Do you care what your staff think?
This might sound like a rhetorical question, but how do you know what your staff are actually thinking? According to Richard Branson:
“Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.”
I tend to think he is right, so for this reason, understanding what matters to your staff (and hence what might be giving them cause for concern) is clearly important.
I have often thought that one of the most disappointing things for a manager to experience is a resignation letter from a valued employee when it comes out of the blue. The obvious questions are: ‘why did I not see this coming?’ and ‘what could I have done about it even if I knew?’ Sometimes this occurs simply because a staff member has been offered a fantastic opportunity that aligns with their career ambitions and is a role they could not refuse. In this case, there may be little that can be done other than to wish them the best of luck. However, this can often occur because the staff member is not happy about what they are doing and does not know how to express this to their manager.
Regular one-to-one meetings between a manager and their direct report is an excellent way to uncover potential issues here since these meetings, if done properly, can build trust and rapport and actually create the space for concerns to be raised before they become major issues. However, if a leader has a significant number of direct reports or has managers reporting to them, then it becomes much more difficult to get to understand how each person in the overall team is feeling.
One way to overcome this is to undertake a periodic staff survey. It was Bill Gates who said that:
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”
and the same can be applied to staff as with customers. A staff survey is not the sort of thing that should be done on a very regular basis as employees quickly tire of this, but doing a staff survey once a year can pay great dividends. It is said that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers so any staff survey worth its salt necessarily must include questions about management. A former boss of mine once said that “this is not the sort of thing you necessarily want to read from the top of a tall building” as you may not always like what you read, but if you are serious about improving things within the business, your most unhappy staff may well be “your greatest source of learning”.
There are three key things to bear in mind when undertaking a survey of this nature:
1. The survey must be confidential so that no one in the management team can know who said what. Without the provision of confidentiality, such an initiative is useless.
2. Undertaking a staff survey creates a ‘behavioural expectation’ within employees that something will get done. You do not need to address everything, but feedback of the results along with a high-level plan of action must be done in a timely manner otherwise the whole exercise gets thrown into disrepute and reflects poorly on management itself.
3. Look for key themes that emerge from the survey results. The 80/20 rule will typically apply here (80% of the issues will be due to 20% of the causes) so find which ones will give the biggest bang for the buck if addressed and develop remedial actions for these.
Avoid the tall buildings but undertake a survey nevertheless.
Ian Ash ACC, AinstiB
Managing Director OrgMent Talent Solutions www.omtalent.com.au