Negativity is Infectious

Everyone has their bad days at work. But some employees have bad weeks – or even bad months.

While managers may be tempted to let frustrated employees blow off steam thinking that they’ll come around sooner or later, negative attitudes in the workplace can harm businesses drastically, from morale to the entire organizational culture. Here’s how:

Employees Become Less Engaged

We’ve all had been in the company of extremely negative coworkers at one time or another. It seems as if these individuals are pessimistic to the point that they’d probably find a reason to complain about an across-the-board raise for the entire team.

Today’s workers have so much on their plates. In fact, according to an Employee Engagement Report, nearly 70 percentof employees feel as though they are unable to tackle all of their job responsibilities each week. That’s tough enough as it is. Add in a coworker who’s constantly complaining about everything, and managing a workload gets that much more difficult. When negative attitudes infiltrate the workplace, employees become disengaged and less productive. And what does less productivity mean for a

business? Less revenue.

Loss of Creativity as Workers Focus on What’s Wrong

Brainstorming sessions are supposed to be fun. Workers get together and bounce ideas off one another until they hopefully come up with something fantastic. But these kinds of sessions will only be successful if workers are in good moods and don’t mind participating.

Rather than thinking about how their companies can become stronger, workers with negative attitudes are more likely to simply think about how much they hate their jobs. During brainstorming sessions, they become the proverbial wet blanket in the room, making everyone else uncomfortable. As a result, team creativity takes a dip for the worse – which stifles innovation.

Unhappy Employees Create Unhappy Customers

When employees are unhappy at work, it becomes increasingly unlikely they’ll be able to fake it with your customers. Eventually, they’ll take out their bad mood on their clients – which could very well cause those clients to take their business elsewhere. If that’s not bad enough, after they drop the company, clients may decide to vocalize their terrible experiences amongst their friends or, worse, across social channels.

According to an American Express study, folks are more than twice as likely to tell other people about their bad experiences compared to their good ones. That being the case, managers should be extremely wary when negative attitudes start to creep into the workplace.

They Also Create Additional Unhappy Coworkers

Even the most positive employees are bound to break down when they’re forced to work with extremely negative peers on a regular basis. So it’s only a matter of time before workers with negative attitudes rub off on other team members, bringing them down with them.

Nobody wants to be around someone who’s constantly talking about how terrible everything is. Since employee happiness is linked to productivity, managers would be wise to do everything they can to extinguish negative attitudes the moment they rear their ugly heads. Instead of letting problems fester, the company should be proactive and try to nip them in the bud as soon as possible.

There should be employee engagement platforms that enable employees to share their ideas and feelings anonymously, and so managers will be able to keep their fingers on the pulse of the team’s collective attitude. If managers see unwelcomed trends developing, they can act swiftly to improve morale by making appropriate changes.

The recipe for a healthy company includes happy workers with positive attitudes. Once it is noticed that the attitudes of any worker are beginning to take a turn for the worse, managers must intervene immediately. The rest of the staff – and the company’s bottom line – will be saved.

(www.tinypulse.com)