You preach an open-door policy at your company, you solicit feedback from your employees on a regular basis and you also regularly motivate your people to come up with novel ideas. You try to do everything the right way.
But, do you know how your employees feel and think of you and your business? You don’t!
Employees gossip about many things, but not to you particularly when it boils down to the following things. Let’s see 5 things employees talk about behind their bosses:
1. What’s your salary?
Companies actively discourage their staff from discussing salaries with each other. On the other hand, a few companies ask their employees to sign an agreement stipulating that they won’t discuss salaries, benefits, etc. with co-workers. Employees that refrain from sharing their pay are often the ones, who make little. Simply put, management and HR should never presume that perks, salaries, benefits, etc. would stay confidential. HR managers ought to practice a sound approach when explaining salary differences.
2. Why is the problem employee still not taken care of?
Yes, he’s the one who always shows up late, takes things for granted, and always plays the blame game in an office. Why the management hasn’t dealt with that problem employee? Why it’s taking too long? Is it in the process already? These questions are sure to pop into the heads of other employees that they won’t share with you.
3. What’s happening behind the doors?
Some major business decisions, expansions, organizational changes, layoffs, etc. take months or weeks to be announced. It makes sense to wait this long sometimes, but not always. Employees tend to lose trust in the management if they are made to wait too long for such announcements. So for instance, if the company is going through a rough patch and layoff is the only solution, make sure you talk about the same with your employees. It goes the same way for expansion as well.
4. What they thought during that meeting?
You hold a meeting wherein concerns were shared, issues were raised and decisions were made. Every participant in the meeting supported the decisions and things appeared to be quite clear. But then your people start having meetings where they discuss concerns and issues that they didn’t share in the actual meeting. They tend to disagree with some decisions.
5. How the management makes their day cumbersome?
Understand that employees wish to talk to you, but they also have tasks to accomplish too, which might mean that bonding with their manager or boss is of the least priority to them. Never interrupt employees, who are busy and engrossed in their work just because you thought of checking up with your staff.
So these are five things that every employee in an office setting tends to talk about behind his/her boss. For leaders and entrepreneurs, this means having total transparency.
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