(Expansion) – One of the signs of how organizational awareness has matured in human issues is the identification of the phenomena of resignation and silent dismissal, which beyond being a problem as serious as active staff turnover, impacts not only in business results, but also in the well-being of employees and their families.
These practices have been called silent or passive, since their impact is less visible in the short term and sometimes it seems that nothing is happening, when in fact, at the roots of the work environment there is a large storm that affects individuals and teams. of work.
In short, both resignation and silent dismissal are today generating a high level of passive turnover in organizations, which is understood as the disconnection of the collaborator from their work objectives, generating a deterioration in the level of results for the business, with an even more complex consequence than active rotation, because in these silent cases, the possibility of identifying them becomes more difficult, given that it normally occurs because the relationship between the boss and his collaborator is broken and the “silence” hides the reality of one and the other. other.
To identify passive turnover , it is important to first define its two key causes: first, there is silent resignation , which is generated when the collaborator decides to stay in the company doing the minimum necessary in his job, this includes minimal communication, participation and contribution . Normally this is a situation known to their immediate boss, who probably does not have the tools or the interest to reconnect the collaborator with the challenges of their position and the possibility of growth or development.
On the other hand, silent dismissal can also occur, where the boss consciously or unconsciously decides to keep a collaborator in his work team, excluding him from the possibility of participating or contributing and on many occasions significantly limiting communication. In some cases, silent dismissal may be accompanied by workplace violence behavior by the work team, where the collaborator is excluded from meetings and projects or does not have the necessary information for the normal development of their work.
In any case, these phenomena of working life have a significant impact on the well-being of the group, of each person and even affect their families. The most interesting thing is that this does not only happen to the members of a team, a situation that we see today in organizations is the demotivation of many bosses who do not manage to lead their teams and even suffer from workplace harassment by their own collaborators. .
Power relations in companies have changed with the arrival of new generations, more vocal and less “obedient”. Today we hear many team leaders complain about the need to explain the purpose of each task and objective, and even in some cases, report mistreatment by the people in their charge.
Faced with this situation, there are three key actions that we can develop as a company:
1. Give responsibility to all the collaborators of a team for the improvement in the work environment. A lot of work has been done in companies to improve the work environment, however, almost all the responsibility is assigned to the team leader, where sometimes he even receives all the “pressure” to ensure that his reports are “happy”, which It is clearly an impossible task.
For this reason, many organizations are migrating to 360 climate thermometers, where the impact of each person on the team is measured regardless of the role they play. These relationship maps help identify the quality of formal and informal leadership, seeking to positively channel the relationships of all people towards the group’s objectives.
2. Connect each team member to the purpose of their role. Lately, more has been done to ensure that each person really understands the “why” of what each one does in the organization, in a broader context, that is, in the human impact of the task they perform; in other words, in the reasons that give meaning to the work of each person, beyond the economic contribution.
It is not an easy task, first because it must be sufficiently inspiring or relevant to the motivators of each person and, second, because it must be an ongoing task. In this sense, some organizations have implemented the practice of connecting support area collaborators with the end customer or consumer of their products and/or services, in such a way that they know first-hand the benefits that their task manages to generate in those groups of people.
3. Monitor the relationship between collaborators and leaders through crossed surveys, labor pulses or complaint lines. Passive rotation needs very constant and deep measurements to be able to be identified, for this reason an evolution of the monitoring mechanisms is required and even a crossing of measurements that manages to identify tendencies or symptoms that allow to determine this phenomenon.
Work environment surveys are no longer sufficient, the analysis of averages becomes inaccurate and dangerous, for this reason the participation of employees in internal risk monitoring networks is one of the tools that can contribute to timely intervention of this type. of organizational problems.
Ultimately, we need open and empathetic organizations, where emotional problems are treated with the same level of priority as issues that affect productivity, but above all, where people really feel good and want to achieve better things.
Editor’s note: Blanya Correal is an Industrial Engineer with more than 25 years of international experience in Human Resources and labor strategy, in various multinational companies such as Coca Cola Femsa, Danone and Nissan. She has been recognized for two consecutive years as one of the 30 best CHROs in Mexico and is in the top 20 of the ranking of the Most Powerful Women in Mexico, according to Expansión magazine. Follow her on . The opinions published in this column belong exclusively to the author.
