Managers and staff...

[dwpanxt]

...how can they interact with benefit on both sides?

I have been tasked with coming up with some suggestions to improve interlevel relations in our large office.

Management think everything is fine - with a mission statement posted up on several noticeboards and with 'fun' days once every 3 months or so.

Staff however think that management is not doing a good job of identifying talent and it seems to be down to how proactive line managers are at pushing their favourites into the limelight.If you have a workshy linemanger then basically you stand very little chance of progression.

Staff arent that fussed about 'fun' days although they recognise that this is the way management try to interact.What they want is proper recognition and less interference-possibly mutually exclusive?

Im totally lost about where to start with all of this. I can only come up with criticisms which will not be very helpful.

So does anyone have happy working relationships between management and staff .And more importantly -how did this come about?

Sounds basic, but in the past I've used a 3rd party/anonymous web resource where all members of staff were asked to give truly honest feedback about what works, what they want, etc..& it really worked. Sounds like the fun days are financially wasteful and not getting relations very far - can those, and show staff you are going straight to them, listening to them, then taking the right action. The anonymous/3rd party route was excellent in identifying problems with specific managers, etc...it allowed honesty and it allowed the 3rd party to give a presentation to staff (without mgmt) to say, am I interpreting your thoughts correctly, then being able to managemt the generalized but anonymous feedback so no-one felt worried about speaking up. Also speaking to mgmt about their concerns and doing 1-on-1 follow ups a few months after this initial intervention plus action taken is necessary to monitor how effective the intervention was.

Ps some typo's in my post - sorry! - but just to clarify, the 3rd party would be a person external to the organization (hired on a contract basis only for this purpose), using a web based anonymous feedback resource and any other interventions that seem appropriate (e.g. 1-on-1's or team meetings without mgmt, etc).

Thank you henrysmama -some good ideas I can take forward .

A "fun day" sounds expensive, why not split it into something smaller but more regular? Buffet lunch once a month, or a half hour earlier finish on Fridays.

You need buy in from all line managers that putting their staff forward for promotions etc is their responsibility. They need some incentives too I suppose - eg say best team or team with most promotable people?

As for the fun time, maybe the staff can come up with suggestions as to what they'd want to do? Maybe they can take that money they'd spend otherwise and use it for a good cause like say buying a piano for the local school or putting it towards people taking a day off a month to volunteer. That usually gives people a sense of achievement (eg clearing the gardens of a nursing home or running a sports club for kids or going into schools to read...).

They need some good talent management and recognition by the sounds of it and probably performance management.

Some simple things you can do:

First check what you think are issues actually ARE the issues. I would do this by running a confidential employee opinion survey covering everything from job satisfaction to how effective employees feel their line manager is. I would create the survey to look for trends and issues in particular teams/departments. To get the maximum benefit you probably need an independent consultant to ask the right questions and do a proper analysis of the results. If you are not sure where to begin with this PM me.

Alternatively you could run focus groups, listening posts (anonymously via email is good), 360 degree feedback etc to get information.

Once you have identified your issues then you need to find solutions to those issues. Ideally your initial investigations will have been constructed in such a way as to give you some ideas and suggestions.

From what you've posted, if you are right, fun days sound a waste of time (bit puerile IMHO unless you have very juvenile people working for you). Most dissatisfaction in the employee/employer relationship has been shown to occur for the following reasons:

Poor communication
Poor performance management
Lack of progression or development
Perceived inequality
Feeling efforts are not rewarded

So improving communication, consistent and fair performance management and succession/talent planning and good learning & development schemes that are organisation/department/site wide, fairly implemented and audited to check implementation are key.

What is your hr department like? This sort of stuff should be their bread and butter really.

I suggest focus groups too. They worked well for me in the past - I facilitated them as the third party using a series of q's from management to staff and vice versa to kick off proceedings. 9 times out of 10 though, the set questions would get flung out the window as the real issues and problems come out and so then you can discuss them openly.

