Book It!
“The Cost of Emotions in the Workplace” by Dr. Vali Hawkins Mitchell
Review by Kathryn Mckee
The Cost of Emotions in the Workplace is a must-have for business continuity planners, HR staff, CFO‘s and others involved in ensuring effective, efficient and emotionally healthy workplaces.
This book is near and dear to my heart – as one who lived through three earthquakes, a horrific building fire and the Rodney King Riots, I understand all too well what can happen when employees suffer emotional distress as their workplaces are disrupted for any
reason: fires, earthquakes, tornados or employees behaving badly, from angry voices, to bullying or even murder.
There are plenty of resources for disaster planning and recovery and most do not touch on the human aspects that ought to be considered. It‘s one thing to consider staffing plans and contact mechanisms; it‘s another to think about what happens inside people‘s heads when they smell smoke and need to quickly evacuate that 62 story building, or there is a 6.9 earthquake and the advice coming over the loud speaker is to stay put as the elevators aren‘t working. Think fear and anxiety, the thought of death comes to mind. Ask yourself - how easy is it, when the emergency is over, and you need to get back to that urgent project on your desk? How likely are you to be able to focus on that, and help your employees calm down and actually be able to concentrate on what they need to be doing?
Now there is this wonderful resource that deals with Emotional Continuity Management – a well-researched and practical way to come at the type of strategy development and action planning for the human side of Business Continuity Management. When I speak to BCM groups about involving HR in the people side of disaster preparedness and recovery, there is usually pushback on the idea. Why? Because the Human Resources people do not understand the importance of their role in BCM. When I speak to HR groups, they push back saying it‘s not their job….phooey!
This book could be the instrument that brings them together. The Author asks: ―Why would you or anyone in the business care about this? Humans work and humans have emotions Human emotions can make or break your company financially Poorly managed emotional events at work can range from daily annoyances to deadly Emotions and business are like oil and water‖
She makes a compelling financial argument for investing in emotional management tools by detailing how you can figure out the cost of time spent dealing with Bullies and Emotional Terrorists, and the financial damage that they can do to your organization. When you as a manager reflect back on situations where emotions spun out of control, how prepared were you first, to get in control of your own emotions, and, then, how able were you to defuse the situation, and help others get back to work? Most of us would not know how to debrief this type of occurrence because we are not trained to deal with this. Many HR staff are trained in what to do, or know how to find people who are.
This book is a great guide for all.
About the Book Reviewer: Kathryn McKee, co-author of ―Leading People Through Disaster‖ was Senior Vice President of Human Resources at Frist Interstate Bank Ltd, and participated in the design and delivery of a program to help 3,000 employees and managers of First Interstate Bancorp and its subsidiary banks in California deal with the many events described above so they could heal and regain focus on their work.
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