©Henry J. Hunjo
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Enhancing social interaction in the workplace for positive productivity
This essay aims to open your mind to the meaning of social interactions for ensuring business success in the world. The success of any business is not the sole responsibility of the business owner but also of those employed to offer services in the different departments of the firm. The discussion has been designed, therefore, to arouse the consciousness of my audience to understand their roles in seeing to the growth of their businesses and workplace interactions. The reason is that if business grows, it translates into the growth of each individual. African economy for many reasons across the globe is facing challenges of depression in many subregions of the continent. Therefore, part of the measures that could be taken to ensure some measure of job satisfaction is to improve social interaction in the workplace to achieve enhanced productivity.
The way we handle our duties determines the way we make the business grow. This point is about workplace attitude. The world of work is a marketplace of high competition. Realise that you are here today at this workshop because some people had to be dropped after a keen competitiveness to select only the best for employment. You are here because you are worthy. You have been appointed through a process of screening that saw other people out while you gained access. If you recall the interview session and the feelings of uncertainty that greeted your waiting period after submitting your application letter, you will agree that the world of work is indeed a marketplace of high competition. You are here, then, to do business, a task you deliberately chose and this workshop has been designed to help you achieve your aim of maintaining a job on the one hand and on the other hand to match your aspirations with those of your employer so that there will be uniformity of purpose in the course of your business activities. The problem with many who succeed in getting a job at a time of unemployment is the workplace attitude they put up.
There are positive and negative workplace attitudes. Negative workplace attitudes lead to disaffection between employers and employees. Positive workplace attitudes create affection between employers and employees. One thing that must constantly be on the mind of all employees of any organization is that the employer’s interest is in profit maximization and business growth. Therefore, any attitude that runs contrary to that interest results in disciplinary actions against the employee. Actions range from simple verbal warnings to written warnings, queries, suspension and dismissal. Some actions may involve the police and/or the court(s) to ensure equitable dispensation of justice in employer-employee interaction. Negative attitudes such as dishonesty, stealing or pilfering, divided loyalty, truancy (absence from work without permission), slothfulness at work, sleeping on duty and unpunctuality usually cause disaffection between employees and their employers. A responsible member of staff is expected to shun any of these negative attitudes. Trust, loyalty and honesty are important qualities that make one’s job satisfying and rewarding.
The foregoing is a general discussion about the workplace. Now let us come home
Apart from knowing the basic duties for which you have been employed, there is a need for you to acquire knowledge of social network-building skills. To do this, you need to understand the environment of business operation, understand the people that patronize the business centre, understand the emotional and material needs of the customers as they come and go, understand patterns of social change momentarily and adopt social interaction strategies that ensure customer loyalty. This workshop takes care of these basic issues under the following topics:
- Greeting in English to show politeness in a business place
- Relating with customers
- Relating with colleagues at work
- Living up to your employer’s expectation
Let us get to work.
Greetings in English to show politeness in a business place
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Your job brings you into contact with people many of whom are strangers. Contact with strangers requires that you show courtesy. The English language is the medium of communication in the business world in Nigeria. A fact we all must contend with is that language and culture intermingle. Therefore, cultural practices that require the use of English must not lead to failure in the show of politeness (or courtesy) in our interactions. Greeting is the first step to showing politeness in the business place. Greeting is cultural. Since greetings in our mother tongues (Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, etc) take linguistic forms that purely reflect our cultural sensibilities, cultural interference can occur in the way we use the English language to greet.
To greet in English requires that we select the greeting terms that fit formal situations. Formal situations are marked by social distance. The term social distance refers to the situation that exists between persons whose level of connectedness is not on the same social axis. Some distance exists between them in the sense that one is placed above the other and vice-versa. The relationship between customers of this eatery and staff is formal where the customers enjoy supremacy over the staff. Therefore, the greeting terms for the customers of this place shall be formal, indicating a social distance between the customers and the staff such that the customer is indeed the king. Greeting too concerns timing: a day is divided into morning, afternoon and night. Each period has its greeting forms.
Morning: Morning starts from midnight and ends at mid-day: 12:00 – 12:00 Noon.
We greet with the expression, “Good morning”.
It is wrong to simply say ‘Good morning’ while greeting customers. It is important to show courtesy by adding, ‘Sir’ or ‘Ma’am’. Therefore, it is appropriate to say, “Good morning, Sir” or “Good morning, Ma’am”. Within the business context, it does not matter whether the customer is younger than us or not. Attitude to age does not make customer relations positive.
