Ensuring cohesion between management and employees

Cohesion is an inherent trait of any type of relationship. To relate means to communicate, to transmit my vibes to the other person, to unite towards a common goal or simply to co-exist under the organizational umbrella. This latter one though is the toughest one: we never get to choose our colleagues or managers, but we have to comply with unspoken regulations to ensure organizational consensus.

Cohesion is the degree to which organizational members are attached to organization and desire to remain in it. Ensuring cohesion in the organization is a fundamental performance and efficiency issue. On the shoulders of cohesion rests the heavy load of ensuring the strategic direction of an organization is known, understood and, most importantly, acted on. Cohesion results in enhanced engagement and efficiency, with employees performing the role of ambassadors for the organization. Otherwise, when cohesion dose not exist between management and employees, top teams realize how contagious apathy and cynicism can be.

The factors that ensure cohesion between management and employees, while ensuring a stable and viable work environment are:

1/Democratic Leadership

Effective communication between management and employees necessitates primarily a context of democratic leadership. Employees are both allowed and looked-for to participate in the decision making process considering the achievement of organizational goals a shared organizational responsibility. Within the context of democratic leadership, leaders are active listeners, who allow subordinates to voice their opinion driving up flexibility and responsibility and keeping employee morale high. In addition, in this environment, managers do not assume that employees understand directions. Requiring skill complementarity and creative collaboration to facilitate organizational flexibility, democratic leaders assume a variety of social roles – active listener, visionary, leader. Therefore, they follow an open door policy encouraging open communication and appreciating feedback provided by employees, who feel free to discuss possible flaws of leadership.

Open interaction enables the cultivation and the improvement of employee understanding of the drivers behind organizational practices and decisions. From the management perspective, open communication is beneficial in terms of gaining insight into employee motivation and commitment, while ensuring productive organizational climate, and fostering equality.

2/Teamwork

Working together brings better results than working alone. Team structures often account for organizational success in the modern corporate environment and are strongly favored because they evoke employee involvement and empowerment. Helping individuals to take responsibility for their business results, individuals experience team building and the shift from individuality to collectivity.

Reflecting the dynamic, interdependent and adaptive interaction of diverse individuals to achieve shared goals and vision, teamwork involves the elements of commitment, and mutual accountability. Common mission, common vision, clear roles and functions, complementary skills, balanced effort, synergy and equal responsibility are the basic attributes of a team, which facilitate team effectiveness.

Globalization has generated a great diversity in workforce in terms of origin, mentality, skills, and competencies. Team members have multiple ideas, sharing and developing different views. In this context, team diversity is important in relation to team effectiveness considering that a team structure necessitates coordination of activities between the team members as to meet the team goals. Team-based organizations need to determine not only the best individual for a certain assignment but, most importantly, the best mixture of individuals, who would form a team, based on their diverse characteristics.

3/Trust

Trust in business relationships is important in order to achieve cohesion between management and employees. Employees' contribution in the day-to-day decision-making is fundamental to effective strategy implementation. Employees are the people, who contact the customers, get feedback from them, and appreciate the business practices and their effectiveness in customer relationship management. So, if employees doubt that the management appreciates their ideas and suggestions for the improvement of business practices, they also doubt their relation to the organization.

Instilling elements of trust in employees should be of vital concern for any organization. Generally, when a relationship is driven by trust it can never fail. Even during hardships and unfortunate events trust keeps the two parts united. Particularly, in business relationships, which are less emotional and more impersonal, trust creates the urge to offer more to the organization thus contributing to conflict resolution and human development. Only if they trust the management, employees view their engagement to the organization as part of their lives and not as a compulsory activity. This results in the creation of intrinsic motivation, which in simple terms means that people do their job because they like it and not because they have to. Consequently, they create happy customers, who become loyal to the organization. Intrinsic motivation never fails. So does trust.