Five Steps to Curb Workplace Anger

Gregory Kyles, at the Anger Management Institute of Texas wrote an article about workplace anger recently. he distilled a list of five steps to curb workplace anger:

Steps to curb Workplace Anger: Managers should be cognizant of the first signs of aggression. Absenteeism, late-coming, tardiness and deterioration in performance are some warning signals.
• Organizations should invest in Anger Management Programs at regular intervals to enable employees to express feelings and release pent-up emotions.
• One-to-one sessions with employees should take place regularly even when no problems are apparent. This helps prevent any lurking anger issues that may blow up later.
• Active listening and conversations in informal settings should be encouraged to make people feel at ease and open up.
• Proper systems for complaints and grievances must be established. Every complaint must be dealt with within a specified time frame.
• If an employee has to be terminated, it has to be done as civilly as possible. They should not be made to feel small and humiliated.

Let's consider these steps:

1. Invest in Anger Management: The skills of anger management, emotional intelligence, assertive communication, and stress management will help any employee to work more productively. Adding anger awareness for employees whose attitude or behavior is getting out of line is also useful. Large corporations may want to train their human resources or employee assistance professionals to provide these trainings in regular workplace classes or workshops.



2. One-on-one Sessions: Ideally, supervisors and management would have developed emotional intelligence and communications skills to be a helping person for their direct reports. Unfortunately, however, management is often a serious contributor to morale and anger problems. Bringing in an outside professional to assess work units, teams, and project groups can go a long way towards helping companies avoid not just violent outbursts of rage, but also passive-aggressive slow-downs by aggrieved employees.


3. Active Listening: According to a Kaiser Permanente internal document, employees are most motivated by a) being appreciated, b) feeling like they're active participants in the process, and c) management sympathy for their problems. These three highest priorities of employees can be met readily by a manager trained in emotional intelligence using active listening. Such an approach will draw management and labor closer together.


4. Feedback: All too often, American corporations ignore employee feedback. W. Edwards Deming identified employee feedback about work process and work conditions as essential to a corporations success. Companies need to ensure that management culture can effectively receive feedback from employees and help them feel safe in providing that feedback.


5. Treat Employees with Civility and Dignity: It doesn't take a graduate degree in organizational psychology to realize that workers who are treated with contempt and hostility, will be resentful workers. Anger management training within corporations will not work until any corporate culture of management's hostility towards workers has been transformed.

How can a corporation's culture be transformed? One person at a time. Implicit in assertive communication is respect for the other individual. Teaching collaborative and cooperative methods of work, implementing consensus processes, and encouraging employee leadership and expertise can go a long way towards creating a workplace liberated from anger.

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