How To Lose Your Best Employees
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
12. Make decisions that affect workers for which they have valuable input, seek that input, but ignore it and do what you want anyway.
13. Say one thing and do another. (Mission Statement = A, What We Really Do = B)
14. Have no idea what it actually takes to get things done.
15. Have no idea who people are and what they do.
16. Believe that management is "over" workers. (Fail to understand that until a worker actually builds something, management has nothing to manage and ownership has nothing to count.)
17. Treat workers as unequals.
18. Act like children.
19. Pay late.
20. Drive the business into the toilet.
21. Make work so difficult or pointless that you drive your best workers to Hacker News.
This, a thousand times over.
Mission statements are uniquely infuriating when their values are in blatant contradiction to how the business is being operated. I'd rather a company not have a mission statement at all than have a hypocritically practiced one.
A hypocritical mission statement turns into a cruel joke, and it serves only to reinforce employees' disenchantment with the firm -- especially when it's being touted in the press, or waved in employees' faces.
That's like saying I met someone from a foreign country once, didn't like him, and therefore I know all people from that country are jerks.
I've spent significant amounts of time in a few different cultures and through that I have developed deep appreciation for the various dimensions in which cultures differ and, like the famous story of the fish in the water, how it's inherently impossible to realise what is cultural and what is not until you enter a culture which exists on different point in these dimensions.
If you're familiar with Hofstede's work [1] he already provides us with five cultural dimensions he found most salient and useful in describing cultural differences.
I merely posited that, based on my experience and compared to Dutch culture, the US I saw was far on the far end of a dimension I would call "distance between the projected identity and real-world behaviour." This manifested it in all sorts of ways, from abstinence only education and large amounts of teen pregnancy, to being harsh on drug use but doing it much more than I was used to, to the more well known examples of exaggeration on resumes being the norm.
It is also not surprising that this is the dimension that was most salient to my mind, since Dutch culture is famous for being extremely parsimonious and straight-forward so the cultural distance on this dimensions is probably very large.
P.S. Hofstede is actually a Dutchman, so interestingly enough this perspective itself could very well be a Dutch cultural trait, perhaps caused by us being among the earliest cultures who conducted world-wide trade.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede's_cultural_dimensions_...
It's nice to know where you are with people. If we're not really equals, please don't treat me as if we are. If the final decision is yours, and you only allow a certain measure of disagreement, please make that clear.
I'll be more likely to give feedback and ideas if I know where the lines are, and don't have to worry about offending someone who's half my friends and half my boss by stepping over something I've not been adequately warned about. ^_^
The danger of soliciting input is that people often couple too much of their ego with their suggestions. You can't possibly go with every suggestion or incorporate all input (because let's face it - most of it is usually poorly thought out), so when you give everyone their say and then have to go a different direction from much of it, people get angry and resentful.
I worked with one chap who literally hung onto his discarded idea about a bit (seriously, a bit field in a database) for years, with it reappearing with a bitter sense of pride with every new database discussion.
1. "I hear you about X but we are doing Y anyway."
2. "I hear you about X and understand you viewpoint, however we need to go with Y because..."
I'm okay with #2. #1 will drive me away. And it should. It's disrespectful and basically tells the other person that you have no regard for their opinion and that you only ask to satisfy a rule or expectation. If you are aren't going to have a discussion about why Y is the solution and were going to do it regardless of what anyone else said, then why bother even asking?
If you value someone as an employee, show them.
Whether this is through salary increases, promotions, or even just pulling someone aside for five minutes and saying "Hey, you're doing a great job." ....show them. Especially on younger employees, its amazing how powerful a moment of unsolicited praise from a manager or senior level employee can be.
Obviously a bigger salary and promotions help as well, but companies often act surprised when someone they considered their "best employee" walks out, but how would this so called "best employee" even know they were highly valued in the first place when they cant get a raise that keeps up with inflation, or their manager can't even take five minutes every now and then to congratulate him/her on a job well done?
I never understood this advice. Not to sound arrogant, but I know I'm good. What I need from you is enough financial compensation so that my skillset/experience matches up with a competitive salary or I'm going to go elsewhere for that salary. I'm not a child. I don't need reassurance and tricks like "hey lets have casual Thursdays and a pingpong table" are NOT substitutes for the money I deserve.
Top performing teams have great leaders. Great leaders inspire. Inspired workers value the praise.
I'm my own boss nowadays, but back when I was working for someone else, the teams I enjoyed the most had great leaders. Looking back, whenever I ended up being led by someone uninspired I jumped ship within months.
It's not about the money, it's about the respect. If you are doing a good job and make the company money you deserve a cut, not a pat on the shoulder. When the company is paying you your salary they are putting value on your work.
Leadership and inspiration are nothing without respect.
1) It becomes expected by the employee. A raise has an effect the moment it is awarded. A couple of months later, the productivity effect wanes and the new salary is part of the steady state.
2) For most people, beyond an hygienic level, it's not really what they want. Of course nobody will tell you they wouldn't like a raise, but in practice they prefer a better work environment: flexible schedules, remote working, simple hierarchies, a trove of other factors that make working fun or at least enjoyable.
Recognition in front of peers is good for other reasons, but its not a replacement for financial reward.
This might sound strange to you, but some subset of the population won't know it. Ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger_effect[1]? Actual competence may weaken self-confidence and the unskilled might have illusory superiority.