Afternoon: The afternoon starts at Noon and ends at about 16:00 Hours (4:00 p.m.). We greet by saying, “Good afternoon, Sir” or “Good afternoon, Ma’am”.
Evening: evening starts from 4:00 p.m. upwards. Some authorities on the subject matter say that the evening starts from 6:00 p.m. We greet by saying, “Good evening, Sir” or “Good evening, Ma’am”.
We must observe that it is common for many Nigerian users of English to misuse some greeting terms in English. The use of Good Day is an example. The term is usually used to announce the end of a meeting or to dismiss a subordinate whose presence causes disaffection in his/her boss. In casual dealings, however, it is used to greet friends and colleagues but that must be between the hours of 10:00 and 12:00 Noon. Those who greet by saying, “Good day”, either in the morning at night or in the afternoon do so in ignorance. The expression comes from a longer sentence, “Do have a good day.” It is wrong to use ‘Good day’ as a replacement for other greeting terms.
The point under discussion here is that we need to know how to greet in English with the right expressions that promote the good image of the workplace and treat customers with respect and dignity.
Relating with customers
Relating with customers in your workplace is very important. The way you treat them determines if you are working to lose or gain them. Gaining them is very crucial to increasing profit margins regularly. Some facts must be kept in mind in terms of customer relations. Customers must be specially treated. To do this requires that you understand the special needs of each of the customers that visit you for business. This task is difficult because people who patronise you are not members of the same community. Therefore, you must develop the charisma to attract people with diverse interests who throng to you to satisfy their hunger.
Charisma is the word. Your ability to attract people to you so that they do what you want is what makes you charismatic. Therefore, you must act in a way that attracts your customers to keep coming for your services all the time. If the customers come regularly, it means you are making them do what you want. It is not a matter of coercion or force or manipulation but creating a favourable environment for the people to keep coming to you regularly. All hands must be on deck to make this happen. From the security persons to the manager and the kitchen staff up to the handlers of the canter, being charismatic is a non-negotiable quality for attracting customers.
Exhibiting charisma needs some form of altruism – thinking of the needs of others as more important than self-needs. Suzette Haden Elgin, in her book, The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, explains that ‘charisma is a matter of perception… perceived – seen and heard and felt – as the ability to convince and compel us without force. And it is that perception that concerns us here. Elgin stresses that everyone has a Charisma Quotient (CQ) that can be measured scientifically. She links that to our ability to use the five senses to make inferences from the utterances of the people we interact with to influence them to take actions in the direction we desire. The process of working with perception here involves understanding others by paying attention to their use of expressions that expose their perception techniques. According to Elgin, ‘it is usual for people to prefer one sensory mode to another and agree that they will often make their preference clear in their language’. She makes up a list with explanations:
- Sight: “I see what you mean. I see your point.”
“That’s very clear.”
“That looks good to me.”
- Hearing: “I hear what you’re trying to say.”
“That sounds nice to me”
- Touch: “Somehow this situation just doesn’t feel right.”
- Smell: “The whole thing smells rotten”
- Taste: “The whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
From the verbs chosen to represent the perception of a situation, one can infer the sensory mode preferred by an interlocutor and work to understand the person.
Relating with colleagues at work
Understanding colleagues is a daunting task. Relating with them requires also the points made earlier on understanding the way people interpret the world and relate with it. Apart from those points, I have enumerated eight other facts that help maintain good work relations with colleagues.
Boldness and Courage
In this world of fear and uncertainty, we need boldness and courage to enjoy living. As co-workers, you need rare boldness to support your colleagues at work. This is because all of you are from different backgrounds and entertain different fears and ambitions. Behind every bold step is courage. Courage is the quality that powers boldness. Without courage, it is difficult to act with boldness.
Both boldness and courage require the understanding of the REASON behind an action. This understanding is the force behind all efforts invested in working against all odds to make a venture succeed. Your job and relationship with your workmate are a venture you must understand. You need knowledge of not just the fact that you are in a job together but also the reasons behind your role as a co-worker. We live in a society that sees cooperation as a flimsy contract. That is not good. You must take your job and colleagues with a deep understanding so that you can withstand the storm of managing the office.
We can learn boldness and courage from the example of Mother Teresa. William Beausay and Kathryn Beausay, in their book, Girls, explain that Mother Teresa was an example of boldness and courage. They say she committed herself to serving humanity without paying attention to what people may say. The authors say that Mother Teresa was “well known for doing the impossible by means of simple, innocent boldness.” You too can do many “impossible” things by paying attention to your natural assignment in your workplace by building ideal, modest and good relations with your colleagues. The challenges are many but they are surmountable.
