Reduced politics and increased trust are long-term consequences of healthy corporate culture

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Dear Joan:

Our company has just completed an Employee Survey. The results overall were extremely favorable. During our monthly company management meeting, the results were shared. The results showed key areas: communication, HR, training, money and promotions, politics and trust.

We decided to divide into teams and develop a means of improving each of the areas in our organization. I am lucky to be a part of an organization that wishes to improve areas that were very favorable in the results of the survey.

I am on the politics and trust team. We are a team of 2. I wish to recruit a couple of other people to the team who are not management.

The goal is to work toward developing the managers to reduce office politics, and also to increase the trust of the management by the employees.

Do you have any suggestions?

Answer:

Congratulations for getting such high ratings from your employees. It’s easy to see why, from some of the actions you mentioned in your letter: The Company cared enough to take a survey and then shared the results with all of the employees. Then, even though the results were good, the company didn’t rest on its laurels—you formed teams to address the “worst of the best” scores. Kudos for wanting to keep moving the bar up.

Your team has a tough job to do, I suspect. The other topics are more quantifiable and tangible. For example, it’s going to be more difficult to get at the root of “trust” than to develop a training curriculum. 

Here are some thoughts about how you might go about working on “politics” and “trust.” First, you will need to identify some core causes of the problem. To do that you can examine the questions in the survey that contributed to your lower scores. In addition, you may want to involve a cross section of employees in some focus groups. You could ask the focus groups to elaborate on the questions you identified and expand on why these ratings might have been lower.

Share your findings with the other management teams working on other parts of the survey (and encourage them to share their work with your team). For instance, there may be a theme running through all five of your lowest survey categories. For instance, perhaps a desire for career growth and advancement is a central theme. This may help the groups build on each other’s solution ideas and then focus on a high leverage idea to work on together.

Here’s a word of caution, however. It’s important to be very clear about what real authority your committee has. For example, a few years ago, I became aware of a “Retention Committee” who gathered input on why people were leaving and determined that it was the poor management skills of some of the managers. Their action plan was well-intentioned but flawed. They were a cross-functional team of people who decided to take it upon themselves to go and “counsel” their own peer managers. Needless to say, it did not go over well.

In your case, you will want to research and recommend a course of action to take to senior management and Human Resources. For instance, if your committee finds that there is mistrust about how people get promoted and associates believe it is all politics, you will want to bring that to HR, with a recommendation for installing a job posting system. Or, if you find that different managers are administering policies differently and it looks like favoritism, you may want to recommend monthly “Policy Review Roundtables,” where the managers can get together to compare how they apply each policy and learn how to be more consistent across departments.

I think getting several non-management associates on your team is a good idea. Perhaps a good way to do that is to solicit a few recommendations at your next management meeting. The criteria should be: associates who are well-respected, willing to share their thoughts, good performers and people who can think conceptually about the organization (as opposed to tunnel vision about their own job). Avoid people with their own axe to grind, or it could skew the results and cause people to discount the committee’s recommendations.

Would you like to bridge the commitment gap with your employees?   We provide management consulting, executive coaching and customized, skills-based training for managers and supervisors, that changes behavior, creates a healthy culture and builds a customer-focused team.  Call us today at (800) 348-1944.