How Not To Be An A**hole at Work

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A guide to increasing employee engagement and job satisfaction

23 Awesome Techniques for Becoming a Rock Star, Not an A**hole

Around the world, employees are not that into their jobs. Gallup conducts an annual survey on employee engagement and estimates that around 21% of employees are engaged, plus or minus, in any given year. A little over a fifth. A lot less than the four-fifths or so that aren’t.

Gallup thinks this widespread ‘not that into it’ employee attitude costs the global economy on the order of 8 trillion dollars, give or take, in any given year. In typical capitalist gung-ho fashion, Gallup advocates for businesses to fix their employee engagement problem to gain a ‘true competitive advantage’ in the marketplace.

But let’s just be upfront about reality: businesses are not run for employees. They are run for the benefit of the people who own them, whoever that might be. Theoretically, in order to induce people to work for them, employers offer benefits to employees that outweigh the costs of the time and effort employees put into their jobs.

In such a world, everybody wins. Employers win because the output of employees exceeds the costs of the employees themselves, and each employee wins because the rewards exceed the cost of the employment itself. By working together, employers and employees are able to create more for than themselves than it costs them to create it. Profit! Winning! Free enterprise!

This is not the world we live in. Businesses are just trying to survive and so are employees. People who are just trying to survive are not very nice – well, at least people who feel their survival is under threat are not very nice. They feel like they can’t afford to be; they’re always one wave away from being washed off the boat and drowned. Pervasive fear is not conducive to winning! of any kind.

Pervasive fear is the enemy you must vanquish to not be an a**hole at work.

I’ve got plenty of experience being surrounded by pervasive fear. Not only have I lived in America for the last 40 years, but I grew up with pervasively fearful parents. I went to school with anxious students. And most importantly, I’ve worked for fearful bosses. Very fearful bosses. Bosses so fearful they’ve been willing to do very bad things to cope with their fear. Bosses so fearful that they elicit amazement far and wide for their overwhelming anxiety.

Pervasive fear may be entirely justified. Artificial intelligence is sneaking its way toward making the entire concept of humans exchanging labor for the financial means of survival entirely obsolete. If the concept of humans exchanging their labor for money goes away then who exactly will be buying the goods and services produced by businesses? AI servers? Bots? Humanoid butlers?

That doesn’t seem like it will work. Bots are notoriously picky shoppers, and they’d rather not buy at all than pay a penny over the minimum price they can obtain a good or service for. Tough customers those bots. Good luck staying in business catering to them!

Just kidding. There will have to be a different way of distributing the means of human survival if and when machines make human labor more or less obsolete.

So, accidentally standing on the precipice of an entirely different economic system will fill any reasonable employer or employee with pervasive dread.

But tough. That day hasn’t come yet, and peeps gotta be doing something in the meantime. So let’s take a look at how you can increase employee engagement and job satisfaction in the interim. Not being an a-hole at work may even increase your own engagement and satisfaction!!

RECOGNIZE THAT YOU’RE DEALING WITH SOME SYSTEMIC PROBLEMS

Gallup thinks that employee engagement reflects the commitment employees have toward a job. But the thing is – employers often show an absolute lack of commitment toward their employees. For example, wages haven’t kept pace with productivity over the past 40 or so years. So maybe if employers want employee engagement, they should rectify that and start paying at a rate equivalent to what people would have earned in 1979. Measured in productivity terms, a whole fuckload of workers would get big fat raises.

Or how about employer engagement in terms of having wages keep up with inflation. You want engaged employees? Have your pay scales keep pace with inflation and that means – you guessed it – a whole shit ton of people getting big fat raises.

How about employer engagement in terms of not committing wage theft and demanding uncompensated overtime? Or not dangling carrots like raises and promotions in front of the people you are getting extra labor from and then not providing either?

How about not threatening people with unemployment if they don’t do more than you actually pay them for? How about that.

Employers lay people off at the drop of a hat. They don’t offer pensions. There’s little to no security of any sort. With the things employers do these days, it’s a wonder that any employee feels engaged. And it’s no wonder 80% don’t.

So your efforts to increase employee engagement and increase job satisfaction by not being an a-hole are double-edged swords in a world where employers are routinely gigantic a-holes. On the one hand, you will stand out like a rock star and possibly inspire crazy loyalty and embarrassing ass-kissing for your wonderfulness. On the other hand, if you work for an a-hole organization, there’s only so much you can do and so much effect you will have.

