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We have all seen it happen in workplaces around the country. An employee is passed over for a promotion. Another employee’s ideas are rejected by senior management. And still another feels they were not recognized for a job well done.

What do they all have in common? They become disgruntled. And often their disgruntlement spreads like a poison throughout the organization. Here are some specific steps your organization can do to help them refocus on the job at hand.

Nagaholics

First let’s establish the fact that the organization may not be able to help everyone. Some employees sink so low into negativity that throwing them a lifeline simply does not work. Nagaholics (negative people) spread their poison like a venomous snake and often reach a point of no return. Your mission is to know when that disgruntled employee has reached that point.

For employees the organization feel can be rehabilitated, here are seven powerful refocusing strategies you can employ:

1. Have A Sit Down With Them: My 37 plus years of experience in the military, government, corporate America, and as a consultant to these very industries has taught me a valuable lesson, which is, people want to be heard. They want to feel valued and respected. Often the disgruntled employee feels someone at sometime has disrespected them. A simple sit with them will often work wonders.

2. Listen To Them: When I say listen, I mean really listen. When you let people talk, they often solve their own problem(s). What they really wanted was to have someone listen to them. Listening to people is a skill that Dale Carnegie in his powerful book “How To Win Friends and Influence People” places in high extreme. So become a great listener.

3. Value Their Opinion: I recently spoke to an organization whose primary management staff was all under the age of 27 years old. The biggest problem they had was each of these young leaders treated the employees underneath them as ones having no brains or opinions. Experience teaches when you listen to others opinions; you just may find some jewels. Learn to value your employees’ opinions.

4. Be Inclusive: Everyone wants to be a part of something special and feel their contribution to the organization really does count for something. Go over again with the employee how their work impacts the organization as a whole. Even if they are a janitor, make them feel like the president of the company could come by at any time, and we’d like to know that you take your job seriously. Be inclusive. Remind them that they matter.

5. Find Their Triggers: Organizations like to talk about their mission and where they are headed. But when is the last time an organization sat down with its workers and got to know where they hope to go. Do they have a child headed to college, and worried about how they will pay the tuition? Are they caring for a sick parent or child? People work for themselves, not the company. They work at the company to accomplish their personal goals, not the goals of the company. So find what triggers the disgruntled employee to keep coming back, and help them succeed.

6. Reward Good Performance: What employees crave more than anything is recognition. Experience teaches money is a poor motivator. Employees want to be held in high esteem when they do a good job. And they want to be recognized in the company of their peers. Always recognized 10-20 percent of your workforce at meetings. Good performance then becomes contagious; because other employees will enjoy being recognized as well.

7. Love Your People: If you have supervisors trying to lead people they don’t particularly care for or care about, employees will know. People can smell a phony a mile away. It blows my mind the number of people who work in the hospitality field, but dislike people. Its call hospitality for a reason. Learn to love your people, and if you are in an industry you hate, and you dislike the people in that industry- do yourself and everyone else a big favor-get out. Bottom line let the disgruntled employee know you care.

Summary

There are ways to disarm disgruntled employees before they become a problem both mentally and legally. This white paper explores seven specific ways to accomplish disgruntled employee disarmament.

© 2009 Cubie Davis King. All Right Reserved Internationally.