Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: 
Deflecting Dissent

No one wants to seem like they’re a difficult employee. Difficult employees (or DEs for short) are, among other things, more challenging to supervise, and therefore require more management attention than their colleagues. It’s made clear to the more complex to manage that their performance has to be phenomenal to justify all of the additional resources their supervision entails. The recent recession has shown many just how crucial individual ROI is to continued employment.

One of the ways that employees can make themselves difficult is by noting issues with the physical environment in which they’re asked to work, particularly if concerns voiced can be directly tied to management goals (even vague ones such as the ever popular “increase collaboration”). DEs do things like say, out loud where others can hear, that the work they do requires concentration and is not best done in the environments provided, for example. They are often independent self-starters who can add a lot of value to the organizations that hire them, but their commentary can lead to their elimination, regardless of how professional they are as they frankly discuss their work world.

Being a DE can be tough; many share the goals of DEs (optimizing work environments is among them), but not their stamina for taking management heat. So, other workers often go another route, choosing their path consciously or unconsciously. They criticize aspects of environments that aren’t as directly tied in most people’s minds to performance and management goals as those DEs question. We can call these people SDEs, short for “supportive of the difficult employee.”

SDEs report workplace issues such as erratic temperatures or mysterious and intermittent smells or non-optimal rest room design; they deflect criticism to temperatures, etc., because these are the aspects of the environment they feel can be discussed without penalty. Although each of these deflected concerns is, at a fundamental level, tied to workplace performance, we can complain about these aspects of a physical environment without seeming like an employee who’s being difficult or not giving their all for the success of the organization.

These deflected workplace issues are not seen as closely linked to achieving corporate objectives. Someone can be too hot or too cold and still a “great team player,” for example. If they acknowledge being distracted by nearby conversations, workers may fear that they’llConcurrents.DeflectingDissent be categorized as “not aligned with organizational needs,” so temperatures are discussed instead of distractions.

It’s important to check out all issues raised regarding temperatures and smells and bathrooms, of course. They may indeed be just what the SDEs report. Temperatures in a space may be randomly hot or cold, mysterious and troublesome smells may fill the area, and bathrooms might be poorly designed.

If, after review, the temperatures, etc., seem to be acceptable, people who design and manage workplaces need to solve the interesting puzzle of determining what the SDEs really have issue with in the physical environment. Are complaints about temperature really an expression of unhappiness with acoustic shielding around areas for focused work, which people feel they can’t express directly because such comments may indicate that they lack skills possessed by others or aren’t trying hard enough? Are comments about smells really related to issues with feeling displaced because individuals and teams no longer have a home base and feel devalued by their employer?

The aspects of the physical environment that people feel they can complain about are not directly tied to the underlying causes of employee unhappiness, so rooting out the true concerns of workers can be difficult. It requires empathetic observation and careful interviewing, for example. Surveys often don’t unearth the true underlying issues because not many people filling out online questionnaires actually feel that their responses are confidential.

Next time you hear deflected dissent, don’t brush it off after you investigate the stated problem. People always complain for a reason, even if it’s not the stated one. When issues raised don’t seem tied to the space being discussed, find out what’s really upsetting the SDEs and DEs in your midst.

Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.