DON’T ENCOURAGE OVER-ENGAGEMENT

And the other reality is, you don’t want to over-do it. Commitment isn’t always so wonderful. I’ve experienced highly committed employees who are balls-out engaged in conflict and politicking that ultimately leads to feuds, favoritism, bias, drama, HR complaints and lawsuits. Territory wars, hostilities, boardroom takeover maneuvers – these are all the kinds of things that highly engaged employees do because they are so fucking committed to their work that their egos get involved and they go insane. It may be perversely fun to watch, but I can tell you – it’s hell to live through.

Believe me, I’ve met plenty of highly engaged employees with switchblades for elbows, who do their utmost best to drive down productivity if it serves the interests of their highly engaged egos. Highly engaged employees have basically lost their minds and failed to realize that the business they work for is not them, and they are not the business. They don’t remember that the business can survive without them, and they can survive without the business.

I suppose some employers, lost in their own form of insanity, think it’s some sort of wet dream to have hired a bunch of people more committed to the employing organization than their own lives, who run around treating their careers like some sort of military campaign because they are so damn committed to whoever they work for. But employers, if they engage in that type of fantasy, would be wrong.

What you really want is a bunch of employees who are view their jobs with the ‘whatever, it’s a part of life’ lens. These are the people who keep the lights on, get the jobs done, and don’t lead your organization off the cliff of engagement into the abyss of A Really Big Drop in Stock Price or whatever the nightmare scenario is. The people you want doing the jobs you want done – are the people who treat it like a job. Not the people who think it’s their only reason for living. You want the people who stay in their own lane. The ones who don’t swerve into other lanes and cause accidents.

If your business model relies on the ideal of the ‘engaged’ employee, then your business model is wrong. Your business model should be built around jobs being easy for people to do without getting burned out. Because then they’ll do them. Without getting burned out.

Which brings us back to how not to be a-hole at work.

1. Be A Decent Human Being

This one’s pretty obvious but routinely overlooked. After all, it doesn’t sound like the kind of principle that will make you rich or famous. It doesn’t sound very scientific. No big words or exciting new concepts.

Also, sadly, it involves acting like a decent human being, a feat that is quite difficult for many employers, owing a lot, as we mentioned, to the pervasive fear factor.

Even though it’s almost never called out specifically, business advice-givers skate around the topic by recommending that employers do all kinds of things are kind of like being a decent human being, under the guise of improving profits or productivity or whatever is in the fashion at the moment.

For example:

2. Decrease the amount of time each employee spends in meetings.

Research and common sense show that people aren’t paying attention in meetings because a) they have too damn many of them, b) they don’t need to be in them, c) they are boring AF, and d) they are tired as hell.

A lot of meetings are recurring meetings in which people are theoretically updated on matters of little to no interest to themselves. Everybody at the meeting knows it’s useless but nobody wants to cancel it. Nobody wants to cancel it because either a) they’re not high enough up the food chain to cancel it without looking bad, or b) they are high enough up the food chain and they’re worried if they cancel it, they’ll end up having to do some actual work that they don’t actually know how to do, which will make them look bad.

Behavior in organizations is driven by the almighty concept of ‘looking bad’ and scooting around nervously attempting to avoid it like it was a monster in an arcade video game. Think about it – do you get rewarded in Pac-Man for acting like decent human being? You do not.

Still, the next time you’re tempted to schedule a meeting (and you will be tempted), remember that everybody in the meeting, including you, would rather be watching a YouTube video of adorable animals doing funny things. Get rid of just 25% to 30% of the meetings on your calendar. You’ll get back so many hours to actually get stuff done that you can actually use some of that PTO that you keep accruing and never using.

Despite what the ‘make sure no one works remotely anymore’ contingent of big bosses and CEOs who are the natural enemies of employee engagement think – meetings do not increase anyone’s sense of personal connection with their fellow workers – unless they are clandestine meetings whose sole purpose is to engage in office gossip.

In reality, meetings are just like emails – self-replicating.

The more emails you send – the more emails you will have to answer. The more meetings you schedule – the more follow-up meetings you will have to attend. JUST SAY NO! Every employee that’s worth anything will thank you.

This one hack – drastically reducing meeting time, could save your business over A GAZILLION DOLLARS A YEAR. Yup, a gazillion. Big or small, your business could see relative cost savings that pencil out to the equivalent of a gazillion.

I would tell you that you can thank me later, but really, you ought to just thank me now before you forget and start using that all free time you now have for watching TikTok videos. You’re welcome.

