I recently saw this post by Josh on Bear Blog, in which he presumes to give career advice based on an anecdote he heard about astronauts on the ISS, who supposedly referred to people who made things worse as -1s. While the astronauts in the anecdote didn’t explain what traits or behaviors made somebody a negative contributor, this blogger has some opinions of his own.
According to Josh, a -1 is somebody who...
- waits to be told what to do
- doesn’t ask questions
- gives up
- does the bare minimum
- avoids responsibility
- watches others struggle
- are boastful
- are unreliable
- are unenthusiastic
I only agree with Josh about -1s being boastful and unreliable. The rest don’t look like personal failings to me. They look like symptoms of a morale problem.
You know how you get people who wait to be told what to do, people who don’t ask questions, who give up or do the bare minimum, and avoid responsibility? First, start by not paying them enough to thrive as human beings. You get what you pay for, and while people generally want to earn their pay, we are learning to act our wage instead of going above and beyond for employers who will carry out layoffs even if they’re turning a healthy profit in order to earn bigger profits or juice their stock price. We’re also learning that we are not merely what we do for a living, and if we are not our jobs, and if there is more to life than a job, then maybe we shouldn’t be giving more effort to our jobs than they actually deserve.
As for initiative: if you want initiative, you have to prove it. You can’t micromanage. You can’t expect employees to merely follow orders. You can’t expect them to only use their brains when it benefits you, which means they might have opinions on not only how the work is done, but the uses to which their work is put.
Thus, if you’re making a product that the Likud regime in Israel can use to fuck over Palestinian civilians in Gaza, your employees might object to that. And if you threaten to fire people for raising objections, let alone actually do so, you have broken any trust your employees might have had. You do not want to remind them that the workplace is anything but democratic, and that they leave their human rights at the door.
As for people giving up: if you’ve discouraged initiative and made it clear that questions from employess are unwelcome, and people run into obstacles, what do you expect them to do? Why shouldn’t they give up? After all, you’ve demoralized them by treating them like robots. ‘Robot’, incidentally, comes from the English translation of Karel Capek’s 1920 play “R.U.R.” (“Rossum's Universal Robots”), from the Czech word robotnik.
But, you say, they should still take responsibility? I disagree. You don’t pay your employees enough for that. Responsibility means nothing without authority and ownership. If an employee does not own their work, and has no authority over how it is done or the uses to which it is put, then why should they take responsibility for it? Conversely, if you give a person authority without responsibility, you get a tyrant.
As for promotions: Any worker who accepts a promotion to management is a sucker, especially if they were paid hourly, making good money by getting time and a half for overtime work, and switching from hourly wages to a salary in the process. If you wonder why workers won’t accept promotions to greater responsibility, it’s because you demand too much of them and offer too little in return.
If you find that many of your co-workers or direct reports are negative contributors or -1s, look at the organization and yourself. People respond to incentives. If you are not incentivizing people to give their best, don’t complain when they choose not to offer it. You get what you pay for, and you aren’t paying enough.
After all, why should any of us put in the time and hustle if all we accomplish thereby is enabling our bosses to buy a new luxury car every year? Why should we be suckers? Bad enough we must work in the first place lest we wind up homeless, starving, and suffering from preventable disease because we live in a society that demands of us that we earn the right to exist. We have no reason or moral obligation to work any harder than we have to in order to earn a living.
The truth is simpler, and less palatable:
- We work too damn hard.
- We work too damn long.
- We get paid too damn little.
- We pay too damn much in taxes on what damn little we do get paid.
- The prices of everything but our labor keeps going up.
Given these conditions, why should anybody sacrifice themselves on the altar of productivity? The social contract is bullshit. If hard work paid off, single mothers would be billionaires; nobody works harder than they do.
If that upsets you, and you own a business or run one, look in a mirror before you blame your workers and complain that “Nobody wants to work anymore.” It’s almost as old a complaint as the one about young people holding their elders in (frequently well-earned) contempt. Nobody wants to hear that bullshit from you anymore. Not unless you’re going to pay us to listen.
Instead, listen to what workers are telling you: Pay more, trust us to know what we’re doing, and don’t expect us to not act like Americans with the right to freedom of speech when we’re on the job. The way businesses are run like private dictatorships in this country, it’s a miracle there isn’t more workplace violence. Dictatorial bosses get away with entirely too much. That includes blaming demoralized workers for their own demoralization.