Gosh I am being slow and should have posted this before - Piff has reminded me - check out 'employee voice' and 'employee voice solutions' '~~ mechanisms" they are fancy-pants term for listening and engaging with your teams. If you Google it you will get loads of useful stuff that you can use.

Check out People Management online site for articles about this. Orange implemented a particularly successful scheme if I remember rightly.

I forgot to say the reason I prefer a survey is that you can repeat it to check progress - but I do love a survey so I am biased!

Katie I too love a survey, I used to get so excited when I got my results in and could spend many happy hours analysing tiny percentage changes and making lovely graphs!

OP do you have an internal comms team in your business? They could help you with this potentially, certainly with communicating results and a way ahead. Employee Engagement is how we used to refer to it but that was a few years ago, it might be called something else now. But otherwise, what KatieMiddleton says in her longer post is pretty much spot on.

We recently had a company wide, externally run survey on employee satisfaction. The results were interesting, but in the management meeting I was part of, they just tried to justify themselves round the issues.
Most crucially, nothing has been done to meaningfully address these issues. Oh, HR have a new 'talent management' system, where you put into your appraisal stuff what you want to be doing, but no one does anything with this.

What staff actually wanted was a) all new jobs/roles to be properly advertised to all staff b) to be able to have a meaningful development plan that your manager actually got pulled up on if you weren't allowed to do those things

We have a quarterly staff survey, the results of which are published on the intranet and the comments can make for unintentionally hilarious reading. In theory, each director is then told to create an action plan for his/her area to address the specific concerns and then (presumably) report against progress. I have been reporting in my own comments for well over a year that there is no action plan. Nothing has been done. Every three months we get increasingly badgered to complete the survey, no-one apparently able to see why each time fewer and fewer people can be bothered writing their concerns when they can see it is completely futile.

My guess is, they will finally (and possibly triumphantly) declare that as so few people choose to participate in the survey there is no value in running it. So, if a feedback system is implemented it must be seen to yield results or it is actually worse than doing nothing.

360 degree feedback can be a very useful tool as well, although typically we have used facilitators so that the appraisee has a chance to talk through all the feedback in a structured way, rather than just read it and dismiss any of it that is critical of them.

It sounds like you also need a published policy on internal recruitment and the way in which jobs will be advertised. And no promotions are agreed that haven't followed the policy. It's still entirely possible for managers to promote their favourites but it requires more open collusion between interviewers than may be comfortable.

The fun days sound dreadful but then I loathe enforced fun. It sounds like a cheap way of avoiding treating your staff properly. And it sounds like they know it, too.

I've worked in two organisations in the same sector, same bit of the business. One did nothing with employee opinion survey - didn't even include women taking maternity leave despite being run by big consultancy firm. The other ran theirs in house and had action plans that were actioned for every single team.

I loved one company, the other made me feel furiously impotent. I'll let you guess which is which

LOL Katie - you're going to burst my bubble and say the one with the action plans was the furious impotence company :)

My one seems to serve no purpose but for the directors to take the piss out of each other about who has the lowest score this time. In fact, I might just put that in my comments next time around. It is worse than useless. As it's completely clear the directors couldn't give a shite about it, one can only guess they do it because they think it will make everyone else feel better. Lovely. If we had enforced fun days as well I don't think many of the senior managers would make it back alive.

Nah it was the good one - was text book. I had a plan for my team. It was basically "Katie they love you for XYZ. Don't fuck that up and while you're not fucking that up you need to do something about ABC or they won't love you anymore".

The other company was "Manager band C, there were insufficient responses to give you any data so do fuck off now before we humiliate you on a conference call at length, preventing you from actually doing any work".

Ironically I had twice as many staff in the latter company and all staff completed both times. Indicative of culture generally I reckon

Rule #1 of management this stuff isn't it? Do what you say you will.

Wow -fantastic and fantasticer

So many great ideas - brought together nicely I think in Katies 'checklist' (and yes yes to the #1 management rule ).

I have already made a start in gathering together what I will present - but really I think I could do worse than print off this thread and read most of the contents out loud to whoever will listen.

Drinks are on me