Now that everyone’s life has gotten so much better with fewer meetings, we’ll tackle the next big one.

3. QUIT IT WITH THE EXTRA EMAILS

If you have employees who are checking email during non-working hours: bad, wrong. You’re doing it wrong. Too many emails. At the wrong time. If your employees can’t answer all their emails in an hour a day, you’re doing it wrong. Too many emails.

Stop with all the fucking communication and collaboration and all that stuff you have learned is the key to business success and let people do their actual work.

Wait, what? Let an employee do their actual work? But, but, but….

Yup, get rid of any email that does not directly help the person receiving it do their actual work. Do that, and I guarantee you Harvard Business Review will be chasing after you to do a case study and an interview and use you as the latest poster child for doing something different. Because at this point, letting people do their work would be something so different you might win some sort of prize for it.

4. DON’T TEXT PEOPLE ON THE WEEKEND.

I know you want to. But don’t. Just don’t.

5. Thank people.

Seriously. Thank people. Employees, it turns out, are real people. They actually like being treated like real people, instead of ‘human resources’. Employees have lives and souls and feelings and thoughts – they’re not just a means to an end for an entrepreneur or gigantic corporation.

You can thank people by engaging in novel and exciting behaviors – like thank you notes! One company I worked for had a software program that allowed people to send thank you notes to their colleagues and automatically copy their supervisors. People liked it.

You can acknowledge an employee publicly in a meeting or other venue (since you’ve already drastically reduced your meetings). You could even have some of your relatively few meetings be devoted entirely to thanking people and acknowledging what they do. Sales organizations frequently do this to keep their salespeople fired up. But if you actually think employee engagement is important, then salespeople aren’t the only people who need to be fired up.

You could even give out unexpected financial bonuses – as a way of saying thank you to the people in your organization who actually do the work. I once had a boss who would give people a paid day off after a tough stretch of work as a way of saying thank you. And you know what – people liked it.

There is another way to say thank you that people often overlook. It involves immediately saying thank you after someone has done something that benefits you. People take each other for granted to an amazing degree. Creating a culture of not take other people for granted would probably qualify as one of those ‘competitive advantages’ that Gallup is encouraging you to invest in. I’ve known plenty of people who will go the extra mile for someone who simply thanks them for their work. Go figure!

To be even more innovative in your workplace culture, you could also offer thanks that are genuine, and true. As in, actually noticing what a person did that went above and beyond, was well-executed, took a bit of extra effort or displayed the frequently elusive quality of competence.

Thanks don’t have to be big, but it helps if they’re real. People tend to remember genuine appreciation for a long, long time. And since it’s so hard to get, and rare enough, people also tend to stick with leaders that can provide it – for a long, long time.

6. Emphasize positive attributions.

This is a fancy way of saying give people the benefit of the doubt. If something went well, attribute it to employee efforts. That’s a positive attribution.

If something goes wrong, attribute it to a temporary factor that can be overcome. That’s a positive attribution as well, and it gives the employee the benefit of the doubt.

You don’t want to be dishonest in attributing outcomes – but giving people the benefit of the doubt communicates your expectation that employees are capable of producing good work. Attributing poor outcomes to employee fuck-ups communicates your expectation that the people who work for you will fuck up. People have a very strong tendency to live up to your expectations – positive or negative – so it is to your advantage to emphasize the positive expectations.

Along these lines, share the credit and appreciation that you receive. Emphasize the positive contributions of colleagues and collaborators. I know this makes an impression because I’ve literally had people call me after a meeting to tell me (excitedly) that some muckety-muck actually praised a worker or two for their contributions to a project. It was so unusual that it actually made headline news in the gossip hotline.

If you can lean toward positive attributions rather than negative ones, it can also make your life easier when you’re dealing with difficult employees. That employee that drives you crazy – probably not trying to drive you crazy. Give them the benefit of the doubt and behave as though they WANT to make you happy not miserable.

7. Make your suggestions before your employee does the work, not after.

It’s not exactly true that there’s nothing worse than Monday morning quarterbacking your employees. There are worse things – but that doesn’t make Monday morning quarterbacking a good thing.

I’ve met bosses who used the ‘plenty of rope to hang yourself with’ tactic. They’d let employees have lots of autonomy but then viciously rip them new ones once the decisions were already made. This makes it look as though the boss is never responsible for anything that isn’t perfect; they always have someone else to blame.

