saving cost measures, whatever. And it was just so horribly miss cast miss don't not reading the room. And then.

He went on to defend that he stayed at a Four Seasons hotel in Europe when he went out there because, oh yeah, it just, I can't remember what his justification was. All I heard was, and for those upset that I stayed at a Four Seasons in Paris or whatever, I'm just like lost, done. It starts at the top.

If you cannot empathize as to maybe perhaps the entire team is struggling for whatever reason, it's you. The problem is you. So I've been wanting to share that story for the longest time because there's so much of my friends that are listening. They're like, that guy, that guy. They know exactly who that guy is. Oh, and I'm, and I am positive that guy has no clue that he was the most hated person in the universe at that moment in time. So all the, even the people that are happy to be at that company were like,

what the hell just happened. Like it was bad. So again, what you're talking about on the worst day, worst, you know, angriest, most disenfranchised employee on the worst day. Like I think of that example right there is, well, maybe you caused it too. Like, come on guys. It ain't always about, you know, Billy's bad day. It could be, you made Billy's day bad. Well, I mean, you look at it this way. I mean, I don't know how many times I've gone into companies to sit there and say,

I get a CEO says, well, can you fix my teams? I go no, until I fix you first. And you get this horrible look. I said, look, there's a problem here. I don't know what the problem is yet, but the problem may be you. Or it may be the fact that your brother -in -law is the problem. And if your brother -in -law is the problem, we got a worse problem because not only is that going to make your wife angry,

But it's probably going to make his, you know, it's going to make Thanksgiving. Yeah. Thanksgiving or Christmas is going to be a little bit tenuous moving forward. So you have to sit there and say, okay, it's not always the person who's the disgruntled employee who's the cause of the problem. It's how they've been treated, how they've been either dealt with or not dealt with led, managed, empowered, disempowered, ignored.

stepped over, stepped on, and we need to take a look and sit there and say, what's the systematic problems here? Because it's amazing how many times people fire the bad employee and then six months later they hire somebody else and the problem persists. Why does it still exist? Because guess what? The person who leads this person is a royal pain in the B.

You know, it's you sit there and not say but you couldn't say bottom. Well, you know, that's my that's my what was it my Sheldon from from Big Bang series. You can't say he's got to say be but okay, sorry. But anyway, you look at it and you go. Problems are usually are not usually that narrow focused and that simple that just getting rid of one person.

is going to fix the problem unless that problem is the cancer there. You know, we have sat there and said, okay, we've had five employees are all discredited. Okay. Their leader, their manager is the problem that that's the problem. It's not these five disgruntled employees. It's the person that, that manages and leads them. And that person either needs to have some leadership training skills. They need to get rid of the Peter principle within them.

Or they have to be sitting there and say, look, you either need to be trained up or trained out.

And we need to look at that as organizations and look at the root cause and not just the symptoms of it.

And as organizations, so often we just cut off a limb and let the cancer grow. I mean, literally, I just saw a picture of someone posted on Facebook where it was her own fruit bowl and like a couple of fruits had like molded up and you could see the contact of that mold molding up the nether, you know, the, you know, the fruits adjacent to it. And, uh, it just reminded me of like, yeah, like.

even if you remove the dead fruit, there's lingering peats and parts and pieces that mold spores, the spores are still there. So it's almost even more so. Okay, let's say let's say for example, let's just say for giggles, there was a very, very disenfranchised employee. Or if you're Disney cast member, a very disenchanted disenfranchised person receiving a paycheck at this organization, and they leave because let's be honest, there are some people.

who love to live in misery. There are, cause that's their reaction to things and they are toxic. So let us just accept that premise. Sometimes there is that situation and you're lucky and it's a benign tumor. You're pluck it out. It's good and everything's good. Right? But there's always a stench, a stink, a linger or something that it's even more important at that point as a leader to pull the team together to talk about the departure.

not not to bash the person, but to to discuss, hey, you know what, it's very clear there's unhappiness, there's disenfranchisement. Let's talk about let's let's have a as a Navy pilot person debrief. That's it. Like he they did debriefs. And I love that idea. I love that concept, because it's a safe zone. It's almost like a

Maxwell smart, you know, cone of silence, like have a cone of silence, debris situation in this room. Nothing leaves will not be taken personally. Let's go. And I don't know if you foster that kind of, uh, culture, I bet you, you would have a far happier, far more content group because now they're feel free that they can actually articulate good, bad, ugly, indifferent, uh, you're giving people a reason to sit there and say, okay, this was the problem. Okay. That person's gone, but where do we go from here? It's how do you build?

an aspirational culture after the cancerous person, the cancerous idea is gone. And be able to sit there and say, look, I'm here for you people. I'm sorry. It took me a while to figure out what the problem was. We figured out what the problem was. We got rid of the problem. You are all important to me. How do we make things better now? How do we work as a team to be able to fix the challenges that have been happening within this department?

And I think that if you can do that and you can give those people a chance to voice their opinion and not, as you said, not turn it into a complete and utter, you know, fast, but to be able to sit there and say, okay, these were the challenges. These are the things that weren't happening. These are the problems that have, that we've, that we've been trying to fix. How do we, how do we move forward from here? And if you can sit there and build on it and sit there and say, yeah, we're sorry that this happened. It's our fault.

We've, we've tried to fix this. Now, where do we go from here as a group? You're going to build a whole bunch of champions moving forward. I agreed. You know what? Look, we tell you, we ever talk, what's that book, the get your biggest cheerleaders, you know, making your clients, your biggest cheerleaders. Yeah. Take the same amount of energy that you put towards your clients and prospects into your own team internally, make them your biggest cheerleaders, not you as an up human, but like, you know,

I have met some flaky editors. So you have to be really, you have to like, sit and wonder why, like, why are you flaky? Like, is it because of me? Am I not setting the parameters? Are you happy? You know what mean? You're making me think about really, okay, let's practice what we preach and we should report back and be honest with ourselves. Well, it's all about effective communication. It's all about giving people the opportunity to speak without feeling that they're going to get their hands slapped because they speak.

and allowing people to be honest. As you said, it's the military debrief where anybody's allowed to speak up and say, hey, that didn't go right. This is what we really should have been doing. How do we fix this going forward? And as long as you sit there and look at the problem and not the people and just say, it's your fault, Sia. It's just, no, no, no, no, that doesn't work. We're a team. How do we attack the problem, not the person?

And if you can build that culture in your system where everybody has the ability to stand up to say, hey, listen, wait a second, hit that bell because something's wrong and we're going to stop the line. Then that empowers people to actually care about what's going on and wanting to be better and wanting to be part of something better and not be tolerant when things are not up to standard or not this enough or up to the brand mission, vision and values.

Yes. True that. Well, that's simple to say, okay, fine. If you're going to be that, you know, that they were, we're just going to leave it there. Cause I, I think that's a great place to leave this. I think we should. All right. I'm Ben and I'm see ya and we'll see you soon.

Hey hey hey, thanks for listening to another episode of Not On This Business Fights. If you liked what you heard, we most humbly ask that you like, share, and hit that subscribe button. If you want to communicate more effectively within your organization, contact Ben at yourbrandmarketing .com or me at brilliantbeammedia .com. We can help you build your community, brand awareness, and personality through digital content and podcasting.

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