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Why Is Low Employee Morale Morally Acceptable?

Dec 14, 2009 » by Cali & Jody

According to a new Careerbuilder.com survey, almost a quarter of American workers are suffering from low morale.

The survey found that

Two in five said stress levels were high

Half had their workload increase in the past six months

Two in five felt they were on the bad end of departmental favoritism

A quarter did not think their department was important to senior leadership

Two in five had trouble staying motivated

Now we could make some kind of self-protecting joke about how we’re surprised the numbers aren’t higher. Or we could dismiss this news with a “life is hard” shrug.

Instead we’d like to focus for a moment on the real human suffering that is behind these numbers.

We realize that in the context of other big-picture problems (hunger, disease, addiction, etc.), getting outraged about low morale at work is a hard sell.

We also realize that while equal and fair access to a job is a right, actually being employed is not. Anyone who has a job in this economy should be happier than not having an income at all.

We further realize that life IS hard and that everyone can’t be perfectly fulfilled by what they do for a living and that, in general, you take the good with the bad.

Still . . . .

There are roughly 140 million workers in America. If the survey is correct, then that means that at least 56 million of them are stressed out, unappreciated, overworked and unmotivated. In other word, they’re hurting.

What is it about work that makes it culturally acceptable for people to suffer like this?

We understand that these people are getting paid. But our understanding is that they are getting paid to produce something. Where does human suffering fit into the compensation package?

For us, this is a moral issue. And by moral, we do not mean that we ‘re somehow morally superior because we have a nifty plan for fixing the problem of work.

Rather, we mean that when we talk about stress and morale at work, we’d like to see the moral dimension added to the conversation.

We’ve had plenty of chances to discuss this intellectually. Type “effects of stress” into Google and you’ll get plenty of blog posts, websites, and news articles about the ill effects of stress.

But all the facts in the world (75-90% of all doctor’s office visits are for stress-related ailments and complaints, stress costs American industry more than $300 billion annually, etc.) aren’t going to change our behavior and beliefs.

Talking about this issue of workplace stress on a higher plane might. Every big social change of the past century happened in part because of winning the  moral argument. Perhaps that is what’s needed to get people the freedom and the schedule control they need in order to work and live in today’s world.

  • Persephone K

    One of the greatest challenges I face when talking to people about ROWE is in convincing them that they deserve to be happy at work. It is sad how often they will say something like “I’m just happy to have a job” or “there are so many others who have it much worse.” While its great you believe the former, and the latter may be very true, why can’t you have it all, I say!? You owe your employer your best work; they owe you a paycheck (and whatever else they agreed to benefits-wise when you were hired). That’s it. They don’t deserve your soul. You say this to people in a traditional work environment and they call you the one with the attitude problem.

    Cheers, :)

    • Cali & Jody

      @Persephone K – you got it. They don’t deserve your soul. They DON’T.

  • Matt

    It is “acceptable” because money trumps all other things in a free market economy. As the collapse of the financial sector shows, you can’t expect people to do the right thing when it comes to money. So, unless the ROI is readily apparent, few companies will ever do something voluntarily to better the working conditions of the workers if the perceived investment is too high. For example, most companies would ignore the benefit gained by giving all employees remote access (employees work when they are at their best and most productive) and only see the associated startup costs (new servers, new laptops, wireless cards, etc.). Companies would rather pay higher health insurance premiums and insist on rigid schedules than let employees set their own schedule so they could work out regularly. The list goes on..

    The most morally reprehensible part of the current economic climate is that companies pile onto their employees because they know the employees have nowhere else to go. A company has every right to cut costs to ensure its survival during a tough economy, but that shouldn’t give it the right to run down any remaining workers “because it can”. Hopefully, some of these opportunistic companies will “reap what they sow” as the economy turns around and employees have the opportunity to escape. Having ROWE available in more companies will make this even more of a possibility.

    • Cali & Jody

      @Matt – we were nodding crazily and then applauding as we read your comment. We’ve been in countless situations where companies just seem to not want to look past the initial investment (whether that be monetary or emotional) to see all of the benefits that will become reality in a ROWE. Focusing on the companies that get it is a much better strategy. Those that do run down their workers “because they can” will absolutely experience negative consequences as the economy turns around – we have no doubt about that. It will be interesting to watch, won’t it?

  • http://www.davidzinger.com David Zinger

    Cali and Jodi:

    I love the idea of bringing moral into morale and work. I get concerned with we make the workplace or company out to be the villain here. Yes there are workplaces that are not working well but I want to include them not exclude them with judgment.

    I so much appreciate the work of Albert Bandura (born in Canada so that could be part of it) on moral disengagement. I think you were spot on with the level of moral disengagement and that employee engagement is not sucking out more discretionary effort it is to have everyone within an organization morally engage with the work we are doing.

    Thanks, and you’ve inspired me to write more about this at my site.

    David

  • http://www.WeismanSuccessResources.com Skip Weisman

    I think the smaller the organization the less morally (and emotionally) acceptable low morale in the workplace is. Because the owner/CEO is much closer to the low morale, can feel it and is both impacted by it and has a greater impact on it. I do most of my coaching and consulting work in the small-medium sized business and non-profit sector ($50 million and under).

    I find those at the top really don’t understand how what they are doing and how they are delivering what they are doing is impacting the morale. I think they know no other way, which is why I’ve been so successful in working with them to help change their approach to engage their people in creating solutions, giving their employees a sense of more control over their environment and situation, even in difficult times.

    This is my first exposure to your ROWE philosophy but in some other ways I’ve been preaching something similar since I was a CEO of my own company before I left 10 years ago, and I am always speaking in results oriented terms with the clients I work with today. It’s the only way to be.

    Keep up the good work!