Vali Hawkins Mitchell

The Cost of Emotions in the Workplace: Bottom Line Value of Emotional Continuity Management Vali Hawkins Mitchell

BEWARE: Ignoring Emotions in the Workplace is High Risk Behavior

Deadly workplace violence may grab headlines, but in this dynamic new business book Dr. Vali Hawkins Mitchell cautions C-Suite Executives and Line Managers that ignoring the impact of employee emotions in the workplace is a recipe for disaster.

"The effects of emotions in the workplace are significant and measurable," she warns, emphasizing it's your fiscal responsibility to realize that emotions cost your company money! Managing emotions cannot be the sole domain of the HR Department. Everyone up and down the organization can benefit from learning how to productively manage and channel workplace emotions. This important new book in the rising field of Emotional Continuity Management (ECM) clearly outlines how emotionally-charged situations, when mismanaged or unaddressed, can have a calculable, direct impact on the fiscal bottom line.

Dr. Vali, a Certified Traumalogist, coins the term "emotional tornado" to describe the cumulative effect of escalating, emotionally-charged human energy as it develops a life of its own with the potential for rampant destruction. Caused by circumstances in a person s private or work life, an individual s emotions have the potential of spinning out of control. Financial costs to the organization can range from simple to profoundly complex - ultimately affecting productivity, company loyalty, absenteeism, healthcare costs, and managerial time, all of which contribute to a toxic work environment.

In this book, you will learn that it's critical for today's executives to:
Understand that emotions are going to happen and they do not go away;
Realize that emotions have measurable costs and can be managed in a compassionate manner that supports people and the bottom line;
Know that if suppressed, ignored, or devalued, emotions distort and become even more lethal.

You will learn that it's possible and necessary to:
Achieve a realistic buy-in from the CEO and other leadership;
Avoid the rapidly escalating costs caused by emotions rising in the system;
Reflect negative feelings into a healthy form that increases loyalty and productivity.

And you will learn how to:
Observe, predict, prepare & write policy to manage the full range of workplace emotions;
Manage office bullies, who are too often managers themselves;
Calculate the managerial & productivity costs of an emotional incident.

In a particularly powerful chapter that details how to manage emotionally charged events, Dr. Vali compares the escalating workplace tension caused by two violent co-workers to her own onsite experience counseling victims of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Indonesian Tsunami: "Walking the halls, I saw, felt, and heard the disruptive effect of two workers on 600 people. It was like experiencing the rubble of any other disaster. People took sides, hid, ran, overworked, underworked, ate too much, drank more, complained more, went silent, quit. I became sensitized to the differences between small gusts of emotions with no power and those with catastrophic force."

Lyndon Bird, Technical Director, Business Continuity Institute, emphasizes: "This book will persuade organizations to look more closely at a commonly overlooked subject. It demonstrates that ECM is not a soft issue. It makes a compelling case that relates directly to cost and increased risk and ranks high as a new topic for Business Continuity and Risk Management practitioners to master."