Joy
Joy comes from thankfulness and self-sacrifice. To whom do we give thanks? I am sure many shall say, God. Giving thanks to God opens opportunities for us to enjoy favour from Him. God is not a physical being. He, however, understands us and treats us with the understanding that we are His creations. It is, therefore, not adequate for us to utter expressions such as ‘thank God’ as a way of showing thankfulness. What is required of us in this regard is for us to show thankfulness through our actions. That is where self-sacrifice appears. It is important we know that joy in life is the reward of how much we give in the service to others. As workmates, you need to bring into your work relations self-sacrifice and thankfulness. Serving your colleagues is a task that can give joy if you do it with thankfulness and self-sacrifice. To do this means taking some deliberate steps. These steps are different from the popular ideas propagated about relationship roles in the world. In the world today, many think of their role as a profit-making venture. In this case, their workmates must pay for everything. They keep credit cards for all activities in the office. The centre of all they do is based on money. Money determines everything at work. Where money is expected to be the reward for all life’s activities, joy disappears from the actors.
Therefore, we experience joy if we learn to do our best for others as a way of giving thanks and self-sacrificing. We must constantly perform our duties without asking for material rewards. You must understand your colleagues’ situations. The understanding you show is what shall make them live up to their responsibilities too. If your colleague knows that you make many sacrifices to make the job enjoyable, s/he is naturally moved to attend to your needs. Pestering and nagging come from our inability to see that we ought to do something about our conditions but expect the other to do it. What I mean is that when you complain bitterly about someone else’s failure to make you happy, you hardly conceive of the idea that you are responsible for your sadness or disappointment. Start doing things for your workmates without prejudice and see how much joy you have.
Initiative
An initiative is the act of doing what we know would change our situation from what is depressing to what is motivating or encouraging. Life presents us with many depressing circumstances. These circumstances, at many times, lead to powerlessness. We need to kill powerlessness to be emboldened. The initiative is the key. It is the ingredient that ensures the constant confronting of life’s challenges that tend to decapitate our efforts to keep going. Apart from collective initiative, we need to develop personal initiative. Personal initiative refers to getting up to do something you know you ought to do to achieve desired success. It requires that you take direct action. Launch yourself into the activity with full blast and until you get results, you do not stop.
The initiative, therefore, is a combination of energy and direction: energy + direction = initiative. When you apply energy to a task, that application must be aimed at a direction, an end in view via a means that has been clearly defined or envisioned. An individual in search of happiness, then, must develop a sense of initiative. Think about many of your moments of dullness and see how much energy is wasted on lack of direction. Beausay and Beausay say that the “time spent encouraging natural activity in a specific direction yields a zesty crop of initiative”.
Giving yourself with love and compassion
In this world of dog-eat-dog, it is truly not easy to give all of yourself to others. The world is full of people who do not understand that human beings are created for one another. We cannot live on an island. The necessity to live with people imposes the obligation to do things for one another. Doing things for others gives happiness. Beausay and Beausay, in their book, Girls!, state that ‘giving generously of oneself remains one of the purest ways to achieve happiness and a true, deep sense of satisfaction’.
Giving generously of oneself means doing things for others without expecting some noted rewards. This means you are not expected to be paid for things you give or do. For instance, when you do things in support of your colleague, you should not expect to be rewarded with some material things. When you place your hope on material rewards for things you do, you invite sadness. Material desires attract fear. The presence of fear eliminates all positive feelings that go into the building of happiness. We must then adopt means of giving ourselves with love and compassion to enjoy long, lasting joy – and happiness.
Forgiveness
Forgiveness is not a strange concept. We all belong to religious groups where the teachings about God and existence include the practice of forgiveness. Forgiveness, according to Marianne Williamson in her book, A Return to Love, is ‘selective remembering – a conscious decision to focus on love and let the rest go’. She adds that ‘it’s not easy to forgive people who have never done anything to make us angry. People who make us angry are our most important teachers. They indicate the limits to our capacity for forgiveness.’ In simple language, forgiveness requires that the offended tries to forget the offence an offender has committed. Forgetting an offence in this sense is not easy. Every offence brings with it a hurtful feeling. The offended remember the offence and the offender each time s/he feels pain from the hurtful feeling. What then is important in forgiveness practice is developing the means to heal the wound that hurts. That is where ‘selective remembering’ becomes useful. In this case, the offended remembers to forget the offence and the hurtful feeling.
