Dear Bob ... Do you feel employee apathy is ever caused by the fact that if all "root causes" were diagnosed and fixed, at least some employees would be out of a job? How do you encourage people to fix a situation that is bad for the company, but may threaten the security of their paycheck? - More than just curious Dear More ... No. Employees might sometimes choose to avoid fixing root causes for this Dear Bob … Do you feel employee apathy is ever caused by the fact that if all “root causes” were diagnosed and fixed, at least some employees would be out of a job? How do you encourage people to fix a situation that is bad for the company, but may threaten the security of their paycheck? – More than just curious Dear More …No. Employees might sometimes choose to avoid fixing root causes for this reason, but the symptom wouldn’t be apathy. It would be a preponderance of fire drills, and a culture that values fire-fighting more than fire prevention. Apathetic employees would be lackadaisical about resolving the individual incidents that are the result of a failure to address root causes.Which is still an issue, with or without the apathy. How to prevent it and get employees to focus on fixing root causes rather than chasing down individual incidents?Welcome to the wonderful world of changing business culture. It isn’t for the faint of heart. First, recruit, retain and promote employees whose focus is on opportunity rather than job security, and to make it clear that your goal is to provide opportunities for growth, not opportunities to “RIP” (Retire In Place).Second, and even more important, pay close attention to what you reward. If you reserve your compliments, bonuses and attention for employees and teams that do a great job of fire-fighting, you’ll get a team of fire-fighters; those who prevent fires will find themselves at the back of the line.Try this: Establish a problem prevention program. Perhaps it’s capacity monitoring so you bring additional storage on-line in advance of demand instead of after users run out. Perhaps it’s a performance management program that alerts you to the need to re-tune your DBMS. Beats me – it depends on what kinds of incidents are common in your environment right now. The point is, you can put this kind of program in place, graph the trends, and forecast when a problem would have occurred had nobody acted to prevent it.When the problem would have occurred, take everyone to lunch, and congratulate them on having fixed the problem faster and with less disruption than they ever have before. And when they give you puzzled looks, describe what would have happened but didn’t because of their foresight.– Bob ——– Technology Industry