Mutual Respect | Building and Growing a Healthy Company
By: Meaghan Ziemba, Marketing Communications, MakingChips
One key ingredient to having a successful company with a positive work environment is mutual respect. It starts at the top with company executives and management and moves down to every employee--from the office space to the shop floor.
Here at Advanced Machine & Engineering (AME), we understand how toxic our overall work culture would be if we did not have Mutual Respect at the core of our company values.
Healthy Companies vs. Non-Healthy Companies
“A healthy company versus a non-healthy company is dependent on mutual respect,” claims Kaleb Mertz, Marketing Technology Manager at AME. “It’s like growing up--you mimic the actions and behaviors of your parents. It’s the same in a company--you mimic the actions and behaviors of management and the employees that surround you.”
If one person maintains a disrespectful attitude, it can poison the rest of the workplace, negatively affecting others within the company.
For a business to be healthy, successful, and continue to grow, respect must become the mindset of the entire company.
Empathize, Appreciate, and Listen
A person that has mutual respect for someone else is able to empathize with them.
“[Empathy] has two parts,” says Mertz. “First, you want to place yourself in their shoes in every situation so that you can really try to understand their points of view. Then, you have to keep in mind that they’re human just like you, and trying to figure everything out like you are (human perspective).”
Mertz mentions that it is always easy to respect someone when they agree with you and hold the same opinions as you. The tricky part is when they disagree with you on something. That is when both management and employees need to demonstrate mutual respect and collaborate with one another to find the best solutions that will help employees achieve their goals within the company, and help customers achieve their overall goals through the company.
Without Mutual Respect at the core of our work values, AME would lose a lot of talented people and the overall morale would be down. We want all of our employees to have a personal connection with one another and enjoy coming to work on a daily basis. This core value helps us achieve that while also showing them how much their hard work is appreciated.