Seems like a good strategy to avoid the dreaded ‘looking bad’ monster, right? Nope. People like this, the after-the-fact-criticizers, quickly get a reputation throughout the organization. An employee learns really fast who can’t be trusted to have their backs when the ‘looking bad’ monster is stalking the halls. Monday morning quarterbacking is a great way to make lots of enemies.

Once the work is done or the decision made, keep your mouth shut unless you can give genuine appreciation. Have the employee analyze what went wrong, not you.

8. Don’t force people into offsite team building.

I cannot say that I loved off site team building. I cannot say that I hated it. I can say that it was kind of a hassle. But I have observed other people with far stronger reactions. I’ve seen people get hives. I’ve seen people complain for weeks at a time. I’ve seen folks go into major dread mode. Some people just really do not like offsite team building.

Some people love it. You may love happy hour and want to take the team out for drinks. But your people may have issues with alcohol or diabetes or childcare or any number of other things. Despite what many managers and companies seem to think, people do NOT need to bond outside of the workplace to have good working relationships.

Offsite team building is also recipe for decreasing diversity in your group. People who have to conform to survive the golfing weekend or the bowling tournament or the ‘trust-building’ exercises or the lunches and the dinners and the small talk – become less and less inclined to contribute when they’re back in the office. Let people have their own lives, their own identities. Let them avoid each other when they’re not working!

On the other hand….

9. DON’T GET IN THE WAY OF EMPLOYEE FRIENDSHIPS

Work friendships increase productivity and engagement. Some people don’t want to make friends at work. They don’t want work stuff interfering with their home lives. However, research from Gallup shows a clear link between having friends at work and working harder and more productively.

For example, women who strongly agree they have a best friend at work are more than twice as likely to be engaged (63%) compared with the women who say otherwise (29%).

Having friends at work makes work seem more worthwhile. In fact, in many cases, it may be the only worthwhile thing about one’s work.

Middle class jobs are disappearing. Meanwhile, mothers are leaving the workforce due to corporate policies that make it not worthwhile to stay – such as the ‘back in the office or go fuck yourself’ stance that employers like Chase Manhattan Bank, Amazon, and Disney have adopted. In other words, corporate attitudes can and do make the working life seem worse than not working at all. The financial sacrifice begins to seem worth it. And perhaps that’s not surprising, given that only about 20% of workers feel like they have a best friend at work. Corporations are leaving money on the table – workers with friends correlate with an uptick in engaged customers. In other words, engaged workers engage with customers who in turn engage with the company that is producing all that engagement.

To put it another way, corporations that want to make more money should let workers be friends with one another. Relationships with peers and co-workers is one of those not-in-the-job-description factors that can make a big difference in worker motivation.

10. DON’T RELY ON INCENTIVE PROGRAMS ALONE

One of the most motivating elements of a job for many an employee is the inner satisfaction of completing something. You might realize this if you pay any attention to the number of books and articles and podcasts and god knows what telling people how to ‘get more done.’ People love feeling like they got stuff done!

Get out of their way and let them get stuff done! Don’t treat them like they don’t want to. They do!

An incentive program for your salespeople might be wonderful. I used to have an incentive program that quite literally involved Hershey’s kisses. It was fun and it increased team bonding and it kind of worked. But those kinds of things are really temporary fixes designed to help people overcome challenges that might otherwise sap motivation. It’s more important in the long run to remove any challenging factors like bad working conditions rather than to try to engineer incentives around them.

Avoid Obvious Bad Stuff.

Some things are really worth avoiding with your employees – and yet, many people neglect to avoid them.

1. Embarrassing Employees

For example, embarrassing your employees in front of other employees. You’d think that even an idiot would recognize that embarrassing people is not the key to employee engagement.

And yet… There are many bosses, CEOs, founders, muckety-mucks and even fictional characters who seem to think the key to high performance is reaming out an employee in front of everyone else. It isn’t. But, it is a good way to get a journalist to write a story about your ‘toxic work culture’ for some publication.

2. Disappearing Act

Only showing up when you want something. People can see through that, sooner or later. Even if you dish out the flattery, if you’re only there for your employees in some sort of transactional way – they’re never really going to be there for you, either.

3. Thinking Money Compensates for Anything and Everything

This doesn’t seem like an unreasonable idea in some ways. Money is the primary form of compensation for employees and the most important. But it doesn’t compensate for everything. The income needs to be commensurate with the labor the employee is providing, but there are lots of things money can’t buy. Like the sense that the workplace is just and generally fair. Or that people aren’t subjected to harassment and abuse. And so on.

