Encourage Your Employees to Speak Up, Or It May Cost You
David Maxfield is a New York Times bestselling author, keynote speaker, and leading social scientist for business performance. In an article published in the Harvard Business Journal, he observed several workplace issues ranging from employee behavior, abusive managers, lack of accountability, and even general dysfunction.
He found that instead of speaking up in these situations, interviewees admitted to engaging in one or more resource-sapping behaviors, including complaining to others (78%), doing extra or unnecessary work (66%), ruminating about the problem (53%), or getting angry (50%).
One conclusion he drew was the simple economics of deafening silence - the average person surveyed estimated the cost of silence at $7,500, and 20% of the sample estimated the cost of avoiding a difficult conversation to be as much as $50,000.
Further, the interviewees described how silence damages employee engagement, relationships, deadlines, budgets, and culture. Given the fact that every one of the people interviewed identified at least one costly example, he concluded that it’s likely that every employee in your organization is adding to the cumulative organizational cost of silence eating away at your bottom line.
Breaking the Silence
It’s been our experience that this is only the tip of the iceberg. Although those economics do matter, they are theoretical. So, unfortunately, we have clients come to us after ending up on the wrong side of a class action suit with many more commas and zeros. It’s why our mantra is “the more you know, the better company you can be.”
We have found that by offering as many ways as possible for your employees to communicate about issues, they come to the surface and allow the employer to address them and resolve them. This often eliminates the potential for costly litigation.
Our approach has been to ensure our customers’ deployments are done in a way that encourages dialogue by offering culturally sensitive tools to communicate and having trained agents that diffuse the emotion from a situation while offering a sympathetic ear.
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MEET THE AUTHOR
J Rollins is the co-founder and CEO of ETHIX360. J is a well known leader and innovator who has served on senior leadership teams ranging in responsibility from Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, SVP of Product Strategy and Chief Operating Officer.
ABOUT ETHIX360
At ETHIX360, our goal is simple: to provide an affordable, flexible, and comprehensive answer to employee communication, policy management, corporate training and case management on issues related to corporate ethics, code of conduct, fraud, bribery, and workplace violence.
