If you don’t have a solid business reason for your policy, the rest of us will question your ability to make any decisions about the company going forward. Employees who have other options will take them when they don’t trust leadership.
Why give them a reason to distrust you?
Words about your workplace’s great culture ring hollow when team members regularly find themselves putting up with jerks. That’s not a great culture. That’s extra emotional labor—labor that likely doesn’t come close to matching what they are paid.
We don’t talk about this in terms of emotional labor. We talk about being resilient, staying composed, etc. We don’t talk about how exhausting it is to know that every day at work, someone is likely to yell at you, let alone know that when it happens, there will be no solution to prevent it from happening again. If they take the time to complain and ask for a solution, they’ll be told it’s “just part of the job.”
Yes, those are things we should tell our family and friends. They are also 100% the things we should tell employees. What makes a difference for employees other than pay? Knowing that the work they do is appreciated and makes a difference. How will they know if you don’t tell them? How will they know that you notice their effort if you don’t tell them you notice it?
This headline seems obvious. If you have an employee who has set a goal of being promoted to the next level of your organization, you should be able to tell them what is required. Yet, in many companies, it’s not that easy. There could be several reasons for this, but these are the ones I’ve seen and heard in my years:
What I would like, however, is just once for someone not to feel the need to make a business case for treating your employees with kindness and empathy. This need to include the business case and the impact on the bottom line is an appeal to management in their self-interest and the financial interest of their business.
How about we make the case that being kind, thoughtful, and empathetic towards employees is the right way to treat a fellow human being, regardless of what it means for the bottom line? Is it too much to ask managers and CEOs to treat people like people? Or are we so far down the caste system at work that we have to convince managers to act as if they care about their employees to benefit themselves?
When management harms the mental health of our employees, we typically respond by offering them yoga or meditation spaces or maybe a lunchtime session on stress management. We never look at the system. We offer them ways to better cope with the broken system, but we never take responsibility for what the workplace is doing to their mental health.