"Take Care of Your Employees... they will take care of the clients."
The title if this article is a paraphrase of one of my favoreite quotes, by Richard Branson. It seems like it would be common sense for a company to treat the people they employ with respect, dignity, and fairness. Especially when you read a company's "About Us" page. Or maybe you sit in on your orientation session after being hired. The mission statement always reads about the same for all companies. Sadly, this is almost never the case.
I have worked for and with, four fortune 500 companies. The same problems continue to plague then all. HR violations, pushing the envelope on labor laws, inconsistent enforcement of policy, incorrectly classified contractors, overworking of employees. But these aren't the issue. These problems have always existed. So what is different? Why is it so hard to staff a company now? Why is it now so hard to keep good people employed and your client's projects on track? Why do so many companies end up tangled up in lawsuits? Let's look at a few points that personally feel attribute to this problem. All of which can be very easily fixed if a company wanted to.
Honest and Accurate Expectations of the Role
Sad to say, most companies have lost all hope of an employee or resource being able to "work out" before they even enter orientation. From the ridiculous qualifications and amount of experience required, most job postings have already given a false representation of what the job role actually entails before the prospective employee has even submitted his/her resume. And let us not forget the "may perform duties outside of job role as needed" bullet point on every job posting.
And God help you if you are working with a recruiter or hiring manager that doesn't even know what they are hiring for. I have had so many arguments with recruiters who try and quiz me on form factors for system boards in a phone interview, when they themselves don't even know the difference between AMD and Intel. Even the direct supervisor you may end up working with tends to not know what their employees do all day, and couldn't do the job themselves if they had to. But you can forget about discussing this with them. You see companies want qualified people, but that comes at the price of sometimes being over people that are quite honestly smarter than you.
Qualifications aside, another part of setting expectations in the hiring process, is the promising of things like work schedule, overtime, pay, reimburment, time off, travel, and potential for growth. Too many times, hiring managers have no real idea what actually will be expected of their employees once they are on the job. It's not that they are lying to their recruits. But typically companies are fully aware of how hard it is to hire good workers in today's job market. But they will fudge the job description to get somebody hired. Especially when they have a client that they are trying to please. Which will transition me in to my main point of this article.
Inevitability in the first month, the new hire will speak the words, "that's not what my recruiter told me" or "I was promised _______ when I was hired." Now, it's at this point where the company has a chance to salvage the relationship with their new employee. Sadly, they don't do that most of the time. They will tell the employee that they can't control what recruiters tell potential hires. They will say that you just need to be able to accept change. They will tell the employee that recruiters don't really know what they are hiring for. These are just a few examples, and they may be true, but unknowingly, you just crippled yourself as a manager. You don't seem to be in control. You don't seem to have the power to fix issues. The employee is now questioning who is in control and who actually knows what's goin on at the ground level of a company.
Over the first few months of their employment there will be some frustrations. Especially if your resource was promised the moon, and never sees anything close to it. As a manager and a company, this shouldn't surprise you. You made up a completely bogus job description and handed it to a recruiter who posts it on Indeed.com and does what they can to get the sale done. No different than a used car salesman. On top of that, you have allowed your project and account managers to set unrealistic expectations with your clients.
As a company, you are in a tough spot. You have resources that are uneasy and unmotivated right out of the gate. They may even feel completely lied to. They have no faith in management. It's an uphill battle to get them motivated at all at this point.
On the other hand, you have a client that is wanting results. They don't care about your resources or their concerns. If they did, they would have staffed their project themselves. At this point, it is very tempting to give your staff ultimatums. To set hardcore deadlines and even go full drill seargant. Once you go this route, there is no turning back. The message will have been sent loud and clear, and the suspicion confirmed in the employee's mind that you don't really have control.
They do this to their employees because upper management and clients like data. They like numbers. Being condescending and beligerent doesn't show up in a spreadsheet. Your employees could work tons of overtime, and lack needed sleep. They may not see their families anymore. They may feel betrayed and disrespected. But this method is getting great results and numbers in the short term. But it isn't sustainable. Long term, this will fail. Your glass door reviews will fall. Lawsuits will be filed. And ultimately, you become unable to staff at all and your clients leave you anyway.
I understand that numbers matter. That perception is reality when it comes to public relationships. Especially in today's volatile economy where industries and stocks rise and fall based on a Tweet that may or may not be true. But companies need to start realizing that eventually, they will run out of qualified resources to push around and exhaust. Short term gratification is not a model for long term financial success as a company. Hopefully companies will start go back to worrying about the future, and not what this quarter's budget looks like.
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