Those who offend us are our most precious people. They are people we cannot afford to lose: husbands, wives, children, siblings, cousins, uncles, aunties, pastors, fathers, teachers, leaders, neighbours, workmates, employers, and so on. If you look deeply into your heart and search for people who have hurt you one way or the other, you find they are your most precious people. People with whom you have no affinity do not offend you. The act of offending is the product of our expectations of others. We live with the unconscious notion that our loved ones should know our needs and fill them in manners that suit us. When these loved ones fail us, most often as a matter-of-can’t-help, we conclude they do so deliberately. People naturally act within the limits of their capabilities. If our expectation of others is situated within the limit of their abilities, they hardly fail us. Therefore, if you think forgiveness is too hard to practise, it means you are the creator of your calamity. The person who offends you takes advantage of your wrong judgement of his or her abilities. We must, then, learn to limit our expectations of others to their abilities. Before building some fantastic expectations of your colleagues, take time to understand the limits of their affordances and avoid going beyond such limits. This will also help us forgive others too.
Trustworthiness
To be trustworthy means to possess truthfulness, consistency, integrity, forthrightness, ‘forthcomingness’, and submissiveness. It is natural for your colleagues to trust you and you have the right to trust your colleague in return. In their book, In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work, Cohen and Prusak say that ‘trust is the one essential lubricant to any social activities, allowing people to work and live together without generating a constant, wasteful flurry of conflict and negotiations’. Emphasising the importance of trust, Herb Baum, in his book, The Transparent Leader, states categorically that the ‘most effective organizations are based on shared ethics and that can only be possible where there is mutual loyalty, honesty, and dependability. That’s why building trust is a critical component of keeping transparency alive in any organization. The point is that trustworthiness is a necessity in the workplace. Your colleagues and employers must trust you. Therefore, you must be trustworthy. Honesty, Loyalty and Trust must form parts of work tools as social capital.
Tenacity
Tenacity is what we need to face hopelessness. Hope is very vital to the process of establishing and maintaining a family life in the workplace that can stand the test of time. Tenacity therefore helps maintain hope in the face of adversity. Life presents challenges that make us feel quitting is the solution to our deplorable conditions. Some people, when faced with tough challenges, want to stop going on while others fight to get their lives back on track for achievement. Tenacity is being able to push until we achieve success.
Wisdom
Wisdom is the product of applied knowledge. First, one needs knowledge. It is not enough to know something. It is expedient to put the knowledge to use. This is where the application appears. Knowledge application is what produces wisdom. In our modern world, knowing what one ought to do at any given time is what determines the degree of wisdom one possesses.
Every person is expected to maintain his or her job with wisdom. What this means is that a worker should act based on knowledge. When you do something, you should be able to detect the knowledge you have applied to achieve the feat. Knowing which is which is wisdom. Building our desires and entire lives on superstitions or beliefs that lack verifiable knowledge is not wisdom. Rather than joining those who wait for things to happen, we must be among those who acquire knowledge and apply it to achieving something that marks wisdom. It is essential that apart from acquiring knowledge, we learn application skills to forge ahead in demonstrating wisdom in all our deeds.
Living up to your employer’s expectation
Living up to your employer’s expectations means understanding the position of power and your disposition to it in the organisation. The employer of labour is powerful and the labour laws of our nation have imposed some restrictions. The restrictions do not mean that employees should abuse the protection they enjoy. The very moment you are employed to do a job, it is your responsibility to understand the functions of your position in the workplace to promote the overall interest of your employer. Over the years, as stated at the beginning of this paper, unpunctuality, slothfulness, social loafing, dishonesty and pilfering have been the major causes of disaffection between employers and their employees. If you apply the points under trustworthiness above to doing your job, you will not only be meeting your employer’s expectations but also creating room for your rise on the job. Besides, your gaining the trust and confidence of your employer will open doors of opportunities to acquire business skills that can make you establish your firm.
Conclusion
We have examined four key factors that can improve your quality of services in any organisation. We must understand that we live at a time when job opportunities are scarce and the little existing ones must not be treated with levity.
Another thing we must keep in mind is the importance of social capital. In the body of this paper, attention has been drawn to the importance of honesty, loyalty and trustworthiness. Greed is the reason for the lack of honesty in our society. Making huge financial success is not about greed but hard work, frugality and professionalism. Frugality is important to every person’s material growth. Frugality means saving from the little earnings you make to execute lifetime projects. Dishonesty cannot be mixed with frugality. Some of the available means of ensuring frugality in Nigeria today are mutual trust funds, stocks, bonds, cooperative society, bank savings accounts and target accounts. No matter how small your salary may be, it is wise to save a little from it as it comes monthly.
