Various management systems

Must-know employee emotional management

The primary purpose of work is nothing more than to live a better life. But now, we are not getting closer to this original intention, but getting further and further away.

Society has entered a period of impetuousness, filled with six major tendencies and pathological psychology: materialization, vulgarity, indifference, restlessness, irresponsibility, exaggeration and falsehood. According to statistics, 26 million people in China suffer from depression, about 250,000 people die of suicide every year, and 1 million people attempt suicide. Seeking spiritual stability has become a common social need.

A US research study shows that for every US$1 invested by companies in employee emotion management projects, they can get a return of US$5 to US$7. San Francisco's Best Employers Institute ranks the world's best employers every year. According to the agency's survey, companies with happy employees have greater investment returns. According to a survey by Denison Consulting, between 1996 and 2004, the annual sales of companies with unhappy employees increased by only 0.1%, while the sales of companies with happy employees increased by 15.1% during the same period. In China, although there is no similarly clear data showing the effectiveness of employee emotion management, what is certain is that the sooner companies realize the importance of this issue, the sooner they will reap positive returns.

The tide of knowledge economy is getting higher and higher. Knowledge workers are people who master and use symbols or concepts, and work with knowledge or information. The realization of their potential has a lot to do with their emotions. With the development of China's economy and the changes in the social environment, the emotional loss of front-line employees caused by the Foxconn serial jump has attracted widespread attention from society. This can’t help but cause reflection in the human resources management practice community: employee emotion management not only involves knowledge workers, but also covers the entire human resources category. It should be a system in the practice of corporate human resources management and must run through all aspects of corporate human resources management. .

Interpretation

◎ Emotion

Emotion refers to the state of consciousness in which people experience happiness, sadness, fear, hatred, love and worry. It is often an exciting, intense emotional state, accompanied by many physiological changes and special feelings. Generally speaking, emotions include three aspects.

Subjective experience. It refers to an individual’s self-perception of different emotions and emotional states, such as different inner feelings of joy and fear, and different inner feelings of pain and surprise.

External performance. Usually called expressions, such as facial expressions, posture expressions, intonation expressions, etc.

Physiological arousal. That is, the physiological reactions caused by different emotions are different. For example, when you are satisfied and happy, your heartbeat is normal, but when you are fearful or angry, your heartbeat speeds up, your blood pressure rises, your breathing speeds up, etc. It is not difficult to understand from this that many employees, under the influence of objective events such as increased work pressure and a sense of unfairness, cause emotional loss and ultimately lead to physical danger.

Employee emotions are divided into two categories: one is negative emotions, including fear, hatred, anger, greed, jealousy, revenge, etc., which can cause burnout, tension, anxiety, dissatisfaction, and extremeness during the work process. and other behavioral manifestations; the other is positive emotions, including love, gratitude, hope, confidence, sympathy, optimism, loyalty, etc., which are positive emotions that keep employees' morale high and motivated. As far as current corporate practice is concerned, the management of negative emotions is of particular concern in corporate management, because the long-term spread of negative emotions will inevitably lead to a reduction in employee work efficiency, an increase in work errors, poor communication, and poor relationships between colleagues, which will also affect the enterprise. operational efficiency and overall performance.

◎ ABC Theory of Emotions

Human emotions are not caused by a triggering event itself, but by the interpretation of the event by the person who experienced the event and evaluation. Emotion is a state of being aroused by an individual, which mainly reflects the relationship between objective reality and human needs. Just as everyone's understanding of ideal life is vastly different, everyone has different emotional experiences of the same things due to their different subjective attitudes, subjective expectations, different perspectives and attitudes towards problems.

The ABC theory of emotions was created by American psychologist Albert Ellis.

This theory points out that inducing events (A, activating events) are only indirect causes of emotional and behavioral responses (C, consequences), and people’s beliefs, opinions, and explanations (B, beliefs) about activating events are what cause people The direct cause of emotional and behavioral reactions (see Figure 1).