There are also many cultural and social environments where an individual person comes from which gives them a negative self image no matter how well they are performing. It might not even occur to them they are doing a good job. Victims of abuse, for example.
Taking a second or two to say "good job" gives the person actual feedback. I'm not saying you should make a show, but job feedback is important.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
If you want to promote any kind of sense of ownership or pride, find something they did that you didn't ask them to do and tell them that you think it's awesome. (Assuming you actually think it's awesome.) That's it.
I'm completely against patronizing, but to not signal to your employees that you value their judgement, independence and skill is... just foolish.
I don't think the point is to replace compensation with pats-on-the-back, but rather, get in the habit of personally recognizing the positives. Too often it's only the negatives that are recognized, and though most of it is probably on the technical side of things ("hey, we found a bug you wrote that crashed prod"), there's still very little in the way of positive encouragement or reinforcement coming from a human.
Of course, some will respond better to it than others, but I think it's a worthy practice. Too often, especially in stressful atmospheres, only the negatives are spotlighted, and this can hurt morale over time.
I get paid a lot more as a consultant right now that I made as a fulltime employee but there is something missing in my current gig. It is the appreciation (not patronizing) that me being there makes a difference.
How many people have been led out the door protesting, "How can you fire me? Don't you know how much work I do around here?" Those people didn't have anyone in management saying, "Hey, you're doing a great job."
I never understood this advice. Not to sound arrogant, but I know I'm good.
That said I agree with the rest: telling someone they're great but not worth paying a decent salary sounds insulting.
So far I'm still here, but the last raise was a bit naff so the CV's getting polished up. Life's too short to be working a job you don't like anymore.
It's especially bad when the size of the cuts is meaningless compared to the cost of a given employee. Making a $100k+ employee work with a 3-year-old $1000 laptop for an extra year shouldn't make any sense in a proper company, but it's incredibly common.
If you want to make the hardware situation better. I recommend these two approaches.
1. Loss aversion. Detail what an unplanned outage costs. Lost work, man hours, even lost business if it's bad enough timing. Business guys have a respect for the missing nail that lost the war.
2. Cheapness. Buying a $1000 laptop every two years is better than a $2000 laptop every four. Better average hardware and less paying guys like me to fix broken machines. Business guys are more likely to write small checks. Paradoxically you are spending the same amount of money, but you can sell it to them like you are spending less.
Above all be respectful. They aren't idiots, they may have issues to worry about that you aren't aware of.
--Zig Ziglar
I have Stockholm Syndrome. My biggest problem is that I'm now being overworked so much (intentionally) that I collapse from exhaustion when I go home and don't have the energy to spend looking for a new job.
At least here I know what I know, even if I don't like it. But that's also me convincing myself that I'm ok here.
The worst part is the demoralization that happens. You start to feel like you are becoming less useful to other organizations.
I've had two employers change their employee benefits packages/bonus structures sharply negatively within <1 year of being hired. In both cases I went up the chain and asked what other compensation I could expect. I was very reasonable and offered them several alternatives. I'm empathetic to a tough situation, and am willing to be flexible.
In both cases it was like talking to a tape recording. 'benefits are not guaranteed, and legally we are within our rights to change at any time' and 'sorry it's policy hands are tied'. Yes I understand that you can do that, but you've effectively rescinded what we negotiated when I recently agreed to work here.
The most frustrating part of the whole thing is how quickly things change once a two week notice is given. As if the retention offer does anything but underscore their dishonesty.
Just my opinion, but I think (8) is the most insightful of these and perhaps the least obvious (though they are all obvious to an extent). (8) is also the hardest to do right. You don't want to drag a developer to five executive meetings a day so that he doesn't have time to do development; that could in itself drive him/her away. But you also don't want any of your developers to feel like they don't know what's going on with the business at a higher level, and if they have an insight there should be an easy and comfortable avenue for them to discuss it.
#0. Force usage of shitty/hopeless tools/frameworks at work.
#1. Pay late
#2. Ask for TPS reports
#3. Recruit a bunch of abusive retards for middle/senior management
These four, for sure!
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A favorite tactic of managers is to fire Q&A and support staff. This is a short term win on the bottom line, but will kill things later. It makes them look good as they get to say they "optimized the workflow". Another excellent one is to put a freeze on equipment buying and let it rot.
If you become a big wig and are in a company inclined to move people around for experience, please, please, please add something to your evaluations that look at the position they left 1 year ago and judge them on the sustainability. If they don't help enforce a sustainable process, then they will be fired as they are just a selfish, game-player.
I can link it here if anyone is interested(?)
I also want to find some research a professor once mentioned, about the traits that employees associated with good managers/bosses (I recall that almost all were personal, almost none technical).
For the research you could try looking up the works of Patrick Lioncini, he also has a great book on the subject called "five dysfunctions of a team".
In my experience, poor talent management and execution always comes down to egos, so yes, you would be right in thinking that it's almost always a personal level issue. When egos are involved, that's what you'll get.
See an answer of mine on Quora also: http://qr.ae/I5brc
"training is costly, don't do it."
the irony here is like a cup of coffee.
1) Become the rock star/golden child for a higher-up who pulls you along as they rise 2) Move from company to company every so often to get positions with higher salary grade and responsibility 3) Become the oracle of technical knowledge in some narrow but crucial specialty
Doh? ;)