What I have found presenting a jigsaw puzzle scenario in the world in general and in Zimbabwe in particular has been the failure to clearly define the role of the workplace for different stakeholders. Organisation Development practitioners do their best to talk about the system that the workplace is and how these different interests can be crafted to dovetail and achieve a win/win scenario for all stakeholders. This whole thing has been a slippery terrain to navigate. What gets more concerning is the attitude that the workplace, through leadership, seems to have towards the issue. We seem to be doing business as usual with no attempts to find meaning and working methods to make work more meaningful to speak to human needs.
It is business as usual in most places and the failure to balance the variables is glaring generally with the push for money taking the lead. This creates conflict and makes the future look gloomy because when conflict is not addressed it snowballs and one day the workplace becomes a crisis place with stakeholders failing to find common ground and therefore drifting apart thoroughly and irretrievably sometimes.
It is of paramount importance for the workplace to keep trying to make things work, and around relationships. There are people who have a mind that does not easily accept things and so continue to search for what works and makes meaning, yet there are those who will live and push forward, destroying not only their own fortunes but those of posterity as well. That is sadly a retrogressive attitude towards life, and I can say roughly that a big portion of leadership in the workplace has that attitude. That we are in the workplace to make money and so everything must speak to bottom-line issues. Well, yes bottom-line cannot be ignored but we do not want to experiment forever.
It is indeed good to have a curious and inquisitive attitude towards things. I have argued in many circles that curiosity is a quality we must never drop. I have observed with much displeasure that it is a quality we tend to lose as we grow old. It does look like the joke that, ‘Do not grow up, it’s a trap…’ is full of truth and sense. It, however, does not mean that one should not reach answers. Curiosity will make us ask questions and even experiment, but we cannot reduce life and work to a series of experiments that find no answer. This becomes worse if these experiments are around people and their welfare and about organizations that house and take care of people and their livelihoods.
Organisations, just like the people who make them, are critical for success and the happiness of all stakeholders. Stakeholder management, therefore, is something a leader should take seriously. Two weeks ago, we wrote about the different types of stakeholders who come to work with different needs and expectations. A leader, in our opinion, must dance around these and find a formula every day that addresses these relationships. It might not be possible to please everyone always, but a serious lead will still think about what it means to have these stakeholders come forward and place their expectations and needs on the table, expecting something to come out of it.
It had been observed that the situation in Zimbabwe has put a lot of pressure on the leaders and this has led to some leaders ignoring that stakeholders web and thinking only about their business and the joy of the shareholder as a stakeholder. Several companies fail to pay salaries, and true good leaders who know what it means for employees not to receive their salaries will keep communication lines open to allow transparency to thriver so that employees are fully appraised regarding the financial situation.
There are those who will slave drive and put expectations on employees including the expectation to have the employee not being paid for over four months still transport themselves to their workstation. True, there may be problems, but these require leadership to make decisions that carry the company through its survival mode to the other side of the river.
Poor leaders will speak at length about prioritization and even sing it as gospel music to say we must all understand prioritisation and what is at the center of things is the success or survival of the business. Employees will listen to that kind of music but still fail to see how their own survival can be integrated into the survival of the company to create that win/win scenario. A win/win scenario will not mean real wins under difficult circumstances but might just mean that employees can breathe and are able to make ends meet in that small survival way. It is irresponsible leadership to expect miracles from human resources when little is done to lift them up.
Such unfair actions on the part of management come with repercussions that affect the organisation negatively. Employees must survive and if leadership does not seem to understand that they will, by their own survival instinct, find ways to breathe. Some such ways of survival are through theft, pilferage, and fraud. They will come to work as if things were good, and a good leader should ask themselves where these employees are getting the means to come to work when they are not paying them.
Employees may also steal working hours and use them for their private jobs (PJs). This cannot be justified but it is understandable because the root cause is poor management and failure to balance issues so that the company moves forward, and employees can breathe.
*Bhekilizwe Bernard Ndlovu’s training is in human resources training, development and transformation, behavioural change, applied drama, personal mastery, and mental fitness. He works for a Zimbabwean company as human capital executive, while also doing a PhD with Wits University where he looks at violent strikes in the South African workplace as a researcher. Ndlovu worked as a human resources manager for several blue-chip companies in Zimbabwe and still takes keen interest in the affairs of people and performance management. He can be contacted on [email protected]
