Culture Mechanics
Preventive Maintenance in the Workplace
This is the final blog post in a 3-part series on workplace conflict. If you missed the other posts, you can read them here:
Post 1: Portal of Transformation: Remodeling Our Approach to Conflict
Post 2: Turning Toward Conflict: Building Capacity in the Face of Fear
From the 1960s to the 1980s, my grandparents owned a salvage yard and auto repair shop in northern Florida, and lived in a trailer on the premises.
My grandfather, called Papa, was born in rural, northern Alabama. Though raised on a farm, he joined the Air Force and spent time as an aircraft mechanic in Alaska. This experience led him to work as a mechanic for much of his life. My grandmother, Mama, did the accounting for the salvage yard business and would get on Papa’s case for being too generous and lenient with customers. Papa could be rough around the edges, but he had a soft heart. Mama was infinitely caring and also a pragmatic, no-nonsense lady with a good sense of humor. I like to think I inherited a bit of all of these things from them.
The family still lovingly refers to the salvage yard as “the junkyard.” By the time I was a young child, my grandparents had sold the business and moved to a house on the outskirts of town. Even after this, Papa wore coveralls most days and worked on cars to help out loyal customers and supplement his social security income. Their yard stayed littered with car parts, much to Mama’s chagrin. I guess you could take Papa out of the junkyard, but you couldn’t take the junkyard out of Papa. Though they both passed away years ago, I can still smell the motor oil and picture his grease-stained fingers.
Despite this family tradition (two of my uncles are also mechanics), I don’t know much about cars beyond the basics. Still, I’ve been thinking that maybe the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
There are many metaphors people use to explain workplace culture. One is: if an organization is a car, workplace culture is the engine. As you might guess, this metaphor resonates with me.
A mechanic’s job has two main functions: to maintain machinery to keep it working well, and to investigate and repair problems. It strikes me that in my work, I push for proactive efforts to maintain healthy workplaces and I investigate relational and operational breakdowns. A culture mechanic, perhaps?
Breaking Down
As I wrote in my last post, I’ve experienced a workplace where toxic conflict was getting in the way of work. Breakdowns in trust and communication negatively impacted the work environment and the ability to get work done, period.
There are many factors that impact organizational culture, but workplace relationships are an important one that I don’t see talked about enough. Healthy relationships and healthy communication at work are essential building blocks of healthy work cultures. And an organization’s culture shapes how employees interact with one another.
Going back to the engine metaphor, unresolved tension and conflict in the workplace can have a similar effect to deteriorated or low levels of motor oil, leading to breakdowns in collaboration that inhibit smooth operational functioning.
Without intervention and left to fester, toxic conflict amps up the friction between coworkers. Things may be functioning somewhat, but it takes a lot more energy to keep things going, it doesn’t feel good, and it can lead to irreparable damage over time.
In such cases, employees may spend time walking on eggshells, dissecting the conflict with one another, or trying to figure out who to go to for work-related questions. Toxic conflict can lead to employees avoiding work, a decline in morale, and physical and mental health impacts.
This is bad for employee and organizational health.
Preventive Maintenance
When it comes to cars, most of us understand the importance of preventative maintenance. It’s common knowledge that as car owners, we should routinely check and change the oil. We understand that if we ignore the check engine light for long enough, it’s going to cost us more in the long run.
To support these individual prevention behaviors, we have a whole infrastructure to support car maintenance in our culture. Car mechanics and oil change places are plentiful. Laws require us to get our cars inspected annually to ensure they’re safe to drive.
And yet, preventive maintenance in workplaces is not as common. What would this even look like in practice?
With regard to workplace conflict, preventive maintenance can include…
Building trust in working relationships;
Clearly communicating roles, responsibilities and expectations;
Fairly and consistently reinforcing codes of conduct;
Implementing communication systems that allow for routine, two-way, open communication; and
Routinely identifying frustrations, disagreements and conflicts at early stages so they can be addressed before escalating.
And while prevention is important, even with effective prevention strategies, some amount of conflict is inevitable...and even healthy. So, how can an organization approach that necessary or unavoidable conflict in a productive way?
In last month’s post, I encouraged leaders to ask the question: How does our organization view and handle conflict? Asking and answering this question is key to intentionally building your conflict culture.
To answer this question and build capacity for healthy approaches to conflict and difficult conversations, an organization can:
Define its views and expectations around workplace conflict;
Support leader and staff professional development re: positive conflict approaches;
Establish communication norms;
Model healthy approaches to conflict from the top down; and
Engage external facilitators or mediators to facilitate difficult conversations.
Often, we’re taught to believe that absence of conflict is the goal, when some measure of conflict in collaborations and relationships is not only normal, but healthy. We may believe that conflict is, by definition, toxic and that it should be avoided at all costs.
To be clear: it’s not our fault if we fear conflict, have trauma related to conflict, or simply don’t have the tools to approach conflict differently than how it was dealt with in our upbringing. There are countless models of conflict in our world where harm is inevitable.
We do have other options, though—if we want them. We can build cultures where conflict is handled in healthier, respectful, more collaborative ways.
Maybe it’s a stretch to compare the work I do to that of a mechanic. I’m the first to admit it’s not a perfect comparison. People aren’t machines, and we can’t just program what we want out of them.
Culture work is systems work and relational work. It is complex and dynamic. It requires a combined human + analytical approach to build relationships and rapport, spot problems, and identify and collaboratively implement interventions to get things working more smoothly.
Working on culture is an imperfect, experimental striving, but the basic job of keeping the engine in good shape and investigating and repairing breakdowns applies. And just like with cars, investing in preventive maintenance is fundamental.
I hope my Louisiana subscribers are recovering well from Hurricane Francine. I wrote a reflection on the storm here and am keeping those most impacted in my thoughts.
(TL;DR: I want to acknowledge all of the additional labor of leading during natural disasters; it can add a lot to already full plates. I see you and wish you grace and rest in the recovery.)
This fall is shaping up to be a busy one. On top of other projects, this week I have the honor of leading a session on Avoiding Burnout for emerging library leaders and will be presenting a webinar series later this month titled Operations Management for Nonprofits. Will I avoid burnout while teaching others to avoid burnout? Stay tuned to find out!