The best employees I’ve ever had always worked the job and not the clock or the calendar.
Indeed, in my first meeting with a new staff person, I would tell him and her that this work ethic was my daily expectation. Some days will be easy, I would say. Other days will be hard. Most days, we will be able to close the office on time. Some days we might need to work past 5 pm to get a vital task accomplished. A few days will be slow, and we might even tippy-toe out of the office a bit early. But in all cases, we should face our workload together, support each other, have each other’s back, and so help maintain a humorous and pleasant working environment while working toward our objectives.
I’ve been blessed to work with many highly-skilled, hard-working staff over the years. Over time, we built strong relationships that made working together fun during good times and that helped us overcome crises that arose in the office. But that hasn’t always been the case. Sometimes it was the fault of the staff member. And sometimes I was the one with the shortcomings.
Don’t Be A Worker Bee
Flashback to many years ago when I was working with a particular office assistant. We had always worked well together and had stayed past closing time on numerous occasions to help students and solve other problems. One Friday afternoon we were struggling with a particularly thorny issue that we weren’t really sure how to solve. My assistant needed to leave on time that day for an out of town engagement. So I said to her, “So while you’re driving, think through whether we should solve this problem by. . . .” She interrupted me and said flatly, “I don’t think about work after hours.”
Indeed, my assistant was an hourly employee, and I know I had no claim on her time after she clocked out that day. And maybe she was only feeling particularly underappreciated at that time or was simply having a bad day. Nevertheless, I was disappointed and even floored by her response. I continued to think about that exchange even years later as I pondered what I expected and had a right to expect from my direct reports.
My assistant was not alone in her views in this particular workplace. Every day at five pm sharp, I could hear the pitter patter of feet scurrying toward the exits of the administration building. It wasn’t so much that they were quitting on time that bothered me. Instead, it was the pervasiveness of a “worker bee” mentality that prevailed among office staff. This perspective is the attitude that the boss owns the employees from nine to five, minus lunch and coffee breaks, and not a minute more. While technically accurate, the worker bee mentality discourages cooperation and a sense of common commitment that is necessary in successful organizations. Instead, each worker bee keeps to his lane, keeps his head down in his work, and watches the clock carefully until the moment arrives when the whistle blows and he regains his freedom from “the man.” I’ve always found this work attitude distasteful.
The Standard Response
I know what HR officers and folks who came to higher ed from the business world are thinking right now. They would aver that what I requested of my assistant was completely unreasonable and that she was entirely justified for standing up for herself in this way. I had no claim on her time after hours. Indeed, the employment laws for non-exempt employees are designed to prevent precisely this type of exploitation by preventing overbearing bosses like me from pressuring staff to work after hours for free. Yes, the law is on your side, my HR friends.
Further, hourly workers will object even more loudly: “Well, if you just paid her what she was really worth, she wouldn’t have had that attitude.” This particular argument has always struck me as disingenuous. First of all, very, very few people in the world are paid what they are truly worth. A few are paid much more than they’re truly worth, but the vast majority are paid much less. Hence, if workplace excellence were truly dependent upon paying employees what they are worth, then workplace excellence would be an even scarcer commodity than it already is.
Second, I find the argument philosophically suspect. That is, the work ethic an employee adopts generally is not positively correlated with his or her salary. It is instead more related to a particular philosophy of work the employee holds. The worker bee mentality is alive and well among higher-paid, salaried workers also.
My chief bias here is that my full-time employment has consisted entirely of faculty and administrative staff positions. I have never held a full-time hourly wage job. Nor have I ever had to contend with having to post overtime or have I been challenged by my boss to work outside of a time clock. Instead, I was given a job to do as a salaried employee. I did the job, and I was paid (usually modestly) for doing it. But I never got paid more if it took me two hours to grade a term paper than if it took me fifteen minutes.
The fact that I have never worked full-time in a non-exempt job position clearly colors my perspective here. On the other hand, when I was in the classroom full-time, I never dared to calculate what my teaching job paid on an hourly basis. I was sure the answer would be too depressing. At any rate, I was certain it was less than I was truly worth. No matter; I enjoyed teaching, even with the long hours it brought and the sacrifices I had to make to family life during the academic year. I usually got to make that up in the summers, which for many years provided me with almost total freedom. As a close colleague of mine is fond of saying, the faculty life is the best gig in town, despite the pay.
Work the Job
When I went into administrative work, I took my faculty mindset with me. There was a job to be done, and I did it, even if that meant working after hours. Moreover, my first administrative job was managing adult degree completion programs, a position that necessarily entailed evening work.
Don’t mistake me for a workaholic. I had a pretty good sense of work-life balance. I was always there for birthdays, holidays, anniversaries, etc. I did take time off, and that time became very precious to me. But my years as a faculty member instilled in me a work ethic I followed throughout my administrative career and that I extolled to all of my direct reports. Here’s how I encouraged my administrative staff (including hourly employees to work).
