Emotional Tornados in Your Workplace Can Be Just as Destructive as the Natural Kind! ¿You will find Dr. Vali¿s book to be both an excellent read and a great catalyst for generating new ideas about how these concepts could be incorporated in your mission statement. If you are open-minded about BCM, I suggest you read this book now and start applying its principles well before the next major incident impacts your organization.¿ ¿ Lyndon Bird FBCI, Technical Director, Business Continuity Institute
Finally – a people management guide that goes way beyond the typical "problem employee" books to help you understand and manage the entire emotional culture of your organization. Many of us have witnessed – sometimes in helpless horror – how a simple problem can spin into a corporate crisis as people take sides, outside professionals are brought in, and company reputations suffer, as this description illustrates: "Everything was exposed and raw as if a common energy had stripped away the veneer of civilized behaviors...People took sides, hid, ran, quit, overworked, underworked, ate too much, drank more, complained more, went silent, changed jobs, exited. They reacted as if all their system had been tossed into the air and was never going to land again." This wasn't the scene of a criminal act, earthquake, or terrorist attack. Rather, it was the disruptive and costly outcome of months of escalating workplace tension in the wake of changed management policies. Like a tornado, two violent co-workers had left 600 others in emotional rubble. That company could have been prepared with corporate policies and procedures to defuse such emotionally charged situations - long before alarming human and financial costs hit its bottom line. Managers could have learned to recognize and stop “emotional spinning” from gathering destructive force. The old paradigm of separating humans from humanity during work hours is not only antiquated thinking, it's high risk corporate behavior. “Dr. Vali” calls her ground-breaking solution Emotional Continuity Management. She provides tools you can use right now to avoid costs in decreased productivity, injured goodwill, employee turnover, plummeting employee engagement, and severed business relationships.In this practical book, Dr. Vali gives you: Real-life case studies that show you how to calculate bottom line, dollars and cents costs of disruptive employees and managers and emotionally charged incidents. Proven techniques to help you identify variations in behavior that are early warning signs of trouble. She compares them to “tornado warnings” and provides a 5-point scale. An understanding of the psychology driving “emotional terrorists,” who stage themselves as victims and gather an army of acolytes to assist in their campaigns of emotional disruption, and a game-plan for managing such attacks before, during and after an event. Practical tools for managing workplace emotions before, during and after an emergency, based on the author’s extensive on-the-ground experience in counseling first responders and victims during major national and international disasters. Policies and procedures for working with military veterans returning to the workplace - and the need to deal with PTSD. Techniques for containing and mitigating the damage created by workplace bullies - and when to decide if an "amputation" is required or a less-extreme strategy is needed. Sample policies and plans, and detailed instructions for company-wide training programs, up and down the organization.
This study is designed to advance the understanding of the causes and effects of emotions at work and extend existing theories to consider implications for the management of emotions.
The key to understanding how your manager calculates your real value—and how to boost it More than anything else, you need to understand exactly how your employer evaluates you, and your annual performance review doesn't tell the whole story. In The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace, Cy Wakeman shows how to calculate how your true value to your organization by understanding your current and future potential against your "emotional expense"—the toll your actions and attitudes take on the people around you. With Cy's clear, straight-to-the-point advice, you can confront and reduce your emotional costliness, become an invaluable member of your team, and even learn to love your job again. Reveals a formula for measuring your current performance, future potential, and the biggest detractor, your emotional expense Shares real-world advice for quickly boosting your value and becoming a highly-valued, sought after employee and teammate Builds on the lessons in Reality-Based Leadership, Cy Wakeman's first book for leaders and managers The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace is the essential guide for boosting your value, owning your career, and becoming the kind of employee no organization can afford to lose.
Today's consumers demand not only services and products that are of the highest quality, but also positive, memorable experiences. This essential guide shows how organizations can leapfrog their competitors by learning how to add emotional value -the economic value of customers' feelings when they positively experience products and services -to their customers' experiences. Janelle Barlow and Dianna Maul, with more than forty years combined experience in the service industry, detail five practices for adding emotional value to customer and staff experiences.
