Organizations
can have very different work environments, including differences in the respect
they give to employees. Organizational cultures differ, and managers differ, in
whether they see employees and valuable and how well they acknowledge this.
Many organizations think that it makes a difference – notice how I used the
word “employee” just now, but actually words like “colleague” and “team member”
are frequent in actual work. Does this matter?
For
an example of how much this can matter – in a very special context – a recent paper in Administrative Science Quarterly by Kristie Rogers, Kevin Corley, and Blake Ashforth looked at an organization that operates professional call
centers as part-time work for selected inmates in prisons. Every day inmates go
to work in their orange jump suits (yes, just like in the TV series). Every day
they go back to the prison wing after working. But this work is not like the
demeaning chain gangs that we see in some old movies; the organization
(Televerde) values its inmate workers and gives them both encouragement and
respect.
So
what happens? The respect they get from their Televerde managers, and from
customers, changes lives. They get a specialized respect based on the value of
the work they do, and their performance, and this gives excitement and self-respect.
They get general respect from being seen as real people with lives and
accomplishments, not inmates with orange jumpsuits and numbers, and this gives
ideas of a changed and improved life. Together, these two kinds of respect, and
especially the general one, puts the inmate-workers on a path toward removing
themselves from their identities as current and future inmates, and attaching themselves
to a new identity as a professional doing legal and respected work out of
prison.
It
happens impressively fast. These changes were easy to see over a period of less
than a year (for most it was much faster), even though the Televerde workers
were still in the prison wing, with their old friends and controlling prison
wardens, every day after work. As part of the identity journey, they needed to
transition from their old thinking habits – the orange in their heads – to a
new way of seeing themselves as part of a regular civil society that they could
not yet reach because it was outside the prison walls. Remarkably, they were
able to not just see their inmate identity and their worker identity as
separate beings coexisting in their minds, they also could shift to a new and
holistic identity that would guide their lives after they were released from
prison.
Giving
workers respect is seen as important also in regular organizations, with no
inmate workers, but there is a certain degree of cynicism about its effect, and
there are also managers who don’t think it matters. After seeing how
transformative it can be under these conditions, when it is done honestly,
maybe it is time to reconsider.
