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It depends. If your boss made you feel welcome, proved to be supportive and fair, and gave you responsibility, your answer is probably a thumbs up.
WELCOME TO the fictional Supermarket from Hell:
At the deli counter, an employee struggles to keep up with a rush of customers. Her co-worker called in sick because she couldn’t find a babysitter. The deli supervisor changes the schedule with little notice, so working parents are constantly scrambling to find childcare—and often don’t.
In produce, it’s a stock boy’s first day. After a brief orientation, he’s left on his own and can only shrug when a customer needs help finding the corn. None of his new co-workers bother to say hello.
In the head office, a stressed-out manager scans the web for job openings. With his skills and experience, he should be running a much bigger store. He could run this one better, too—if his bosses would let him make more decisions.
The Supermarket from Hell, or any real-world workplace with similar woes, doesn’t have to be this way. Researchers at Portland State can prove it. In Psychology and Business, professors are examining the impact of workplace relationships and developing measures to strengthen them—drawing connections between bad bosses and sick employees, and between satisfied workers and a healthier bottom line.
A BASIC first step is for employers to understand that their employees have life challenges outside the workplace, and that unless they can take care of them, they’re probably not going to do well at work. Flexibility is key.
Leslie Hammer, a professor of psychology, recalls a 23-year-old man typical of the low-wage employees whom she finds most compelling—those with the least control over their schedules and fewest resources for “picking up the slack” when work and family collide.
When Hammer interviewed him as part of her current research, the man was supporting his 13-year-old sister and their drug-addicted parents. He needed to talk with his sister each afternoon to make sure she arrived home safely from school, but his grocery supervisor would not allow personal phone calls. The stress and anxiety he endured throughout his daily shift took a visible toll.
“He was sick, clearly depressed,” says Hammer.
This man was part of the first national study to explicitly link conflicts between work and family demands to employee safety and the mental and physical health of workers and their families. It also identified specific ways that supervisors can support workers’ efforts to manage those demands.
Hammer’s study, sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, has established at PSU the Center for Work-Family Stress, Safety and Health, a joint effort with Michigan State University. Hammer is the center director.
After supermarket managers in her study completed a training program she developed, their employees perceived them to be more supportive of work-life issues and reported improvements in their overall health as measured by such factors as pain and psychological problems. Hammer is refining the training and measuring its impact on supervisors and employees in long-term care facilities and the telecommunications industry.
As for that young grocery worker, the better business decision would have been to let him take a daily call from his sister so that he could resolve his concerns and turn his full attention to his job, says Hammer. Especially at smaller companies without formal programs to help employees manage competing demands, “the supervisor is the linchpin in terms of work-family support,” Hammer adds.
“We’re looking at ways to train managers to understand that being responsive and sensitive to work-family issues leads to lower stress,” she says. “Higher levels of stress translate into higher absenteeism, higher turnover and lower production.”
IF BEING SENSITIVE to an employee’s personal challenges is one way to improve life at work, so is being fearless about hiring someone who may seem overqualified. The conventional wisdom about hiring overqualified workers is: Don’t. They have bad attitudes and are more likely to quit. PSU faculty member Berrin Erdogan was skeptical of this premise—especially after she found scant research to back it up. So Erdogan, with Business Administration faculty colleague Talya Bauer, tested the conventional wisdom in a chain of Turkish retail stores.
The results, which earned mention in The New York Times, provide companies new incentive to hire applicants they consider overqualified. If they are made to feel valued and given autonomy—“not treated like a cog in a machine”—overqualified workers will perform well and stick around, says Erdogan.
“They only left sooner if they were not empowered,” she says. The lesson: “Overqualified individuals should not be automatically disqualified.”
“People lead by the relationships they have with people,” explains Erdogan, an associate professor of management, who is interested in the day-to-day management of people and how those relationships affect employee well-being, customer service and organizational effectiveness.
Challenging “common sense” assumptions is the most fun part of her work, she says.
Her recent research, also with Bauer, focused on employees’ perception of justice. They found that it’s not critical for a supervisor to have similar relationships with all subordinates, a long-held management mantra. What’s important is that employees who aren’t part of a leader’s inner circle believe that the organization nonetheless will treat them fairly.
In another project, with Jeanne Enders, an assistant professor of management in the Business School, Erdogan showed that supervisors’ perceptions of whether they are supported by their bosses “trickle down” to influence the work attitudes of those who report to that supervisor.
In the workplace, so much depends on a manager and employee “clicking,” says Erdogan, who with Bauer has co-authored two textbooks used in more than 100 universities worldwide. She is motivated to identify structural approaches companies can use to encourage positive day-to-day relationships between managers and employees—instead of simply hoping for that “click.”
ONE WAY to ensure that employees fit in is to give them a good start. Anybody who’s had a job remembers at least one bad First Day: the cubicle with no working telephone, the lonely lunch break, the boring safety video that served as “orientation.”
And yet, “the research definitely shows that those first few days really matter,” says Bauer, a professor of management in the School of Business Administration. She has published and consulted on the topic of how to acclimate new employees so that they quickly add value to an organization.
Bauer’s PSU students, most of whom hold down jobs while in school, don’t need to be persuaded that how co-workers treat a new hire, or whether employees perceive their bosses as fair, helps determine if a company succeeds or fails.
“That relationships at work matter makes total sense to them. I don’t have to convince them about justice at work or group dynamics,” Bauer says. “They’re living them everyday.”
Bauer’s research agenda is as crowded as her office. Research in progress includes an examination of work as a calling; a look at how newcomers fare in apprentice trades in France; and helping a large high-tech company avoid squelching the creative impulses of new employees. In July, she headed to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., for a three-month stint as the first non-engineering professor in the company’s visiting faculty program.
With her PSU colleagues, Bauer shares the belief that workplace relationships are too important to be left to chance. Employers who want to run effective organizations must take action to help create the relationships that keep employees happy, healthy, and satisfied. It can be as simple as making sure someone takes the newbie to lunch. Especially in retail and other entry-level jobs, “if someone has a bad first day, they don’t come back,” says Bauer.
But make a new employee feel accepted, confident, and clear about his or her role—in that order—and “all sorts of good outcomes follow.”
“I think people believe that relationships aren’t happening all the time—but they are,” Bauer says. “You might as well make it a positive thing.” ?
Shelby Oppel Wood, a freelance writer, contributed the story “Plugging into the Future” in the Winter 2011 Portland State Magazine.
Illustrations by Dan Selleck
What about breaks?
Charlotte Fritz, an assistant professor of psychology, is interested in discovering what employees need to be energized and productive at work so that employers can help provide it.
Fritz says human energy is fuel for organizations and a limited resource that workers can replenish with the right strategies. Yet, when time is short, the most effective choices aren't the ones we usually make, according to Fritz's research.
While the lunch break is a typical time for recharging at work, Fritz focused on the more frequent "micro-breaks" that make up a workday—the moments between finishing one task and moving to another—as additional opportunities for restoring one's personal battery.
Have a snack? Get some fresh air? Surf the Web? In Fritz's study of employees at a U.S. software company, those common strategies for refueling during micro-breaks weren't related to higher rates of vitality. Employees were more likely to feel energized when they chose not to "check out" from their jobs but to engage in a brief work-related activity that involved learning something new, finding meaning, or building high-quality relationships.
For example, instead of mindlessly clicking through web pages or sucking down a diet cola, walk across the office to thank a co-worker for help on a project. Set a new work goal. Or simply reflect on what aspects of your job bring joy, Fritz says.