From Gemma Hartley, the journalist who ignited a national conversation on emotional labor, comes Fed Up, a bold dive into the unpaid, invisible work women have shouldered for too long—and an impassioned vision for creating a better future for us all. Day in, day out, women anticipate and manage the needs of others. In relationships, we initiate the hard conversations. At home, we shoulder the mental load required to keep our households running. At work, we moderate our tone, explaining patiently and speaking softly. In the world, we step gingerly to keep ourselves safe. We do this largely invisible, draining work whether we want to or not—and we never clock out. No wonder women everywhere are overtaxed, exhausted, and simply fed up. In her ultra-viral article “Women Aren’t Nags—We’re Just Fed Up,” shared by millions of readers, Gemma Hartley gave much-needed voice to the frustration and anger experienced by countless women. Now, in Fed Up, Hartley expands outward from the everyday frustrations of performing thankless emotional labor to illuminate how the expectation to do this work in all arenas—private and public—fuels gender inequality, limits our opportunities, steals our time, and adversely affects the quality of our lives. More than just name the problem, though, Hartley teases apart the cultural messaging that has led us here and asks how we can shift the load. Rejecting easy solutions that don’t ultimately move the needle, Hartley offers a nuanced, insightful guide to striking real balance, for true partnership in every aspect of our lives. Reframing emotional labor not as a problem to be overcome, but as a genderless virtue men and women can all learn to channel in our quest to make a better, more egalitarian world, Fed Up is surprising, intelligent, and empathetic essential reading for every woman who has had enough with feeling fed up.
Since the 1970s, the study of emotions moved to the forefront of sociological analysis. This book brings the reader up to date on the theory and research that have proliferated in the analysis of human emotions. The first section of the book addresses the classification, the neurological underpinnings, and the effect of gender on emotions. The second reviews sociological theories of emotion. Section three covers theory and research on specific emotions: love, envy, empathy, anger, grief, etc. The final section shows how the study of emotions adds new insight into other subfields of sociology: the workplace, health, and more.
Over 55% of your day is spent listening; yet only 2% of us have been trained in how to listen. What is poor listening costing you? Do you rush from meeting to meeting, your head buried in the last conversation you had, without time to think of the next? Or feel frustrated with unproductive discussions where the loudest in the room adds limited insight and drowns out everyone else? We usually think of these situations as communication problems; that we have not spoken our needs correctly or clearly. Yet, conflict, chaos and confusion are the costs of not listening. Many communication and listening books say the most important person in a conversation is the speaker - not true! This pocket-sized guide will help you to reconnect with your innate gift of deep listening, to create the right space to listen to yourself before you listen to others. You'll learn to listen beyond the words that are spoken, to add context and meaning and listen in to what's not being said. Deep Listening will help you move from confusion and conflict to thoughtful, insightful and powerful discussions that will transform not just your work, but your whole life.
Annotation Reasonable variations of human emotions are expected at the workplace. People have feelings. Emotions that accumulate, collect force, expand in volume and begin to spin are another matter entirely. Spinning emotions can become as unmanageable as a tornado, and in the workplace they can cause just as much damage in terms of human distress and economic disruption. All people have emotions. Normal people and abnormal people have emotions. Emotions happen at home and at work. So, understanding how individuals or groups respond emotionally in a business situation is important in order to have a complete perspective of human beings in a business function. Different people have different sets of emotions. Some people let emotions roll off their back like water off a duck. Other people swallow emotions and hold them in until they become toxic waste that needs a disposal site. Some have small simple feelings and others have large, complicated emotions. Stresses of life tickle our emotions or act as fuses in a time bomb. Stress triggers emotion. Extreme stress complicates the wide range of varying emotional responses. Work is a stressor. Sometimes work is an extreme stressor. Since everyone has emotion, it is important to know what kinds of emotion are regular and what kinds are irregular, abnormal, or damaging within the business environment. To build a strong, well-grounded, value-added set of references for professional discussions and planning for Emotional Continuity Management a manager needs to know at least the basics about human emotion. Advanced knowledge is preferable. Emotional Continuity Management planning for emotions that come from the stress caused by changes inside business, from small adjustments to catastrophic upheavals, requires knowing emotional and humanity-based needs and functions of people and not just technology and performance data. Emergency and Disaster Continuity planners sometimes posit the questions,?What if during a disaster your computer is working, but no one shows up to use it? What if no one is working the computer because they are terrified to show up to a worksite devastated by an earthquake or