Polluting the Workplace Environment

During my thirty years of consulting and training, the refrain I’ve heard time and time again is, ‘how do I handle negative attitudes in the workplace’? It’s my belief that negativism not dealt with will cost the company thousands of dollars per year. So, how do you deal with a person who is spreading the contagious disease of negativism.

It does no good to simply tell someone their attitude must improve. Usually the response is “there’s nothing wrong with my attitude”. Negative attitudes are observed or heard because of a specific behavior or behaviors. You must describe and demonstrate the behavior you no longer want to see. Ideally, you should also describe and demonstrate the behavior you’d like to see. Slouching in your chair at a meeting and rolling your eyes at various comments is an example of what you consider a display of negativism or a  negative attitude. It doesn’t matter if the person agrees or not, they now know what is expected and can choose whether to comply.

It’s wise to ask the employee how they intend to correct this habit of slouching in the chair at meetings? Try to get them to come up with a plan. For example they might enlist one of their friends to send them some sort of signal when the behavior appears. Always offer your help as well, and set up future brief meetings to review progress.

The employee who refuses to comply or says they’ve tried, but were unable to change this bad habit must be told the consequences of non-compliance. Usually a suspension is the next step with termination to follow. In all cases offer to help the employee with compliance.

So what damage can be done by the attitude I just described? A great deal. One or two individuals who are allowed to continue these behaviors will spread the virus throughout the organization.  It’s ironic that companies will actually hire people who display a negative attitude during the interview (if an interview is conducted). It seems that many companies are so desperate to get a warm body, they will hire anyone who can pass the drug test AND has a pulse! Sad by true.

As I mentioned in a previous article, always hire slowly and fire quickly. You will make hiring mistakes no matter how good a job you do, but as soon as you become aware of the mistake, deal with it. It’s not nearly as costly to do it early on, rather than waiting and hoping that the employee will turn it around. You owe it to the good people who work for you to remove the infection before it spreads.