This work week has been one of the hardest for me in recent years. There are performance review calls, exit interviews, and difficult cases with employees. The latter gave me a lot of useful tips. If you have an employee who is not on good terms with his manager and accuses him for nepotism, unfair tasks distribution, non-transparency and toxic communication, make sure that:
- Everyone who works in a company — employee, vendor, contractor, customer, etc. need to be treated with respect and equally. We provide and promote an environment that welcomes constructive conversations and wants to foster a healthy image and culture. In the event that feedback is given where there is a conflict all parties are to review the feedback respectfully. Under no circumstance is it acceptable for a manager to respond to the feedback in a fashion that may be perceived as hostile or retaliatory. In other words, when you have a conversation with an employee be sure he listens to the feedback and reflects and does not contact with employee to “question him on why he filed a complaint”.
- Manager may develop the program how he is directed but it is strongly recommended that the program he creates is consistent with all vendors. It would also be wise if everyone had a written copy of what the job scope is for this role, what is expected from all of the employees, etc. If a company wants to establish a reputation of being a fair and ethical company, this is a good method to do so.
- A gentle reminder to the manager that as a leader his actions and words hold meaning. Manager should be careful on how he speaks to others and shy away from phrases and comments that others could find offensive. Managers can express the need to distribute workloads using more positive phrases such as “it is critical that we cross train so that we don’t create a single point of failure within the business” or, “we want to prevent burnout by overloading one employee”.
- From a company point of view an employee’s feedback may be more like a customer complaint. You can see this employee as a business and his manager uses “businesses” to assist in completing the project. If a “business” no longer meets the needs of the project then the manager can stop using the “business”. It just happens to be that the “businesses” that a company is using are people and their services.
