Mistrust Grows in Workplace
Globe and Mail (Canada)
October 23, 2009
Last week, U.S. authorities arrested billionaire hedge-fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, founder of the New York-based Galleon Group hedge fund and charged him and executives of other companies with trading inside information in exchange for payoffs. Government officials credited evidence that was gathered by one of Rajaratnam’s former employees, who reportedly taped conversations with him.
While that’s an extreme example of mistrust, results of a survey released this week show that 53% of American employees harbor suspicions their boss is being dishonest with them. In fact, 25% say they don’t even trust their boss to give them the truth about whether their job may be at risk, according to a Harris survey of 2,081 adults done for staffing service Adecco North America.
It’s not that most employees think their bosses are crooks or are outright lying, but they suspect a cover-up by management, says Bernadette Kenny, Melville, NY-based chief career officer for Adecco. “Workers today clearly worry that they are not getting the full picture about how they are perceived in the organization and about how the company is doing financially,” she said.
Her prescription for leaders: There’s no such thing as overcommunicating. That means, in addition to public meetings and memos, more individual feedback, performance reviews, pats on the back for doing things well and private asides to coach employees.
The need is borne out by another survey that found, even if the messages are negative, employees crave more communication from their boss in the wake of the global recession. The survey found that 66% of employees believe they have too little interaction with their boss. That’s up from 53% who complained of a lack of feedback in an earlier poll in May 2008, before the recession took hold.
“When times get tough, managers become avoidant. Focusing on spreadsheets seems a lot easier than talking to employees,” said Mark Murphy, chairman of Washington-based training company Leadership IQ, which did the survey that included 3,611 office and healthcare employees in Canada and the United States.
“Not only might they [managers] get hit with questions they can’t answer, but when their own stress levels are through the roof, the last thing many managers want is to meet the emotional needs of their employees. But this is precisely the time that employees really need lots of feedback, and they need it to be very high quality,” he said.
That’s not as daunting a task as it may seem, Kenny says. It really comes down to something simple: “That the organization department and team are told exactly where they stand from a performance perspective and where the company stands in a competitive environment,” she explained. “Performance reviews should not be thought of as annual events; they should almost be a daily event you need to seek coachable moments.”
In the aftermath of a recession, Kenny continued, “good communicators should be having regular conversations with employees, pointing out that each individual has a part in making a recovery happen.”
Murphy agrees that providing information to employees is essential in a tough economy. “Especially in these stressful times, employees are desperate for feedback and interaction with their boss. And when they don’t get it, their job performance suffers.”
But what if the outlook is bleak? How do you present a message that, even if people work hard, there may not be a reward? “The message has to be, ‘If you work harder, that will have a direct impact on how well we do, how many products we sell, and how stable and growing the company will be as a result,’” Kenny said.
As an example of good leadership communication, she points to Hewlett-Packard, which has a good reputation as a transparent organization. On the company website in February, chief executive officer Mark Hurd laid out in detail the company’s sales decline and explained why he was asking employees to take a pay cut, and that he was taking a pay cut himself rather than having to do layoffs.
It said, in part, “I think we are fundamentally sound, and when the economy picks up, I want HP to be strong, and to take share and to outgrow the market. I said it last quarter, my goal is to keep the muscle of this organization intact. But we do have to do something ... because the numbers just don’t add up, and we need to have the flexibility to make the right long-term investments for HP.”
This was very well done, Kenny says. “He laid out the specifics about how the company is doing and why the decision is made and pulled no punches and didn’t try to fluff it up to soften the blow.”
Another leader who has been effective at laying out the realities is General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who didn’t try to sugarcoat the facts in a speech he made in Singapore at the end of September. He publicly laid out the company’s balance sheet and warned that high unemployment and reduced consumer demand will be a long-term drag on economic recovery. “A lot of the jobs lost in financial services and construction are never coming back,” Immelt predicted.
That might not have been what employees wanted to hear, but it was reality, Kenny says. “Employees have a right to hear about brutal results, because they are the truth. Brutal honesty is the best way to get the message out about bad business conditions, and many managers don’t want to be the bearers of bad news. If things are bad and the market has collapsed, employees probably already know it already. If you sugar-coat the truth, you’re going to be caught out for trying to hide the facts.
“And the brutal truth at the moment is that, while we may be entering a recovery, it is not going to happen this afternoon; companies are not going to just turn around and be back to business as usual. It’s going to take a long time. It’s that kind of honesty that is going to win you respect from the employees who are going to be the ones to find ways to recover.”