bombing and they stay home to care for their children?? The Emotional Continuity Manager asks,?What if no one is coming or no one is producing even if they are at the site because they are grieving or anticipating the next wave of danger? What happens if employees are engaged in emotional combat with another employee through gossip, innuendo, or out-and-out verbal warfare? And what if the entire company is in turmoil because we have an Emotional Terrorist who is just driving everyone bonkers?" The answer is that, in terms of bottom-line thinking, productivity is productivity? and if your employees are not available because their emotions are not calibrated to your industry standards, then fiscal risks must be considered. Human compassion needs are important. And so is money. Employees today face the possibility of biological, nuclear, incendiary, chemical, explosive, or electronic catastrophe while potentially working in the same cubicle with someone ready to suicide over personal issues at home. They face rumors of downsizing and outsourcing while watching for anthrax amidst rumors that co-workers are having affairs. An employee coughs, someone jokes nervously about SARS, or teases a co-worker about their hamburger coming from a Mad Cow, someone laughs, someone worries, and productivity can falter as minds are not on tasks. Emotions run rampant in human lives and therefore at work sites. High-demand emotions demonstrated by complicated workplace relationships, time-consuming divorce proceedings, addiction behaviors, violence, illness, and death are common issues at work sites which people either manage well? or do not manage well. Low-demand emotions demonstrated by annoyances, petty bickering, competition, prejudice, bias, minor power struggles, health variables, politics and daily grind feelings take up mental space as well as emotional space. It is reasonable to assume that dramatic effects from a terrorist attack, natural disaster, disgruntled employee shooting, or natural death at the work site would create emotional content. That content can be something that develops, evolves and resolves, or gathers speed and force like a tornado to become a spinning energy event with a life of its own. Even smaller events, such as a fully involved gossip chain or a computer upgrade can lead to the voluntary or involuntary exit of valuable employees. This can add energy to an emotional spin and translate into real risk features such as time loss, recruitment nightmares, disruptions in customer service, additional management hours, remediations and trainings, consultation fees, Employee Assistance Program (EAP) dollars spent, Human Resources (HR) time spent, administrative restructuring, and expensive and daunting litigations. Companies that prepare for the full range of emotions and therefore emotional risks, from annoyance to catastrophe, are better equipped to adjust to any emotionally charged event, small or large. It is never a question of if something will happen to disrupt the flow of productivity, it is only a question of when and how large. Emotions that ebb and flow are functional in the workplace. A healthy system should be able to manage the ups and downs of emotions. Emotions directly affect the continuity of production and services, customer and vendor relations and essential infrastructure. Unstable emotional infrastructure in the workplace disrupts business through such measurable costs as medical and mental health care, employee retention and retraining costs, time loss, or legal fees. Emotional Continuity Management is reasonably simple for managers when they are provided the justifiable concepts, empirical evidence that the risks are real, a set of correct tools and instructions in their use. What has not been easy until recently has been convincing the?powers that be? that it is value-added work to deal directly and procedurally with emotions in the workplace. Businesses haven?t seen emotions as part of the working technology and have done everything they can do to avoid the topic. Now, cutting-edge companies are turning the corner. Even technology continuity managers are talking about human resources benefits and scrambling to find ways to evaluate feelings and risks. Yes, times are changing. Making a case for policy to manage emotions is now getting easier. For all the pain and horror associated with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, employers are getting the message that no one is immune to crisis. In today''''s heightened security environments the demands of managing complex workplace emotions have increased beyond the normal training supplied by in-house Human Resources (HR) professionals and Employee Assistance Plans (EAPs). Many extremely well-meaning HR and EAP providers just do not have a necessary training to manage the complicated strata of extreme emotional responses. Emotions at work today go well beyond the former standards of HR and EAP training. HR and EAP providers now must have advanced trauma management training to be prepared to support employees. The days of easy emotional management are over. Life and work is much too complicated. Significant emotions from small to extreme are no longer the sole domain of HR, EAP, or even emergency first responders and counselors. Emotions are spinning in the very midst of your team, project, cubicle, and company. Emotions are not just at the scene of a disaster. Emotions are present. And because they are not?controllable,? human emotions are not subject to being mandated. Emotions are going to happen. There are many times when emotions cannot be simply outsourced to an external provider of services. There are many times that a manager will face an extreme emotional reaction. Distressed people will require management regularly. That?s your job
