Episode 18 – Minimizing Workplace Negativity

 

Welcome to the TRSA podcast. Providing interviews and insights from the linen, uniform, and facility services industry. Most Americans might not realize it, but they benefit at least once per week from the cleanliness and safety of laundered, reusable linens, uniforms, towels, mats and other products provided by various businesses and organizations. TRSA represents the companies that supply, launder, and maintain linens and uniforms. And in this podcast, we will bring the thought leaders of the industry to you.

 

Welcome back to another episode of the Linen Uniform and Facility Services podcast, interviews and insights by TRSA. I’m your host, Jason Risley. On a previous episode of the podcast, I spoke with the disc wizard, Nancy Roberts, a certified behavioral analyst, to find out how commercial laundry operators can identify and hire the right employees and retain that talent once they join your team. Unfortunately, we had a few technical issues, and I got some feedback from listeners that the interview was difficult to hear. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts as they help us improve future episodes of the podcast.

 

If you have anything to share with us, please send a message to podcasts attrsa.org. With that said, if you are looking forward to hearing Nancy’s thoughts on recruitment and retention, I have a treat for you today. Nancy recently spoke at TRSAs Production Summit and Plant Tours in Dallas about minimizing workplace negativity to boost production. Without further ado, let’s listen in on Nancy’s presentation. Thank you.

 

In 1997, I was fortunate enough to land my dream job with a small consulting company in my hometown of Rochester, New York. And it was a dream job for about 3 years until they hired a VP of sales from a large corporation to come and help our small consulting business grow. And she was very successful in corporate America and they were excited about what she was gonna bring to our company. Now, how many of you are familiar with DISC? Okay.

 

So a few of you. So, she was the type DI and for those of you who don’t know what DISC is, the DISC model it’s a 4 factor behavioral model that categorizes people into 4 categories. D, I, S, and C. So d is dominance and I is influence. So she was a combination of those 2.

 

When she was in her influence mode, she was awesome. She was people oriented. She was friendly. She was gregarious. She was so warm and just, you know, wanted to be your best friend.

 

How was vacation? How were the kids? Etcetera. But when she switched over her d mode into d mode dominance, she became like a different person. She was aggressive.

 

She was forceful. She was, you know, kinda in your face, and at times she was downright rude. And she completely changed the tone when she ever she came into the office. For about a year this went on and I I tried to steer clear of her. You know, I would see her treat the admin staff one way and then the upper level and the owners a different way, and I just tried to stay out of her way.

 

After about a year, one day the 2 owners called me into the conference room and they sat me down and they said, we wanna know what you think of Lori. We wanna know what you really think of Laurie, I think is what they said. And I’m sorry, I’m a high eye myself. I can’t hide what I’m thinking or feeling. I had tears spring to my eyes.

 

That’s how emotional I had been about this situation with her and how worked up I was about it, that the moment they asked, I got triggered, and I said you know, it was one of those do or die moments, you know? I said I don’t trust her, and I gave them specific examples as to why and 2 weeks later she was gone. Now I’d love to think that it was just my first person testimony that actually showed her the door, but in reality what I found out happened was she had lied to one of the owners and it kind of tipped them off to what they might be dealing with and I was just one of the few employees that they brought in to ask what their experience had been like with her. So when I looked back over that year once she was gone, it was amazing when she was gone to see the difference in the company. The, the positivity that came back, sort of the life and the culture that came back, after this negative influence was gone.

 

Now I know that negative toxic people and situations aren’t always that easily dispatched. I wish they were, because if they were that easily taken care of, we wouldn’t have statistics like I’m about to show you. I always say no presentation is a good presentation unless it starts with very scary statistics. So here’s negativity by the numbers. We’re just gonna pick one one trait of rudeness.

 

98% have experienced rudeness in the office. 80% have lost time worrying about the incident. 78% feel their commitment decline when they’re, you know, experienced that rudeness. 25% have taken frustration out on a customer and I bet that percentage is a lot higher who’s taken it out on another coworker. Right?

 

Isn’t there sort of that domino effect? Someone’s rude and then triggers somebody and then they treat you a certain way? And then here’s probably the craziest one. 12% have left their jobs over rudeness and here’s what’s interesting. What I found out after this woman was gone, our admin assistant who’d been with the company about 5 years, she was getting ready to leave, and one of the main reasons was because of that other woman’s behavior.

