Permeating Negativity
Monday, October 29th, 2007Here is an interesting question regarding the battling of negativity that flows from the top of the organization…
I’m an HR Generalist in a small company and am disturbed with the amount of negativity that has flooded the company lately or how bad employees feel about working here. Most of the concerns are actually expressed by company top-level execs, stating their skepticism that the environment can ever be changed. If this is how the company’s feels, I truly wonder if any of my effort is worth the time. The primary issues seem to be that the company’s owners feels that there is no need for extra incentives or rewards and that the employees should be honored to work here. They provide no support for any employee programs. The senior leadership feels poorly treated by the owners and they seem to pass this poor treatment on to the employees.
I have experience in helping organizations transform their reputation towards their talent and a great desire to help solve this problem, but my boss has made it clear that I should not intervene in this manner. Could you suggest any strategies to address this situation?
Don’t give up just yet. You seem like you are up for this challenge, based upon your experience and expressed desire to make this situation better. The process of moving your firm towards focusing on employee engagement and retention will not be an easy one. However, please keep in mind that the very fact that you were hired with the resume you have says that someone in senior management recognized that you possess a unique level of expertise that would be valuable to have in their company.
Your first step is to breathe deeply and take the necessary time to assess the entire situation realistically and thoroughly for yourself. Resist the temptation to jump to conclusions or over-react to the situation. This will be difficult because it is an issue that you are clearly passionate about. But driving significant, meaningful transformation inside a change-averse environment takes a great deal patience and effort. In order for you to truly get the company’s top-level executives’ to pay proper attention to this matter and have confidence in your recommendations, it is imperative that you always appear level headed, pragmatic, and balanced.
Perhaps one key problem you might be facing is the simple fact that you are presenting an extremely unwieldy issue that is difficult to define and always tends to be mired in opinions and qualified data. Clearly you will need a persuasive, fact-based approach to get your senior management on board and supporting your efforts. A comprehensive, independently administered employee attitude survey might do wonders to put some much-needed structure, facts, and definition to the perceived morale problem. It might also provide important guidance in creating a prioritized plan for improvement, as well as an ongoing tool to measure the improvements that are made.
A good survey can be costly and gaining management approval to execute one is going to be a significant challenge in itself. You need to develop and formally present a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis that highlights the risks of not performing the survey and underscores the potential tangible and intangible benefits over the long term. Simply put, you need to carefully build your case.
If the long-term economics of the situation are presented in a balanced manner, the ownership will get on board, particularly if you utilize available metrics that are easily comparable to other firms. Lean on your CFO for help in compiling data that are appropriate for your firm and industry. Examples might be your firm’s historical employee turnover and turnover cost, as well as “per employee” productivity. You might take the dollars you are projecting to save from reduced turnover and increased productivity and add that to the profit from your prior year to see the overall impact of improving employee engagement.
Regarding the cost side of the equation, between direct expenses (such as recruiting, interviewing and training), indirect costs (effect on worker’s who stay, increased workload, and customer satisfaction) and opportunity costs (lost employee knowledge, existing work that could be performed without the burden of constant rehiring activity), the total cost of employee replacement is likely to run twice that of the previous employee’s annual salary. Another rarely discussed intangible cost of employee turnover is the loss of value inherent to lost relationships between co-workers, employees and vendors, employees and customers, etc. which are extremely valuable and, in many cases irreplaceable..
Use readily available data to show the link between high employee morale and corporate profitability. For example, a recent survey by Sirota Survey Intelligence reflected that the stock prices of companies in which over 70% of the employees expressed overall satisfaction with their employer outperformed similar companies in their same industries by a 2.5 to 1 ratio.
Once you have your written analysis reviewed and updated, then you will need to formally present your case to your firm’s CEO. Your approach must continue in line with your written analysis-persuasive, fact based, and concise. Remember to keep your focus on gaining approval for a survey and remain open to the possibility that the survey might reflect that a serious problem amongst the majority of employees might not, in fact, exist.
This will be one of the pivotal moments in this process for you. If you feel that your presentation was worthy of an approval for the survey and the ownership declines, then you need to reassess your position in the firm and whether you are a good fit within its existing (and future) culture. If the survey is approved, then you should feel proud that you have successfully begun to build the organizational momentum necessary to proceed to the next level of this process.
Once survey results are in, you will have reached your next decision point. Should the results bear out the negativity and associated issues that you have sensed, you will have the necessary fodder to begin to drive change in your organization. If the results do not indicate general employee malaise, then you will again have to assume that what exists will continue into the future and make your personal career decisions accordingly. In either case, you should be content in knowing that have done your level best to identify, quantify, and create a positive view of employee engagement for the benefit of the firm and the employees who work there.