Manager’s role to support the hierarchy of needs

Business Environment:

It is all the circumstances, people, things, and events that influence the work relating to the production, buying, and selling of goods or services.

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Each one inside the working place is affected by the business environment within his daily scope of work. So never to underestimate the small details in your team daily activities within the workplace. All the details work together to create the environment they live within for almost half of their life. They need to have the means through which they can perform their work.

As humans, the Maslow pyramid or hierarchy of needs holds itself true for your team. We need to differentiate between the company benefits and what you can do as a manager in facilitating the every day jobs and life related to work space. What we shall chat about are the actions that you can take as a manger to support your team doing its work without changing the company policies.

There will be another chat of how you can affect the company policies to open more chances for added values to the company.

Physiological needs

It is simply the need to eat, drink, breath and sleep or rest. We all had passed by days when we were stressed or totally engaged and pushed against a deadline where we forgot about food, drinks and even sleep for a day or so. That’s accepted once in a while. It can’t be the normal life style. On the long term, the physical effort of the team will be deteriorated. Some long term illnesses may appear. This doesn’t happen in one or two years but within ten years or less you will be managing an exhausted team. Meanwhile, be aware that exhausted team members can make mistakes that might affect their health directly i.e. accidents. Or, the maintenance duration can be extended and moreover the result is the maintenance rework.

Reducing the reactive work i.e. the emergency intervention due to equipment failures will solve the problem of continuous stress due to firefighting. The maintenance team will spend more time doing properly planned activities. That’s a manager’s choice to adopt this maintenance approach and motivate the team to detour to it instead of the fire fighters role they were used to.

Safety & Security needs

In relation to work, that’s the personal safety and health. To ensure safety and health of your team members you need to assess the maintenance work conditions of all activities. Moreover, all team members need basic education about how to ensure their own safety and health. Your team member need to be aware of what conditions in the work place can harm their health directly or on the long term. Toxic fumes, welding or cutting flares, hot surfaces, slippery ground and so on. Providing the assessment, education and tools to ensure the health and safety of your team will fulfill the second stage of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Feeling safe and secure has more to it than just physical safety or physical risks. They need to feel job security, clarity, no discriminations, fair yearly evaluation, etc. Manager role is highly important in those aspects as it is for the physical safety and security aspects.

Belonging, acceptance and esteem.

Those are two steps of Maslow’s Pyramid but, together they represent the psychological needs. Here mainly we need to be aware of the interrelation in the workplace. Either between the team members or between the different teams. There is another important dimension which is the vertical communication between the manager and the subordinates or supervisors and team members. Titles differ based on the titles used in your work place. However, the key word here is the respect in the vertical and horizontal relations in the workplace.

Feeling belonging and acceptance is usually best explained as a welcomed team member. Even though this may seem like suiting best the life outside the work place, the opposite is true. The bad relations in the workplace is the fuel for continuous blaming and claiming. Solving the reasons of blaming and claiming will elevate the friendship and cooperation among the team members and across different teams. Playing the role of the judge and accepting or declining claims will result in a winner team and a loser one. Unfortunately, this will fuel a continuous war among the different teams and will diminish the targeted healthy cooperation in the workplace.

The discriminations between different teams is a prime mover for this condition. Another crucial factor is the feeling of incompetency. The looser team in the blaming and claiming battle will start to feel injustice and will lose the engagement to the workplace victories. The worst case scenario occurs when one of the teams looses the trust in itself and in the company.

Simple solution to the psychological needs

As a manger or a supervisor, you need to make sure that your team is ready to do the job needed and to do it properly. Failing to do so, will start a never ending cycle of blaming and claiming. To make your team ready for the coming job, you need to ask some questions. The answers to those questions are crucial for preparing your team to do the job properly. This will eliminate any reasons for struggle or friction in the work place. In the absence of struggle and friction, each team member will feel accepted and consequently belonging..

Some preliminary questions that will help preparing your team are:

• Do they know what they need to do?
• Do they have the information of how to do it?
• Is it safe to do this job?
• Is there available time to access the machine?
• Do they have the skills to do this job?
• Do they have he capacity to do this job?
• Are the tools available and correct?
• Can they find the needed spares?
  Providing answers to those questions through a simple maintenance program will raise the self trust among the maintenance team. Moreover the horizontal and vertical impressions about the maintenance will be elevated. Consequently maintenance team members will feel welcomed among their peers.

Also, you need to look for the root cause of this blaming habit. There might be one or two persons who play the role of critics in the team. That’s one of the archetypes we had explained in this chat: . Those critics will undermine your effort to build trust. Once you spot them, try to mitigate their effect on others. You need to discuss openly with them a solution to stop this behavior. Otherwise, relocation is an always valid solution, move them to other teams.

That’s not the end of the story, the crown of the pyramid is the self actualization. This will be subject of a coming chat

In Conclusion,

To maintain a healthy work place, you need to cross check the everyday life in the workplace against the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. We had summarized some key points for the first three (3) levels and included solutions for any shortages found. So Stay safe, join our course on Udemy that tells you which information you need and why? and Enjoy your coffee however you like it, it is a bless.

If you feel you need help with any of these elements,

Either join the Arabic Course for secrets of building a Maintenance Program

Or join the English Course for secrets of building a Maintenance Program OR