 

So when you lump all this together, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics has their own calculation or their own scary statistic, and they have estimated that negativity cost businesses $3,000,000,000 a year due to harmful effects. 3,000,000,000. So one of the number one questions I get asked by clients when I come to do a team building or I should say their team asks is are we gonna do trust falls? Like, are we gonna sing Kumbaya? Like, they always look at this team building stuff that we do as, like, warm and fuzzy.

 

Right? The soft stuff of business. Well, that’s a pretty hard number if you ask me, and I do believe that if most people knew what things like negativity were costing their business, they would raise raise the flag and say, okay. We need a solution. We need to figure this out.

 

But before we solve it, let’s look at what what negativity looks like. Right? What are we talking about here? So sometimes when you say negativity, people think of this guy. How many of you have worked for him?

 

In some form Oh. Is your boss here? Is that the problem? I worked for him. That was my first boss ever was this guy.

 

Of course, there was a tool and die manufacturing company so he didn’t have that suit on. But that was him. He was known for throwing hammers across the plant floor. Hammers. Not not verbal hammers.

 

Physical hammers. Sometimes we think negativity looks like this. Right? Where it actually becomes a fisticuffs. But more often than not, this is what negativity looks like.

 

It’s the person in their office who can’t function because of something toxic or negative that’s happening. The first laundry I ever worked with was in Mississippi, and I was hired by a high dominant CEO to come down there and work with his team. I’m sorry. Fix his team. Right?

 

So, of course, I get there and I I meet with everyone and I talk to everyone and I, talk with his plant manager or actually one of his production managers, who told me that when this aggressive dominant CEO comes through the plant, like he does, and, and he’s yelling and confrontational, he said I I get so upset I have to go in my office and shut the door and I can’t work for a couple of hours when it gets really bad. Now when you hear that depending on your DISC style you might come come on really dude, 2 hours? You know? But I will tell you that there are, in the styles one in particular style that cannot work with confrontation and negativity around them. And here’s the thing, your plant floors are probably filled with 50% of this style and brain scans have shown that when this style gets confronted like that or is, like, you know, toe to toe with confrontation like that their brains actually shut down.

 

They can’t function. So we might wanna go, you know, just I almost said something I probably shouldn’t say. Stride on a pair. We might wanna say that, but but, honestly, their brains have have literally shut down. So when I shared this with this CEO about his production manager, of course, he had a negative reaction to begin with, like, just buck up, you know, but when he really got it was when I said, now multiply this by how many times you lose your temper in a month or a year or a week and multiply that by how many of your production managers are this style And you start to see the productivity that this is costing you.

 

And this more than ever anything else got through to the CEO when I started talking the numbers. So if we’re gonna talk about not eliminating negativity, reducing negativity, we have to talk about cause and effect. Right? When you ask people what’s the cause of negativity, a lot of time they’re gonna give you these things. You know, downsizing, understaffing, we’re being asked to do more than we’ve ever done.

 

Demanding customers, I hear that one all the time, lack of trust in leadership, all of these things are given as the possible cause. The effects, we’re all really familiar with these. Right? Blaming, finger pointing, complaining, rudeness, pessimism, those are kind of the behavioral or personality traits we end up dealing with as the effect. But what if those things on the left hand side are not actually the cause of negative?

 

What if those external events aren’t the cause at all and there’s something a little bit more internal, a little bit more insidious that causes negativity. Well, I wanna show you this. And actually, Kevin this morning, when he was speaking, mentioned the book of the Success Principles, right, by Jack Canfield. Some of you wrote it down. If you wrote it down or it intrigued you at all by what he said I really strongly encourage you to get this book.

 

I think one of the first principles is this model E plus R equals O. Has anybody seen this model before? Anybody maybe have that book? Okay. Sounds like everybody’s gonna jump on Amazon.com and get this book.

 

So here’s what this model says. The event plus the response equals the outcome. And the best way to understand it is to actually read it backwards. So every outcome you achieve is actually based on how you respond to a previous event. Every outcome in your life is based on how you respond to a previous event.

 

Now, why is that significant? It’s significant because the vast majority of people live their life as if the event dictates their outcome. Right? How many people do we know that blame their problems on the government? Taxes.

 

I’m from New York state. Right? Of course I blame taxes. On their spouse. On their upbringing.

 

On the weather. Right? There’s so many things that people external events that people look to to blame why they are where they are, what their certain circumstances are. So let me give you an example. Back in 2007, 2008, when we were fully into that, that particular recession, As you know, Lexus, car companies were having a hard time getting people to buy.

 

Right? When a recession hits, people stop making big purchases. So there was a Lexus dealership that just like a lot of dealerships was really struggling with lack of sales. Nobody was coming into the showrooms. One of the salespeople got an idea and said, well, hey.

