Are you interested in discovering your employees' most serious complaints? Knowing what makes employees unhappy is half the battle when you think about employee work satisfaction, morale, positive motivation, and retention.
Listen to employees and provide opportunities for them to communicate with company managers. If employees feel safe, they will tell you what's on their minds. Your work culture must foster trust for successful two-way communication.
You need to provide ways for employees to communicate and air their concerns, and see that their voiced opinions had an impact on your work systems. You need to, not just listen, but be prepared to tell employees what their shared concerns changed about your business. If nothing, tell them that, too. But especially, tell them why their concern changed nothing.
See tips about addressing and understanding employee complaints.
Image © Lisa Gagne
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I find your article hilarious. I finally complained about sexual harassment in my workplace (after three years) and followed my company’s procedures (including telling corporate HR) and got forced out. Apparently, the corporate HR department’s job was to figure out how to prevent legitimate lawsuits the employees could have against them and deflect them before they started. Oh, and by the way, another female co-worker just found out that they were paying her less (after 4 years there) than a male hired for the same job (no experience). The parent company has also lost a previous sexual harassment case and found guilty of OSHA violations, which is exactly like my old workplace. No one else dares to complain for fear of ending up like me.
PS: After four months I’m still waiting for the state to “get around” to addressing my complaint.
Great article, the key message – welcome employee complaints, otherwise you cannot take action. I have recently worked with a business who’s employees were reluctant to make complaints out of fear, however I know the managers and this just did not fit.
On further investigation the managers were not doing anything negative to provoke this feeling of fear. However, they also were not giving enough positive feedback.
Since this experience I have started to notice people who don’t receive enough positive feedback are less likely to speak up and make a complaint.
I will not read your full article on this topic, thanks again
I think it is a fine line to manage.
At the one end, unfortunately, is Wisconsin where management seems to have put their head in the sand hoping it will go away. Leaving a (presumably) talented employee looking at getting out.
At the other end, there is a risk of encouraging moaning and groaning for its own sake and managing triviality. Without any action, this will create a “feel bad” factor about the place.
(and in the current economic climate who really cares that the vending machine doesn’t have such-and-such flavour crisps..)
How well organizations deal with complaints is the strongest determinant
of ongoing customer satisfaction and loyalty;
If a company can increase its retention of otherwise defecting customers by just 5% they
can increase their bottom-line by more than 25%;
Yet in spite of this, staff from many organizations are poorly equipped to deal with complaints;
And more than half of all attempts to recover a customer’s confidence after they have had
a problem, simply reinforce negativity towards the organization.