You Don’t Want To Be On This List

I must admit the headline: Worst Companies To Work For In 2013 caught my attention … you can’t blame me … it’s what I do!

I love to work with organizations to help their managers become better leaders and better bosses. Improved quality of leadership leads to improved organizational results.

When I see an article like this I look to see what I can learn from it and I like to share with others – you can see the bottom five companies here if you’re interested.

If not, here is the short version: Based on ratings by their own employees, these companies employ some of the most unhappy workers in the United States (Canada has their own list).

Here are 4 – employee complaints extracted from the article and my leadership advice.

Benefits and salaries are not current with your industry – you’ve got to be competitive to attract and retain your customers, so it stands to reason that you must offer competitive benefits and salaries to attract and retain the top employees. Seek out relevant data from Associations within your industry or hire someone to conduct a survey for you.

Management is inconsiderate to employees, customers and shareholders – this is not a very good strategy to meet any organizational objective that I’m aware of. Consistently demonstrate respect for all and have it become one of your organizations core values.

Hitting unreasonable top down targets was more important to management than customer service or employee well-being – targets are important, but they must be realistic and achievable without jeopardizing customer service quality or employee health and safety. Your planning process should contain data that supports setting realistic targets. Include input from those in your organization closest to the action.

Managers play favorites among associates and store managers – you will be a more effective leader if you lead with consistency and fairness. Get regular feedback on your leadership. Consider a 360 degree feedback survey and / or an employee engagement survey.

In addition to the above, my leadership tip for you this week is to take a complete inventory of mistakes made by these and other organizations. Then learn from their mistakes. Make the changes you need to make in your organization to minimize (eliminate) the complaints and achieve full employee engagement.

The benefits of an engaged employee far outweigh the benefits of unhappy – disengaged employees.

A word of caution, you won’t achieve full employee engagement if you don’t measure it and then work towards fixing what needs to be fixed.

When it comes to the rankings of the worst of anything … there’s always someone at the top and there’s always someone on the bottom – I recommend being on the top.

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