COVID-19 - A Wake-Up Call for Businesses There is no such thing as a business relationship and business owners and executive who fail to make that distinction set their business on a pathway to failure.
Recently Bill Gates said that the one question he didn’t ask himself when he was with Microsoft, but one he asks himself now is “How are my business relationships? Are they growing and how am I nurturing them?” But even now, he still hasn’t got it right. Firstly, there is no such thing as a business relationship. Yes, we have to have strong relationships to start, grow and maintain a business. Businesses, however, do not talk to each other. The organisations, the buildings do not talk to each other. It is the people in the business that talk to each other. Your business model might be business to business (B2B) or it might be business to customer (B2C) but every transaction with clients, employees and staff are human to human. And every one of those relationships are personal relationships.
You might say that I’m splitting hairs and just quibbling over semantics. The reality is that there is a huge problem created when we just focus on building business relationships. To start with, we forget the relationships with employees. We expect that because they have a job that they should have loyalty to the business. It doesn’t work that way though. From the Gallup research in 2016 it was found that 66 percent of employees were disengaged in their work. The first 48 percent were just disengaged, and the other 18 percent were actively disengaged. Not only were they not happy in their work, they made it obvious to everyone around them. And this took its toll on those who had previously enjoyed their work. And disengaged people only do what they had to do to keep their jobs. With productivity dropping, many managers started micromanaging their staff. This created further problems. Micromanaged employees feel they are not trusted. And such appalling leadership leaves staff feeling they are being bullied and the productivity of those workers can drop by up to 70%.
Add to this that the productivity of those who observe others being bullied reduces by up to 40%. In many organisations total productivity reduced by an average of 29%. That should have been enough incentive for businesses to take action. Those that did though mostly settled on putting in new systems, increased KPI demands and management controls. But this only exacerbated the situation as many confused management for leadership. In 2018, the Gallup research showed that the number of disengaged had grown to 87 percent. Another 21 percent of disengaged employees. This left many businesses at a financial disadvantage as the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Many of those business who shut their doors will not open again. And those who do re-open but who have poor relationships with their staff will find it very hard to recover.