Generally within the enterprise, the main events that cause employee emotions are: workload, working conditions, role conflict and role ambiguity, career development, interpersonal relationships, aggressive behavior, etc. Once these events contradict or conflict with employees' beliefs, they will cause emotional problems and even manifest as emotional loss. The premise of appeasing employees' emotions is to try to reduce the stimulation of incident A through corporate job design, organizational changes, etc. Ellis further pointed out: It is because of some of the irrational beliefs we often have that cause us emotional distress. If these irrational beliefs continue, they will cause emotional disorders. Therefore, we must first have a full understanding of employees' beliefs and values; to ease employees' emotions, we must create a corporate culture that shapes employees' beliefs and values.

General practices

Many companies have set up coffee houses, relaxation rooms, vent rooms and playing background music at work to relieve employees' emotions, and also set up psychological consultation rooms. Psychological assistance projects such as sunshine service rooms and emotional communication stations are provided to express and vent employees’ emotions. For example, Sichuan Tuopai Group established the "Tuopai Orchid Grass Psychological Counseling Center" in order to solve problems such as employee confusion, work pressure, interpersonal relationship management, and employees' own depression. In addition to company employees, the service targets include their relatives and surroundings. Associated groups. Deloitte Accounting Firm has specially opened a 24-hour private psychological consultation hotline for employees to help employees relieve work stress. It should be said that these are relatively effective means of emotional management.

Emotional problems are not the same as psychological problems. Managers must maintain a peaceful attitude towards this. They should start from the material and spiritual needs of employees and care about their work, life, family and personal reality. Difficulties, and caring about employees' growth, progress and self-realization make employees feel that managers are always paying attention to them, so they can be more proactive in working hard to achieve corporate goals.

System Strategy

The foundation for effective management of employee emotions lies in the introduction of emotion management mechanisms into a series of links such as identifying people, selecting people, employing people, educating people, and retaining people, so that emotions can Management is reflected everywhere in the practice of human resource management.

Recognizing and selecting people: Identifying employees’ emotional management abilities

Current recruitment methods mostly focus on the assessment of job seekers’ knowledge, skills, communication, organization and other comprehensive abilities, with little attention paid to them. Employee values, beliefs and other background capabilities. In fact, it is necessary to try to help employees overcome the "emotional barrier" during the recruitment stage.

When recruiting employees for emotional and personality-based jobs, such as service personnel, precision technology R&D personnel, financial staff, etc., European and American companies have begun to use psychological methods to comprehensively evaluate job applicants. : The content, intensity, and standards of emotional work in recruitment positions are described one by one. Managers evaluate the management and control of emotional resources as a necessary general quality of employees, so that the emotional expression of new employees conforms to the emotional norms of the position. For example, the service industry requires a passionate and patient personality, and financial accounting work requires employees to have a patient, careful and tolerant personality.

In the recruitment process, companies need to understand the emotional quotient (EQ) of each job seeker. Emotional intelligence includes five aspects: emotional control, self-awareness, self-motivation (self-development), ability to recognize others, and interpersonal communication and interaction. When recruiting, you might as well put aside the content on the job seeker's resume and use certain channels and methods to understand and identify the job seeker's emotional intelligence level, their emotional control, interpersonal skills, etc.

In addition, it is also necessary to correctly measure the emotional tendencies of job applicants. According to the test results of the LPI full emotional intelligence personality test software, emotional tendencies are divided into five types.

Type O. More open-minded, creative, likes new things, and has the ability to innovate. The weakness is that they are relatively unwilling to accept constraints, like to daydream, and are unwilling to spend energy on details.

N type. A good listener, considers other people's feelings first, and is a good team player. But they are more easily hurt and hope others will consider their feelings without speaking out.

Type A. I like to analyze numbers and am very sensitive to numbers, but I am slow to make decisions.

R type. A natural communicator, good at communication. But sometimes I forget what I said and speak more than I listen.

Type D. Have the ability to make decisions quickly and be able to make decisions quickly in times of crisis, but are also prone to showing impatience.

Nowadays, when many companies recruit new employees, they will consciously conduct emotional aptitude tests to match employees' emotional aptitudes with job requirements. For example, design and market development personnel need to have a high O-type factor, sales personnel need to have a high R-type factor, and so on.

Employing people: Matching personality, ability and position

Drucker specifically wrote in the book "The Effective Manager": "The director of employment is the effective manager. A quality that must be possessed is the key to the effectiveness of an organization's work." He provided a solution to emotional management from the perspective of focusing on people's strengths. In addition to utilizing employees' strengths and abilities at work, it is also necessary to ensure the matching of employee emotions, employee abilities, and the characteristics of the position itself.

