If you have had fathers who were in business or started on their own, you must have seen them screaming at the workers one time or another. The labour on a shop floor were known to lack responsibility and delay work due to inability to understand the repercussions of not completing a task in time or with the required quality of output.
Today, most of us work in air-conditioned offices and have labour who are well educated with several years of responsibility placed into learning a skill that is useful to a business. So has the reason for screaming vanished?
Were all our fathers incorrect in screaming at a worker. Was it necessary in those days? These are questions that do not have a right or wrong answer. In the end, we end up screaming at people to get a job done in a particular manner. Do they need to be screamed at? who cares as long as the job gets done!
We sometimes take our workers for granted and do not realize the importance of their presence to the business or to society. Our workers are probably the biggest asset we have, if you can scream at a worker several times and he/she still works with you. There are two reasons; firstly your reason for screaming is right or the worker wants to learn from you until a certain level of skill is attained or the worker is so inefficient that they cannot find another job! So when one screams at a worker consecutively, the worker is either inefficient or is below average, either way a loss to the business (thinking practically). Hence, there needs to be a level between you and the worker or the worker needs to find another place where their skill is more appreciated.
In all my days in service, I have found bosses who screamed at me, sometimes with good reason but most often for their self satisfaction. However, I do not believe that the screaming ever resulted in the job getting done any better than it would have minus the screaming!!
When one shows anger on the job, it is a mixture of their passion for their work, frustration from delays on or off work and personal tension. Most of the reasons for screaming are personal and do not belong on the work floor. Lets take a simple situation where a blunder has occurred at work. Instead of making two good cycles, a worker makes one cycle and a tricycle. If you are the boss, what would be your reaction?
Firstly, it is important to understand that the tricycle outcome is possible as more than one person missed the bus. Now this is frustrating, a loss of money and time and a waste of resources. So who do I scream at? There is no such thing as group screaming and any entrepreneur knows that screaming at everyone can only damage your voice and not get a single message across.
So do we call the 3 workers separately and scream at them one by one? Lets first scream at the guy who did not check the list of parts supplied against the order. Screaming at this guy is only going to make him mess up further. So the best solution might be to understand what went wrong first. This would tell us if there is something wrong in the process. Screaming at this guy would only make him quit the job assuming that he was not at fault and gave what was ordered.
If the second guy assembled the tricycle based on the order. Then the guy who wrote the order deserves a screaming! Well! what happens when you scream?
To the worker: –
Worker thinks he/she did the right thing but shit happens, does not deserve this kind of treatment, feels low esteem and complains about the boss; may finally quit on a bad note and may even cause damages due to frustration.
To you: –
Your body tends to behave like a pressure cooker. Which means that most of your organs get cooked when you scream, you say you are letting off steam. The only steam that you let out is objectivity, empathy, prudence or thoughtfulness and you may even cause harm to others.
Screaming has never done any good for any business and has no place in business. It does not solve a problem, while anger is a human emotion. Screaming is converting anger to aggression and aggression has lead to many a great businesses to its last straw.
While these are random thought that I share, would love to hear from you about your experiences and if you have had a situation that absolutely would not get solved without the use of aggression at work.
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