Pull any manager aside and ask them to describe the emerging front line workforce and terms like ‘entitled’ and ‘poor work ethic’ will enter into the conversation. I interact with thousands of managers in the hospitality industry each year, and this I can say with certainty. At last year’s CHART conference in New Orleans, a regional training manager for a large restaurant chain lamented to me, “the work ethic has gotten so bad that our people are in the perpetual mode of trying to get something for nothing!”
Getting something for nothing isn’t bad, or evil, or immoral. Who doesn’t appreciate a little good fortune coming their way? However, when finding ways to separate effort from reward becomes a passionate pursuit, any treasure obtained in the process is marginalized.
There was a time when achievement meant more than possessions, and when character (a person’s qualities) was valued more than achievement. Americans felt good about putting in an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. This was the time when “Made in America” was the best label any product could bear, quality was everyone’s priority, and companies made decisions to ensure long-term stability—not short-term gains for stockholders.
I’m north of fifty and I remember that time. My four children (ages twenty-six to thirty-one) don’t.
They’ve grown up in a world where most people work hard to find ways of avoiding hard work. They’ve heard stories telling how lottery winners, day traders, bloggers, dot-commers, and Internet marketers have managed to beat the system and derive a huge bounty with little or no effort. They’ve been inundated with reality television that turns talentless fools into millionaires in the blink of an eye and with the greatest of ease. To them, an apprentice is not a young worker learning a trade at the foot of a master craftsman but rather a devious schemer finagling to get a coworker fired by Donald Trump.
Is it any wonder there is a burgeoning entitlement mentality among the new workforce?
Work has degenerated to little more than a four letter word; a necessary evil. It’s no longer viewed as something to be proud of, but rather something to disdain, to shortcut, or to elude all together. If we do nothing to reverse this gross misconception, we will be not only being doing our kids a great disservice; we will be allowing the further contamination our labor pool.
Employers can no longer afford to play employee roulette gambling on the chances that they can find good people who’ve already learned a proper work ethic at home or at school. Parents now focus most of their attention on ensuring that their kids are healthy, happy, and have a high self-esteem. Meanwhile, schools are facing widespread criticism and massive cutbacks, and are concentrating every available resource on increasing test scores and keeping students safe. So who’s teaching Johnny to work?
Obviously, the burden of developing work ethic within the emerging workforce has shifted to employers, and more specifically, to trainers. Organizations that neglect this responsibility will wind up point the finger at parents and schools for the unsatisfactory product they are getting. They’ll have no choice but to export labor overseas, replace human interaction with touchscreen technologies, or churn-and-burn their frontline people, whom they see as an expendable commodity.
Desperate to find a resource to provide my clients in this area, I went in search of the best books work ethic that I could recommend. I was stunned when I discovered there hadn’t been a business book on work ethic written since 1904. I figured the timing was ripe.
Reviving Work Ethic: The Leaders Guide to Ending Entitlement and Restoring Pride in the Emerging Workforce is the culmination of research from my work with hundreds of companies, most in the hospitality segment. The book defines work ethic as “the intersection of cognizance (i.e. knowing what to do) and compliance (i.e. doing it, even when unsupervised.) Work ethic is marked by the seven indisputable core values every employer demands: positive attitude, reliability, professionalism, initiative, honesty, respect, and gratitude (cheerful service).
Yesterday’s training programs assume employees already possess these core values, so they focus exclusively on developing job-specific hard skills. But if your chef doesn’t show up for work, …or arrives for their shift wearing a bath robe and flip flops, …or smuggles a few porterhouse steaks in his coat before he clocks out, his culinary skills don’t really matter.
However, it’s not enough to simply alert your workforce to the consequences (and requisite disciplinary actions) of absenteeism, dress code infractions, dishonesty, idleness, texting on company time, etc. You must have a plan and a process for developing and reinforcing work ethic values in your people.
It should be pointed out that the decline of work ethic is not uniquely an American problem, nor one that can be attributed to any specific demographic or generation. However, the ideas and strategies for reviving work ethic are more easily applied—and the overall impact is more sustainable—with teens and young adults, as their workplace habits and core values are still being formed.
As a presenter at the 2010 CHART conference in New Orleans, I unveiled a new tool that I’d been working on for six years designed to instill, reinforce, and certify teens and young adults in work ethic. The Bring Your A Game to Work training and certification program combines classroom curriculum with a peer-to-peer guided eLearning platform to teach the seven values highlighted in the Reviving Work Ethic book and keynote presentation, but they are alliterated with the letter ‘A’ to make them cool, hip, and memorable to youth (Attitude, Attendance, Appearance, Ambition, Accountability, Acceptance, and Appreciation). CHART members like Clearview Cinemas, Tony Roma’s, Zaxby’s and Papa Murphy’s have experienced success with the program and are seeing an improvement in the work ethic of their front liners and future leaders. More over, while these partners are tweaking the content to fit their respective cultures, they are also offering great ideas to improve the training experience for the participants.
Take a moment to view the adjectives used when your organization posts job openings and you’ll see terms like enthusiastic, self-motivated, trustworthy, dependable, service-driven, etc. Then ask yourself if your new hires actually embody those traits. You’ll clearly see that your future depends on your ability to instill within them the work ethic they should have learned at home and school, but didn’t.
(This article was featured in the latest newsletter for CHART – The Council of Hotel and Restaurant Trainers.)
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