 

If people aren’t coming to us, why don’t we take the cars to them? So they took a fleet of beautiful brand new Lexus to, I don’t know if it was the yacht club or golf club or country club or whatever it was, but imagine you’re coming out of your country club because we all belong to 1, right? So we come out and here’s this beautiful fleet of cars to test drive. So you go for a test drive in one of these cars and you come back and you get in your old car and what do you think? Oh, man.

 

There’s no new car smell. Right? Suddenly their sales started taking off just by doing this one thing different. So think about that. One salesperson said, well, the event is the recession.

 

We’re probably not gonna single handedly change that. People aren’t coming into our showrooms. We can’t seem to change that, so what we’re going to do is we’re going to change our response and we’re gonna go out and do something different and look at what they did. They changed their outcome while other dealerships were going out of business this dealership watched their sales increase. Here’s another example.

 

So Mary Kay, everybody knows cosmetic company and some of you might know the the story of the success of Mary Kay. However, most people don’t know the beginning of the story and the beginning of the story is when she was going to open that business, she was a sales force. Like, she was the number one saleswoman of every company she ever sold for before she started this business, but her husband was gonna be, her business partner. He was like the the more introverted, you know, numbers guy. He was gonna do finance and operations for the company.

 

30 days before the company opened he dropped dead of a heart attack at the breakfast table. So in one fell swoop she lost her husband and she lost her business partner. The experts in her life at that time, her attorney, her accountant, etcetera, they said, Mary Kay, close the doors, liquidate the inventory, and shut it down. Otherwise, you’re gonna go bankrupt. That’s what they told her.

 

She obviously made a different decision and she decided to bring her son into the business to replace her husband, the role he was gonna fill. And as they say, the rest is history. Yes? Mary Kay has been around for over 50 years. It’s a multimillion dollar international company and they have the claim to fame of making more women millionaires than any other business opportunity that’s ever existed.

 

So that was her response to an event. Right? She changed her response. She got a different outcome. Now had she gone to bed for 6 months to mourn the loss of her husband nobody would have blamed her.

 

Right? That’s that’s kind of a normal response, but she changed her response and look at the outcome. Have I driven that point home enough? So here’s a question for you. What changes our response?

 

How how come one person has one response to an event but another person has a completely different response? Our beliefs. What else? Your attitude. Your DISC profile.

 

Right? What if this all led to DISC? What if everything in the universe just leads to DISC? Your experience, so your past. Right?

 

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All those things factor into how we respond to events, but there’s something that’s a little bit more insidious, and it happens instantaneously, and most people don’t even know that it happens, and that is that we tell ourselves a story. The moment an event happens, we cannot help but tell a story about it based on those things, our beliefs, our attitudes, our past, our history, our disc style, all those things come into play and it is our stories that create our response and therefore our outcomes. Let me give you an example of this. If there’s a car accident and there are 10 eyewitnesses on the scene and a policeman tries to get one report what does he say? How many how many reports or stories does he get?

 

10. Right? One car accident, one event, 10 stories based on everybody’s vantage point. Right? Everybody looked at the the accident from a different place.

 

Everybody brought their own beliefs. I believe that people drive Escalades are arrogant, and they don’t care about other people on the road. And an Escalade was in the accident. You might think women are bad drivers, and the woman was involved in the accident. You might think red sports cars are always going too fast.

 

Everything you already know about traffic accidents and drivers, etcetera, is going to come to create your story when you see this accident. Now, this could have been me at a younger age. I have to admit I had a serious case of road rage and when I say a serious case of road rage I mean I had on the side of the road altercations with people. I had such bad road rage. Yeah.

 

2. 2 side by or side of the road altercations. When somebody would cut me off, I was so enraged. I would get on their bumper. I would flash my high beams.

 

I would lay on the horn. I was one of those, like, 30 seconds long, because I didn’t just want them to know what they did, I wanted everyone to know what they just did to me. I was filled with self righteousness when this would happen. When I learned e+r equals o, I realized, okay, I’m clearly not having the response I want to be having and I’m not having a good outcome so what’s the story I’m telling when this happens? There has to be a story.

 

The event is someone cut me off but that happens all the time and people don’t react the way I react. When I looked at it I realized my story was how dare they. They saw me, they did it intentionally, and they don’t care about other people. Right? They were despicable.

 

So that justified any retaliation I wanted to dish out. When I changed my story, I changed my response. So I consciously said, I’m just gonna tell a better story, so I don’t die and then kill somebody else. So I changed my story to, you know, maybe they just got fired. Maybe they dropped their coffee.

