When your boss “informs” you on Friday that he expects you to come in on Saturday to do a project he just assigned you five minutes ago, you feel like he doesn’t respect you. When you work hard on a presentation, and then your boss announces that she’ll present it to senior management — with her name on it — you feel like she doesn’t respect you. When you hear all year about how valued you are, and how great you are and then get a one percent raise and a “meets expectations” performance review, you feel that your boss doesn’t respect you. It’s an extremely common thread in the workplace.
And, in fact, a recent Harvard Business Review survey found that 54 percent reported that their bosses don’t respect them. The survey looked at people across a wide range of industries and at a variety of levels, which means this problem isn’t unique to one industry.
To keep reading, click here: More than half of employees don’t feel respected
I felt like this battle was lost decades ago when companies stopped referring to employees as “people” and started calling us “resources”. I even worked for one company who, when putting teams together for projects, included employees on the same Resource Request form that was used to request equipment and other supplies.
It seems to me that a boss may treat an employee badly because he or she can. That is, overall, people often use others to satisfy their own needs–so long as they think they can get away with it. Conscience and right vs. wrong doesn’t really even occur to many. Bosses have more power than their employees and they use it when they can.
At least a segment of a person’s soul and behavior is mean-spirited or, in the extreme, evil. The source is our primal ancestry characterized by our native aggression. The only real question is how much of our aggressive evil will we permit to rise to the surface and vent.
Probably the first sign of the de-evolution of a society is having to explain that employees are humans. Corporate profits are at a record high, so I’m not sure what incentive there is right now to address employee dissatisfaction.