The Cost of a Bad Hire.The Misplacing of Priority in The Workplace. Behaviors Needed in Our Workplace to Safeguard Employee Mental Health

ABIODUN AJALA
7 min readJan 7, 2022
www.inc.com

Complement of The Season. Thank you for subscribing to This Newsletter.

The year 2021 was a great year with challenges that ranges from the COVID, Inflation and resignation. So many employees struggle to make ends meet. So also do organization, Government and World Leaders.

The Year 2022 still shows that we still have much to resolve in the country and Globally.

The workplace has gotten a new look. The study of work has changed. Job loss everywhere. Downgrading of job, job title and pay. The way we work is now different. Many employees have been forced by the pandemic to work from home. Remote work is now on the rise. Communication with employees, family and the society has changed. It is now a digital life.

We see people resigning from work and ignoring motivation quote like “do not give up” “winners don’t quit” Employees are safeguarding their own mental health over money.

To earn a salary in this country is to earn insult. If you cannot endure insult modern days work is not for you. This is the time we have power in the hands of the wrong leaders. Priority has been misplaced.

I wrote in The Coming to The World of Management that the field of business and management would witness so many greedy leaders. People who have no ideas about how work works. A whole of damages has been done in our various workplace. So many issues have occurred unresolved.

Those who manage todays corporation are guys from natural or biological sciences. They saw a quick guide book or self help book and they picked it up for reading. That is not enough to manage. Sometimes they are being appointed by their godfather or kingmaker. You know how we like short cut in Nigeria. Employees have left certain place of work simply because his manager managed her poorly. And we later came to find out that this manager in question read Plant and Animal Science. What! Management is not an over night thing.

The Human Resource guys are responsible for the many issues that we are facing in the workplace. People are getting tired of even writing Resume. They are the that recruited the Toxic Boss. They are the one who hire the Wrong employee. What about the wrong manager and those in procurement? Sometimes I wonder if these jobs are being sold and bought? Anything can happen.

You see in the System of work. One has to be very systematic. In the layman language we should be careful. Organization is a mystery said Peter Drucker. Business Management is not a toy. We need to give it a special treatment just the same way we did to The field of Medicine, Law and Engineering. The influx of guys coming to the field of management has gone out of hand. This is the same abuse Marketing is facing in Nigeria. We turn things upside down. Mistaking sales with Marketing.

Business Owners should understand Structure and Strategy. By so doing they would understand their road map. Invested my whole energy in reading business organization and society. I must tell you it was a bit difficult. Students fails and carry over this noble course of study.

When you put the wrong people in the right position. Have you come to calculate the cost? What about The Cost of a Bad hire? What about the effect it is going to have on The Mental Health of Staff? Or are you just doing all this deliberately just to force people out of your workplace?

There is this English I used for a Supervisor that micromanage. I asked him. Why are you sabotaging your own efforts and our own efforts? Is there anyone you don’t like among my staff? Why not just voice out and tell them so that they can go? Instead of setting them up with misery shopper or whatever. He laughed and took down the word “sabotage”

The trick Human Resource staff plays on us in the workplace is so childish. They walk up to us in other to dig into our personal life. They have informant among our colleagues. WhatsApp chat is not a formal way of communicating. Yet they escort us there. They hide the read receipt. They screenshot what we posted and shared with uninformed managers. They are very corny, trickish and they work with rules. To sum it up, they are manipulative.

So, when you talking about a workplace being toxic. You need to put reference to the HR. they hire toxic people without doing their check. They taught their job start with hiring and ends with firing. Their body language is so poor. Much needed to be done on Human Resource or Recruiters. They have so many names on this platform. This is business.

The privilege we enjoyed back in the days while Personnel Management was in vogue has been taken. People were treated like human and not object. There was respect and concern for people. It was people first.

The number of job-related issues in the past year were not fully accounted for. We don’t have adequate statistic and survey. Even exit job interview is a scam. I doubt if management are actually going through the content of the questionnaire as to why employee resigned from their place of work. One employee has vowed never to return to a particular place of work even if they offer him billions. This proved how people are really suffering from office work being managed by semi-professional.

Why did you leave the job? “I left the job because the Politics there was too high. It is on the high side.”

But you should have stay. You shouldn’t have resigned na. There are Politics everywhere.

“Madam Politics get grade. This one is too high to comprehend with. This is a place you would see young guys in group playing you there and there. There body language speaks volume. Hey, I need to leave for sanity purpose. Who knows what they have as plan next if I refuse going? I need to leave so that they can have fun!”

Employee should try as much as possible to put their safety first in this modern of work. People are suffering upstairs. Their faculty is suffering. No one to talk to. No Guidance and Counselling. No trusted Managers and Hrs. If you confide in the Hrs., it means you are confiding in the wrong hand. He or she would still end up relaying it to your abusive manager that would make gest of you.

Every Author write things based on their own lens on Career Guide. So readers should use their discretion and instinct to know how to decide. Decision shapes us. Many of our guys are still on a job that is not paying for more than 5 years. Part of their new year resolution is to quit. Many might still end up being on that hurting job if they don’t have their road map plan coupled with strategy. New year resolution would fail in the area of whether to leave that job or not to leave. Tony Robbins told me here that “Decision Shapes Us” Simple!!!!!!!!!!!!

Beyond sanitizing our hands because of Virus. Our workplace needs to be sanitized. A good manager would make a whole difference in your workplace. Do not hire employee and hand them over to the wrong management. Every behavior needed to be check. Do not under estimate the importance of greetings in the workplace. The science of mood in the workplace must be attended to. Let people understand their job role and objective. Job title is causing internal crisis in some companies in Nigeria. This is making employees to form a formidable group that can hinder the productivity of the firm. People should know the difference between Private Sector and Public sectors. HRs should understand the basis of their job function.

The idea of wasting companies’ resources on Query, Evaluation and what have we should be churn. Managers and Hrs. believes once they get to a position, the only way management would know that they are working is to be issuing warning letters to their staff. That shows level of their incompetency. Memo is an outstanding device written by a bad manager.

Behavior is everything in the workplace. We should not behave ourselves into a that would be very difficult for the company to do without.

The Nigeria working environment is a very difficult one that favors those who are not meant to carry out a particular duty. Politics is ruling over Competence. As it is the case of Multinationals and some indigenous companies. Managers don’t prescribe drugs. Why should someone who read Food Science be in the affairs of Managing people? I mean People without putting into consideration the consequence. Their wellbeing. The outcome of what could arise out of the mismanagement.

It is high time we have to have respect for the people who work in our companies. A lot of our Human Capital are leaving this country abroad to contribute to someone’s GDP. We are busy consuming rather than producing. Those individuals that would have be producing for us are now in the foreign land helping another Nation.

Thank you for reading this write up.

Enjoy the Year 2022 with best of wishes full of surprises.

--

--