Familiarity Breeds Contentment

We’ve all heard the phrase “familiarity breeds contempt.” But is it possible that familiarity could make everyone more content instead?

The original idea came from the industrial age, based in part perhaps on the idea that managers should not know too much about their floor workers lest they learn too much and form negative opinions of them. It’s easy to stay neutral about someone whom you do not really know, but when you learn about their personal life you start to like them or dislike them. Since the managers would never be friends with “the little people,” they were more likely to swing toward “dislike” instead. So went the theory, anyway.

That arrow went in the opposite direction, too. Business leaders felt they were held in awe by their employees, and having those folks know too much about them would allow the workers to see their leaders as human, just regular folks. That respect for leaders would fade over time, making it harder for them to get things done. Whether employees really held their bosses in awe or not is debatable, but it certainly seemed true to leaders at the time.

Whether or not this was a valid philosophy in the industrial age, as we have moved into the knowledge age it has certainly become less useful. Your skilled employees are not interchangeable pieces who can be hired with no experience and trained in a set of skills for factory production. Instead, they each bring unique talents, and you have to find people who offer what you need rather than trying to develop them from scratch once you hire them. As a result, you need to know more about them to better understand their perspective, and have an idea how they are going to approach their work. You probably don’t need to know every aspect of their lives, but knowing how they view the world will help you understand how they will view their work.

Collaboration is often very important in knowledge work, so you need an environment that encourages engagement within your team and between your employees and you. People need to share ideas, and you need to hear “ground truth” from your workers so you know how things are progressing. It’s best to keep drama out of the workplace, of course, and you definitely don’t want to go meddling in people’s lives. Still, you want an environment where people are comfortable with each other, talking about more than just deadlines and HR policies, so try to encourage that.

Your employees want to feel like they are making a contribution, often preferring that over higher pay. If they see themselves (or think that you see them) as merely a numbered drone who could be replaced in a second, they are not likely to feel as motivated as they would if they thought they were recognized as a talented individual contributing to a team. Recognizing your people for the uniqueness they bring is an important tool for retaining them, and since you want to hold onto the people you’ve got, then creating the right environment is essential. Show an interest in your folks, and make sure they know they’re valued.

None of this is meant to suggest you should be best friends with your employees. That can lead to problems of its own. At the same time, though, you need to know something about your folks to better understand how they fit into your workplace, and how you can make the best use of their talents. Keeping people at arm’s length when they need to be working shoulder-to-shoulder is a bad idea.