It’s About Priorities
It’s not about the clock or the calendar. It’s about priorities. When what was going on at home was more important than what was going on in the office, I went home, regardless of the day or time. And when what was going on at the office was more important than what was going on at home, I came to work. The nature of that work established that the most important hours to be at work were business hours, and the most important days to work were the days of the business week. But sometimes the priorities of the office meant that we had to come in early or work late. Still, I told my employees that family comes first and that we would cover for one another when what was going on at home rose above the demands of office tasks. But I’ve never been an always-quit-at-five kind of worker. And I’ve never been happy working with workers who are.
If we keep our eyes on our priorities instead of the time clock or work calendar, we can live more balanced lives while still excelling in our work. I commend this work ethic to you as I have commended it to my workmates over the years. It need not require workaholism, work-life imbalance, or the exploitation of hourly employees. But it does require commitment to a commonly-held set of priorities. If our offices are going to run smoothly, we need to make explicit exactly what those priorities are and how we will respond to them as a team.
Suggestions for Maintaining A Team-Oriented Office Atmosphere
The priorities I’m talking about require a team-oriented work ethic that maintains the proper balance between the needs of individuals on the team and the goals of the organization. Here are a few basic principles I’ve tried to follow (with varying degrees of success) and that can contribute to this balance.
Align Goals with Values
As leaders, we should constantly re-examine our goals to make sure that they align with our stated values. Once these alignments are established, we should communicate that alignment regularly and consistently to our staff. I routinely did this at the beginning of every new employee’s work with us. But in retrospect, I should have held periodic staff training sessions or workshops where I reiterated the philosophical foundations of work in our office. Things and people change over time. Alignment can deteriorate over time. Employees on board with the office philosophy at the beginning may begin to disagree with it later on. Relationships can grow over time, or differences may fester into real interpersonal problems. If I had regular meetings with my whole staff to reiterate the office philosophy, I would have kept a better handle on evolving problems before they reached a more serious level.
Promote Open Communication
Promoting open communication is about much more than talking openly. It is also about building and protecting trust between you as the leader and those you lead. Your employees need to know they can come to you with problems and objections without fear of retribution. I consistently avoided punishing employees for expressing their heartfelt concerns about operations to me. But I sometimes failed to convince employees that they would not be punished if they were open with their criticisms. Hence, despite my efforts to the contrary, workers sometimes didn’t think they could come to me with problems that really needed solving.
To prevent your repeating my error, I recommend you place the highest priority on effective communication by investing large amounts of time in relating to your employees on a personal level and not only when there is a problem or you need something from them. That habit will help you build a reservoir of relational capital that you can use effectively. If that reservoir of trust is there, you can use that effectively to promote frank exchanges about problems without employees being afraid or hesitant of being totally honest.
Encourage Collaborative Decision-Making
Related to open communication is the need to promote collaborative decision-making. The subject of collaboration is complex and means many (and sometimes contradictory) things to different people. I believe strongly in collaboration, but am certainly no expert on the subject. Some believe collaboration requires transparency, an issue I tried to deal with in my previous post on transparency. While I don’t believe collaboration necessarily requires transparency, it does require a healthy dose of the trust that I described in the previous section. The times I failed to collaborate successfully were always due to a trust deficit of some sort, either within me or within others who worked with me.
We encourage collaboration by acting upon it with the same verve with which we talk about it. It starts with the basics: ask people what they think. The subsequent steps are likewise clear, even if sometimes they are hard to act on consistently. Bring people with diverse opinions together. Engage in discussions objectively, and be honest with yourself and with others about any preconceived notions you have about solving the problem. Sometimes collaboration can be as simple as voting on an issue. But more often, it requires the leader to take concrete steps to make everyone feel enfranchised in the process and the outcome. In the end, encouraging collaboration requires attention to the emotional dimensions of decision making as much as the mechanics of the deliberative process.
Track Progress on Goals and Celebrate Victories
It’s always good to track progress on your workplace environment goals. Keep in mind that unless you have these environmental goals written out and placed into some sort of plan, there will be no way to measure their effectiveness. Once you have them written out, place them in documents such as your office’s strategic plan, employee evaluations, and perhaps an annual workshop.
Finally, it’s always good to celebrate victories. So be generous to your office staff by planning celebratory gatherings that give you the chance to remind others in your office of the progress the group has made during the year. Also, use this meeting to let your employees know how much they mean to you. This is a time to look past problems and to concentrate on progress.
I admit I didn’t always take my own best advice on these four points. That leads to a final point: we are all works in progress, including both employees and their leaders. Take my advice, learn from my mistakes, and help foster the creation of a truly unified team that will accomplish great things for your college or university.