Further, along the lines with the importance of saying thank you – sometimes ice cream for everyone right now while things are tough – is more effective than a bonus 7 months from now when everybody is already completely burned out.

4. Unethical and the Illegal Things. Don’t Do Them.

Yeah, avoid this shit. I know some people absolutely cannot avoid the unethical and the illegal, it is baked right into their nature (Trump). But unless you’re irredeemable – avoid these things. They’re bad. And they’re not good for your relationships with employees (or anyone else for that matter).

5. Expecting an Employee to Go Above and Beyond in Return for Jack F. Squat

Yeah your cute little tricks of understaffing and just expecting the remaining workers to pick up the slack. That’s obvious bad shit. Stop it.

Underpaying the people who do go above and beyond so you can give fat checks to the people who kiss your ass? Bad shit. Cut it out.

Don’t expect people to work during hours when they’re not supposed to be working. Or lay people off so you can cut salaries. Yah, those are the kinds of jerkwad moves that really don’t make anyone satisfied with or engaged with their jobs.

Having plenty to say when you want people to do extra and zippo to say when it’s bonus time – cuz they ain’t any. Yeah, I’ve seen this bonus business get people pretty bitter. They did all the extra work you wanted them to do – for nothing. While someone who already gets paid too much gets a bonus for – doing extra nothing? This is one of the most direct contributors to decreased and missing employee engagement that I’ve ever seen.

6. GETTING ALL PASSIVE-AGRESSIVE AND AGRESSIVE-AGGRESSIVE

Some people express their opinions very forthrightly. Some people express them very indirectly. Your call as to which you prefer.

The aggressive-aggressive type

But if you’re going to be all forthright – stick to the ‘this is my opinion and why’ side of the equation and not the ‘here’s what wrong with you and your opinion, you bad stupid person you.’

You’d be surprised how many people (perhaps including you) have a hostile attitude toward other human beings based at least partly on how hostile they are. What?!

In other words, hostile people elicit hostile reactions which makes the hostile people even more hostile to the people who are now hostile to them.

GET OFF THAT TRAIN!

Don’t use an aggressive attitude to cover up your own poor performance. I know you’re saying ‘well what will I use to cover up my own poor performance then?’

The answer is nothing. You can get away with poor performance for just as long without going to the effort of being all aggressive. Give everyone, including yourself, a break and just tone that aggressive shit down. It’ll make everyone’s life a lot easier.

The passive-aggressive type

By the same token, just nix the passive aggressive criticism. Don’t say to an employee things like “You don’t want to do it [my way]?” This is unbelievably irritating. No, they don’t want to do it your way or they’d already be doing it that way. So stop asking stupid questions and just let them know – “Please do it [my way]” or let them do it their way.

Look, I know you’re anxious. I know that’s why you are passive-aggressive. I feel for you. But try not to advertise it. It makes you look like a jerk. And stupid. It reduces respect for you. Force yourself to take a deep breath and say nothing, or say something straightforward and polite.

7. FORGET ABOUT A KICK IN THE ASS

Sometimes managers fantasize about giving their employees a kick in the ass. This is understandable. After all, employees often fantasize about giving their managers a kick in the ass too. A kick in the ass (KITA) in this case means inflicting some kind of negative psychological event on the offending co-worker. Like, you know, ripping them a new one or something.

Unfortunately, since the idea of reaming someone out is such an enticing fantasy, this kind of thing turns out not to be great for worker attitudes. The possibility of growth turns out to be far more motivating. So when your worker seems to need a KITA, it makes more sense to dangle the possibility of improvement in front of them. The idea that a person can get better is fairly obviously more encouraging than the idea that a person is a hopeless idiot. Remember this, no matter how tempting it might be to forget it.

BONUS TIPS

1. MAKE SURE THE TABLES ARE THE CORRECT SIZE FOR WORKING AND THE AIR CONDITIONING IS FUNCTIONING

For some reason, many leaders and companies seem obsessed with finding new ways to make the actual physical working environment an employee is expected to work in – completely non-conducive to actual work. People can overcome this in the short run. Over the long run not so much.

You don’t have to give people the largest desk in human history or the chillest AC in human history – just stuff that works for them.