 

Maybe it’s a mom and she’s got a baby in the back of the seat and the kid threw a bottle at her head. I don’t know what. I would make up any story I could to not get triggered and not get angry, therefore control my response in order to have a better outcome. So I would have a better day. I didn’t drive around angry.

 

So it was only my story that had to change for me to get a different outcome. So let me ask you a question. And since there’s mostly gentlemen in the room a few ladies, mostly gentlemen I’m going to give you the scenario that works for you first. Let’s imagine that you go in the grocery store and you see your wife or significant other down an aisle talking to an extremely attractive member of the opposite sex. I don’t know if you consider this guy extremely attractive.

 

He’s the only good looking guy I could find in a grocery store. What’s your first thought? You see your wife or your significant other. Just shout it out. What’s your first thought?

 

She’s helping him. God, you know him too? He looks like a UPS driver. Any other thoughts you might not be expressing? How does she know him?

 

How long have they known each other? Alright. So ladies, I don’t wanna leave you out. Same scenario. You go in the grocery store and he’s talking to an extremely member of the opposite sex.

 

What’s your reaction? We’ll see if things. How does he know her? What the WTF. Thank you for your honesty, Pauline.

 

Thank you for your honesty. So I’ve asked this question by the way in like crowds of a 100 women and the responses are hilarious, right? But can you see that in this scenario based on the instantaneous story you would have, how that would determine the outcome of the evening you had that night, right? If you jump to a negative conclusion and think that there’s something fishy going on maybe based on your history. What if you’d been cheated on in the past?

 

Can you see how that would actually alter how you see the situation if that was part of your history? But if you have the situation if that was part of your history? But if you have the response of it, she’s probably helping them or maybe she’s giving them my business card. Right? I don’t know.

 

The response the story would not trigger an upsetting response and probably have a much better outcome. So once we start looking at these negative situations, it’s pretty natural to start asking what’s the difference between facts and stories. Right? Has anyone started to wonder that? And like, well, the answer is there’s gotta be some facts, right, in the world?

 

So let’s take a look at the difference between facts and stories so we can figure out what part of this might be stories. So facts are something you can see or hear. Observable behavior. If you didn’t witness it like in a court of law and you try and pass it off what do they call it? Hearsay.

 

Right? It’s not even admissible in a court of law because you didn’t see, hear it, or observe it. That’s fact face if you can see or hear it. Verifiable data. So something like an email with a timestamp or text messages nowadays or a time card, right, that was punched.

 

That’s considered verifiable data. You might not know who punched the time card but you can verify that it was punched. Years ago we had fax machines. You kids remember fax machines? Yeah.

 

Someday we’ll be saying that. Right? You remember fax machines? And we also call facts things that most people would readily agree upon. Now I will caution you to be careful with this one.

 

1. So when there’s a car accident, most people would readily agree that there was an accident or a collision and then everything after that is dependent on perspective. So, yes, this is a table. Right? A chair, a door.

 

We can all readily agree upon that but the caution comes in just because you can pull your friends into your point of view does not make it factual. Just because you can get other people to agree with you does not make it factual, Right? That interpretation or that spin that we put on it. Right? That interpretation or that spin that we put on it.

 

Judgment. Whenever judgment starts to come into the picture, good or bad, could be negative or positive, you’ve started to go into the territory of stories because facts by their very nature are neutral, but we as humans add judgment to those facts. Stories tend to attribute motives to other people’s behavior, So there’s something called the fundamental attribution error, and that’s a mouthful, but what it means is we judge ourselves based on our intent versus judging others based on their behavior. So if somebody’s late to a meeting, they’re irresponsible or disorganized or whatever it is, you know, and if that behavior goes on, now they don’t care about other people. They think their time is more valuable than ours.

 

Right? Like, we go right to their heart, like, we can see what they’re thinking, and we do that thing called character assassination. Oh, but lo and behold, we’re late to a meeting. Why is it? Important phone call.

 

Traffic. Accident. Something happened external outside of us to cause us being late. We don’t show up to a meeting and go, sorry guys, I’m just really irresponsible. Or I don’t care about other people’s time.

 

Right? So be careful of the fundamental attribution error where we give ourselves a free pass for behavior that when others do it we assassinate them. So I had a few questions as I meandered about and a couple of the questions were similar. There were, terms that were used like condescending and rude and aggressive or confrontational, etcetera, and they wanted to know if that was factual. So I’ll ask the audience is that factual?

