Respect vs. duty: The Forgotten Power of Complicity

Respect vs. duty: The Forgotten Power of Complicity

In any hierarchical relationship there is the a social contract in play.  You may ask “Why are you writing about this, Aaron?” and you’ll see that it makes a difference to your clients how your employees feel about their work and workplace.

This image comes to mind…

underpaid worker

This whole thing is related to broken window theory.  The less you maintain your workplace the less people respect it, the more you maintain it the better people feel about being there.  As the owner of your business, you have to provide a number of things to your employees to make sure that they feel that they are respected and honoured individuals in the work place.  If you can manage this you will create something far more important than DWYL(do what you love).  Because people are far more interested in working at a place that respects them and treats them as honoured members of the team than they are in simply getting paid.  That doesn’t mean we can underpay workers it just means that once fair wages are in place we have to begin with aspiration management.  So I will argue that as both employee and employer, the most important feature of our personal self-respect is the ability to accomplish goals and advance our perception of what we think we should be doing.

So should you love your job? No, but you should be able to respect what you do and the people that you do it with and for.  When we get up in the morning and we look forward to working with our co-workers, because we have fun together, the world is a different place.

When we get up in the morning and you’re going to work with a gang of morons, it’s harder to get out of bed.  So choose people and employees based on whether you think that you can respect them.

Now I walk into two different businesses and here is what happens

1) respect absent:

There is tension in the environment and the people destined to serve the clients are under motivated.  They are there to collect their pay-cheque until they find another job.  I am disinterested to buy here because I become uncomfortable in the environment.

2) Respect present:

People are having fun and like to work with the people in their environment and feel more at ease working as a team.  I get better service and am at ease dealing with the people, because I am also being respected in the environment.

So the more effort you put into maintaining the excellent relations inside your company the better your client relations will be and the more your business will flourish.

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