There is a strange phenomenon in the corporate world: many outstanding employees resign after working for two to three years. After resigning, they do not go to competitors to obtain higher salaries and positions, but change careers to do something such as Teaching or other more stable and dull jobs, or even just spending a year or two to go back to school or travel around. The reason is that after two or three years of work, these employees feel exhausted and burnout, and they lose confidence and fun in their work. Therefore, ensuring the balance between job responsibilities, employee personality, and employee abilities is one of the important measures taken by the human resources department to prevent employees from falling into emotional crises.

For those employees who have already joined the company, caretaking management is another effective measure that pays attention to the safety and health of employees. Concern for employee safety refers to protecting employees from work-related accidents, and protecting their health refers to preventing employees from developing physical or mental illnesses while at work. Caress management means expanding the scope of enterprise management from the inside of the enterprise to the social activity areas of employees, and shifting the focus of enterprise management from employees' work content, work methods and work effects to employees' thoughts and psychology. This kind of thought and psychological safety , The prerequisite for health is that employees work happily in positions they like and are good at.

Educating people: harmonious culture, penetration-based

Employee Assistance Program (EAP, employee assistance program)

Currently, more than 90% of the world's top 500 companies EAP established. Nearly one-quarter of employees in U.S. companies enjoy EAP services. The complete EAP includes: stress assessment, organizational changes, publicity and promotion, education and training, stress consultation, etc. Specifically, the whole process can be divided into three parts.

◎ Address the external stressors causing the problem itself, that is, reduce or eliminate inappropriate management and environmental factors.

◎ Dealing with the reactions caused by stress, that is, alleviating and channeling emotional, behavioral and physiological symptoms.

◎ Change the individual’s own weaknesses, that is, change unreasonable beliefs, behavior patterns and lifestyles, etc.

Since it provides a package solution to employees’ psychological problems, companies should understand that employees need a balance in four major aspects: physical health, ideological culture, family communication, and work achievement. Event stimulation from any party will cause employees to lose control of their emotions. Therefore, the premise of EAP is that the company fully understands its employees.

The organizational atmosphere of family + school

Family atmosphere means that in a strictly managed environment, family atmosphere must be used as a lubricant. Strictness is permeated with care and plays a role in harmony and cohesion. effect. For those employees who have just entered the workplace, within two or three years of their first entry into the workplace, they will devote most of their time to their careers and lack the care of their families and family members. At this time, if the company can create a family atmosphere and feeling, it will greatly retain those employees who perform well within two or three years. These young people who are new to the workplace are so concerned about their future development. At this time, if the "elders" (corporate management) of the company give the "children" (employees) the necessary attention and guidance, they will be very motivated. It not only ensures the realization of corporate goals, but also ensures the personal development of employees, which can be described as a win-win situation. It also needs to be pointed out that since we are a family, we should not criticize our subordinates excessively.

Overly harsh rebuke often arouses resentment among subordinates and may even cause subordinates to feel inferior.

School climate refers to creating an organizational atmosphere that enables students to develop their abilities and improve their quality. As the core concept of an enterprise, "learning organization" runs through the entire development process of the enterprise, and its purpose is to establish a true "learning" culture. If the company can properly play the role of a school, and employees can get opportunities for continuous learning and progress through training activities organized by the company in an organization similar to a school, they will not worry about their own personal development and continuous progress, nor will they be criticized by society. Worry about obsolescence and outdated knowledge. Many companies have also set up special courses for emotional intelligence training to allow employees to acquire relevant knowledge and improve their ability to manage their emotions.

Retain people: To stay or not to stay? Emotional control comes first

As the scale of enterprises grows, managers become more and more hungry for talents. At this time, you will face the problem of how to treat veteran employees, which involves emotional management; if the new employees of the company are like mushrooms in a dark corner for a long time, it will also cause emotional problems; when the company's organizational changes lead to job changes and dismissals Problems will also cause emotional fluctuations among employees... A series of similar problems are important triggers that trigger employees' emotional nerves. In any case, companies must remember that whether they stay or not, they must pay attention to regulating the emotions of their employees. To stay, make sure employees stay willingly; to go, make sure employees leave easily and happily.