East Coast Versus West Coast Work Environment: A Machiavellian Question

The East Coast offers a very different work environment than the West Coast. The typical East coast work environment includes working long hours, working hard, and trying to put on the best show to impress the boss (raise your hand if you wear a suit to work). New York is all about the shallow pursuit of money, while Washington D.C. is all about the endless pursuit of power that will only be crushed by bureaucracy. On the West Coast, the boss tries to impress YOU. Netflix, for example, offers unlimited vacation days among other benefits to their employees. Google provides free gourmet food to its employees.

Now, don’t get me wrong, West Coasters work just as hard as East Coasters – they just have more fun doing it. In these tough economic times (a result of the East Coast work mentality), the East Coast needs to seriously re-think it’s workplace strategy and learn from The West Coast according to a new study published by the Association for Psychological Science (APS).

Now, to be fair, both types of the work environments are meant to control the employee. Yes, providing free snacks is a way of making the employee work harder for the company. Everything the corporation does is meant to increase profit. So this is where the Machiavellian question come in: Is it more profitable to rule through Fear, as the East Coast generally does, or through Love, as the West Coast does.

Psychological scientist James K. Harter of Gallup analyzed data from more than 2,000 business units (retail stores, factories, sales offices, etc…) of ten companies to identify the relationship between employee job satisfaction and the success of the organization as a whole. The data included employee satisfaction surveys, employee retention rates, customer loyalty, and the organization’s financial performance.

Harter found that employee perception of their work environment has a big impact on the success of the organization as a whole. When employees have positive perception of their workplace, the organization is able to retain its employees, increase customer loyalty, and perhaps most importantly, increase their financial profit. The data shows suggests that employee perception of the work place affects company success more than the company success affects employee perception.

So East Coast take note, if you really want to stop terrorists or prevent the stock market from crashing again, learn to treat employees better! Since I moved to the West Coast, I’ve noticed that people are much happier and are much more forward-thinking and innovative. They have an energy that only comes from loving what you’re doing and doing what you love. This energy highly lacks on the East Coast and infects everyone.

The first step is training managers to care for their employees and encourage them to do their best. Harter suggests managers can improve by starting to “clarify expectations for employees by helping employees see the ultimate outcomes the organization is working to achieve and how they play a role in achieving those outcomes.”

Have you worked in a bad environment? If so, how did that impact your organization?

Article image via technewsdaily.