 

What is that? It’s subjective. It’s interpretation and it’s labels. Right? If somebody stood 2 inches from your face and raised the decibel of their voice, Yeah.

 

I could see how that could be interpreted as them being confrontational. But if you say to somebody, I think you’re confrontational, what’s their response gonna be? No. I’m not. I wasn’t confrontational.

 

Right? I worked with a team where the, the the whole team gave the CEO feedback that they didn’t like his anger, that they couldn’t handle that he was so angry. He said I’m not angry, I’m passionate. So when you go with these labels to people, let’s say you try and have a crucial conversation with them about it, and you start off with these labels, people just get defensive. Because if they thought they saw themselves that way, wouldn’t they try and change if they thought they were coming across that way?

 

Another question was if I feel a certain way, is that fact or story? Like, I am angry. I’m frustrated is that fact or story. Your feelings are factual. Trust me.

 

Don’t ever try and tell someone they’re not feeling something they say they’re failing. Men men don’t do that. Right? Do not ever tell a woman she’s not feeling what she’s feeling. So the the fact is they’re feeling that way.

 

Why they’re feeling that way may very well be a story and quite frankly is often a story. Okay? So the whole reason we go through this process is not to excuse the other person’s behavior. Right? That would be a little naive to think that nobody ever behaves in a way that’s not right.

 

The the point of this process is to give you emotional freedom when you’re dealing with these issues Because if you’re stuck in your story, you’re emotional about it. But if you stick to the facts, you bring objectivity back to the situation. So you don’t contribute to the negativity that’s already taking place. And here’s what I want you to take away from this. How you do anything is how you do everything.

 

People are creatures of habit, but what are the stories that you tell every single day costing you in your workplace? We are always telling stories because we are storytelling machines. We cannot help it. They are often less than positive assumptions and not factual, and they are responsible for most of the negativity that we experience. So in some way we end up perpetuating the negativity even when we’re not the cause of it.

 

So our outcomes that we get, negativity that we’re involved in, upsetting or irritating situations we find ourselves in, are the result of the cause, which is the story based on a previous event. Remember always to read this backwards. So here’s 4 steps how to take this information back to help minimize the workplace negativity in the workplace. The first step is model the ideal behavior yourself. Take a 100% responsibility for the stories that you tell and the reactions that you have based on them.

 

It starts with you. It’s like the saying be the change you want to see in the world, Right? I don’t have road rage anymore because I changed the stories I was telling myself. It can change your life. I’m I’m not being dramatic when I say this can change your life.

 

The second step is don’t ignore negative comments by others. Challenge pessimistic thinking and negative beliefs about people, the team, and the organization. So you know how people come in and complain in your office, right? When you start to recognize their stories, call them on it. I ask all the time, is that true?

 

Is that really true? Did you see that? How’d you witness that? To get people really grounded in the difference between facts and stories. The third step is train your leaders.

 

Invest in an E plus R equals O training for supervisors and managers. This is one of the things I do when I work with teams. This process is always built in in some way. And lastly, create a positive culture. Adopt e plus r equals o as an organizational value and mantra.

 

So it starts with you. Right? You master this, then it extends to others, then it extends to your team, and eventually it extends to your culture. And if you’re sitting there thinking, I don’t think my team will get this. I don’t think the company will understand it.

 

Let me tell you that there is a high school in Ohio, New Albany, Ohio, New Albany Eagles, Who has adopted E+R equals 0 as their mantra and they’re changing the culture of this school. The kids have wristbands that they wear. They have lanyards that have their IDs on it and the lanyards say e plus r equals o and you can ask any kid in the high school what that means and they will tell you their interpretation of it and I know this because my boyfriend’s children attend this school and when I asked his 15 year old daughter what does it mean to her she said that I’m responsible for everything that happens to me. A 15 year old Girl, imagine that. I’m responsible for everything that happens to me.

 

Imagine if your employees could have that kind of attitude and what would happen to negativity in your workplace. Thank you. If you’re interested in getting a copy of the slides from Nancy Roberts’ talk at TRSA’s production summit and plant tours in Dallas, send an email to podcast attrsa.org. Nancy also wrote an article for the May 2019 Pre Clean Show issue of Textile Services magazine titled How to Run More Effective Meetings. If you haven’t already, make sure you pick up the May issue of the magazine and read that article today.

 

If you have any questions for Nancy, you can get in touch with her at nancy@discwizardonline.com. That’s nancy@discwizardonline.com. If you liked what you heard today, make sure you go back and listen to all 18 episodes For For more information on the Linen Uniform and Facility Services podcast, visit www.trsa.org/podcasts.