When the boss orders fun: companies rely on emotion management

Companies rely on feel-good managers to increase motivation. But can prescribed sport counteract the effects of reductionism and pressure to perform?

Recent reports suggest that managers now see threats as the most effective tool against employees. Volkswagen and ThyssenKrupp make it clear to employees that job security is only a glorified hope and that layoffs are possible at any time. These announcements will certainly be made even more aggressive in the current round of collective bargaining in the metal industry.

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But that’s not the only strategy that companies use – because managers and their advisors can do something different too. Organizing the “restart after the holidays” properly praises coach Christian Thiele the staff after returning from summer vacation. He provides “tips from behavioral and motivational research” that many employees receive from their superiors in the post-holiday team meeting after returning from summer vacation. .

“What do January 1, your birthday and starting a new job after a holiday have in common?” he asks the consultant: “They are “temporal landmarks” and therefore good times for new beginnings – and for changes. ” Positive thinking helps in the upcoming target agreement debate: “Healthy optimism helps you to be able to achieve realistic goals.”

Delegation is usually overpowered because people do not automatically strive for change. But Thiele sees “a much more helpful medicine than self-discipline: fun!” This is also true in private life. Healthier food is more likely “if we have fun doing it. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

In line with this, many corporations today are responsible for a good atmosphere that is supposed to improve the working atmosphere: “The Feelgood Manager is responsible for optimizing the working atmosphere in a company. of the needs of the people “The goal is to create a work environment in which employees feel comfortable and be more productive.” describes the Haufe Academy.

Positive Leadership as an Alternative to Personal Management

Managers are also sent to “advanced leader” seminars. “Positive leadership aims to focus on employees and their (positive) emotions to expand productivity and company success based on increased employee satisfaction,” explains Personio’s staff consultation.

Positive leadership extends from “individual to community to organizational level.” Managers face a particular challenge: “For positive leadership to work, you need managers and employees who are open to this approach,” the consultants said.

This is a tradition. Managers find tools to motivate their employees early. Henry Ford and FW Taylor, for example, still relied on central management and precise control at the beginning of business. Time checks, bonus payments and ordered transfer sequences on the assembly line were intended to increase production.

This control is also called top-down planning, because planning and control is done from the top down. But this performance control is not only important in production. Digitization enables workflow or call control systems in the call center. The related technical documentation and employee and customer data management make it easier to evaluate the individual work steps and thus control employees.

The latter control includes specifications from above, and is monitored by technical support. There are types of work organization that rely heavily on external control. In the first industrial companies, separate control departments were already established for this purpose.

But this also caused complaints from employees. Working by the book or sabotage by looking the other way at the right time is called management to action and looking for new ways.

Performance enhancement through “human relations”

As early as the 1930s, the “Human Relations” approach developed in the US, a direction in company personnel and social policy that emphasized the importance of interpersonal relationships in the company. In the Federal Republic, this approach was taken up by Guido Fischer, who founded, as a professor in Munich in the 1950s, an institute for the social practice of corporations.

The word “Human Resources” (HR) came up. HR refers to the professional and personal skills of individual employees and the resulting motivation. The idea is that those who are motivated can achieve more. One of the guiding principles for improving performance was “It goes the extra mile”.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Goleman’s bestseller “Emotional Intelligence” from the 1990s has also influenced management strategies. Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to perceive and deal with your own and other people’s emotions. So it’s another term for “emotion management”.

“The most difficult thing is to see emotions. Above all, not the obvious and terrible ones, but the subtle and subtle ones. Then you have to learn the language of emotions to understand their meaning. Emotion management can be learned, but it takes a lot of patience and practice.”, tells about career coach Peter Näf the situation today.

“Emotion management is a matter for the boss,” reports Jansen Consulting & Training. “Currently, managers need to be able to develop sensory acuity, recognize emotions early, assess them correctly and deal with them appropriately,” said the management consultant.

Companies use different instruments for this purpose: The daily “stand-up meeting” in agile teams, for example, aims to create a positive atmosphere, and the shared vision encourages the joy of creation in the group. At the “town hall meeting”, the gathering of all employees, the leader’s motivational speech aims to clarify the strategic direction.

Personal liability should compensate for entrepreneurial errors

Emotion management is almost like humanizing the world of work. But the interests of companies still come first. There is no fun at work and motivating work in a team is not possible if the project goals are set too high and positions are not filled because cost reductions are ordered.

“Personal skills help you to solve complex problems and not let problems or unexpected challenges stop you. They also make it easier to deal with stress,” says Dirk Schäfera product manager at Haufe Academy, clearly.

Personal liability should compensate for entrepreneurial errors in health protection and manpower planning. The health insurance companies report the impact of this. According to assessments by the commercial health insurance company KKH, they are Absence due to mental illness has increased significantly since 2017 – and reached its highest level so far last year: At the start of the assessment in 2017, there were 298 sick days for every 100 insured employees throughout the year, but now there are 388 days.