Are you encouraging people to be less effective? Theory X and Theory Y perspectives on employees.

There is so much going around the HR circles at the moment about social media and what HR needs to do to be prepared. I love working in HR but sometimes I feel like we (and our legal counterparts) get our knickers in a knot about things when really we should just take a chill pill.

For instance, just this week I read an article on how your company may own your tweets, pokes and YouTube videos. I get it. We sign a contract that says any intellectual property created at work is owned by the company. Now, I’m not sure that anything I’ve said on twitter could be considered intellectual, nor some sort of property to be fought over (!) but in the scheme of the fine print on my contract- sure they would own a lot of my tweets, facebook status updates and some of my blog posts.

Really though? It comes back to that fear that we in HR have about what people are doing at work. What if people are spending time on social media sites when they should be working? How we will performance manage these people?

It’s all about controlling people, power and micromanaging. What sort of message would that send to employees? Beware: if you are creative or express yourself at work remember we own that. People aren’t your property and I don’t think we should own people’s thoughts or feelings. If it is of great commercial value perhaps, but otherwise I just think it’s over the top and unnecessary.

If we think back to our management theories from uni (and yeah I remembered this one along with Maslow), it’s a lot like McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y.

Source: McGregor, D. 1960, The Human Side of Enterprise.

Do people really hate work that much that we have to control and direct them all the time? If you answered ‘yes’; why did you hire those lemmings anyway? I want to work with people who are enthused, take the initiative, and think outside the box- not zombies that need to be controlled at work. I certainly don’t want my people to think that I own everything they do between 9-5.

Secondly, if you have a theory X view of your employees perhaps you are encouraging them to be less creative, be unproductive and actually hate work. It’s discouraging and disengages people.

I think perhaps more bureaucratic workplaces with rigid structures such as the public sector, and also large organisations with a huge public presence (such as telcos) could be guilty of this.

How do you view employees at your workplace?