What will make the most difference over the long run is whether or not the person doing the work likes the work. Your job is to get out of the way of that. So don’t have them working in closets without functional AC or heat. Don’t stick them into cubicles that are arranged like bunk beds. Let them work someone where they can work.

2. COMPLIMENT YOUR COLLEAGUES

Compliments are almost always welcome and most people don’t get enough them. Praise, admiration – people will do a lot to earn these things.

Beyond compliments for doing a good job; people also appreciate (and respond well to) general well wishes. Acknowledgement of the birth of their son. Retirement parties. Tributes to outstanding contributors. These things make a difference.

The only caveat I can think of regarding compliments: compliments on outfits and appearance can get uncomfortable. And if an employee expresses discomfort with a particular compliment or type of compliment – drop it. No need to push the issue or anyone’s boundaries.

3. CONTRIBUTE TO THE EMPLOYEE 401K

Benefits and perks make a difference. A baseball cap with your company’s name on it isn’t going to break the bank or turn a very unhappy employee into an ecstatic one. But benefits and perks do demonstrate a team spirit that, well, makes people feel like part of a team.

Benefits alone make a really big difference in whether or not an employee sticks around with an organization and tries to make things work – or doesn’t. I can’t even count the number of conversations I’ve had (and overheard) with employees considering their options regarding employment. And a really big percentage of those conversations included an analysis of benefits as a major factor in decisions.

Benefits are expensive for employers. And they are a big deal in attracting and retaining satisfied employees.

4. KEEP YOUR GENDER BIASES OUT OF THE WORKPLACE

You have them. You believe them. You really really really want to interpret things in light of them and make decisions based on them.

Your gender biases, however, are wrong. So are mine. You developed them based on your experience – and your experience is not universal. Not even close. There’s so much variety in how men and women act. Your generalizations – no matter how seemingly innocent or even benign – just aren’t true.

It would be so much easier for you, me, and the human brain if people did slot neatly into gender stereotypes. Then every employee would be predictable. Brains love predictable!

They especially love predictable when it comes to human behavior. Because human behavior does not seem all that predictable. Sigh.

But there you go. You think that men speak straightforwardly and women beat around the bush. You’re wrong. You’re just not noticing how godawful much time the men around you are beating around the bush. And you’re just not noticing how blunt the women around you really are. I’m not dissing you. I’m just saying that you’re wrong, just like the rest of us.

You think men bring the drama to work with all their rivalries and egos whereas women are all about competence and performance. You’re just not noticing all the men who have their heads down and are doing the work without any drama at all. And you’re not noticing the women who are involved in fierce status rivalries that take up so much time they’re not doing anything else at all. I’m not dissing you. I’m just saying that you’re wrong. Like the rest of us.

The upshot of various inaccurate gender biases is that a surprising number of people exhibit a preference or aversion to supervising one gender or another.

Stop that. Force yourself to stop that. Pry open your mind with a crowbar if necessary. If you hear yourself evaluating someone using gender-specific reasoning, force yourself to say the opposite.

You’re going to accidentally cause yourself so many problems if you don’t do this – and you’re going to be an asshole as well.

5. DON’T ENCOURAGE EMPLOYEE SUCK-UPS

This is hard advice to follow and believe me the people at the top of your organization are not following it. Very few people get to the top of an organization without a desperate desire to reward suck-ups and be followed around by sycophants 24/7.

Still, remember this handy mnemonic: “Suck-ups are fuck-ups!”

Because they are. They just put way more energy into sucking up to you than into doing any work. They make everyone else hate them. And you. They amp up the unnecessary drama. And they’re probably talking shit about you behind your back.

6. FACE YOUR PROBLEMS – AND YOUR PROBLEM EMPLOYEES

I know you don’t want to. I didn’t want to either. But everyone else hates it – absolutely HATES it when you let a problem employee create problems and you don’t do anything about it. It unbalances everything. It inclines you to adopt drastic-teamwide solutions to individual-specific problems. And people hate that.

You have everyone turn in a work summary each day because ONE person is slacking off. So you didn’t have to face that one person but now everyone else hates you.

Facing down your problems, particularly your people problems, is the worst part of your job – and the scariest. Do it anyway. If you don’t do it, everyone will see and smell your fear. And you will be an asshole. Trust me on this. I’ve been there. Do not go down this route.

All righty then! That was 23, count ’em 23, different yet related ways to increase employee engagement and job satisfaction. And make yourself the most popular leader ever!

Congratulations on making the world of work a better place! You go, you!

Tags: Work, workplace, world