May 26th, 2020  By Carolyn Deer

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You’ve invested time and money and you lead the way in ensuring your employees are looked after and treated well. You’ve added morning breakfast and afternoon fruit, Friday drinks, a ping pong table, a football table and great coffee. Then there’s summer parties, the Christmas parties, and the 'parties because we can' parties. There’s the start work when you want policy, the leave when you want policy, and the bring your dog into work day,  sod it … bring your cat too (not on the same day) … yet somehow, your employees are not grateful … 

They leave! Ok it happens but then …  a few months later a bad review on social media pops up - you cannot understand what went wrong!  You demand it is taken down.  Phew …

 

“all that brand work going down the pan, not on my watch”

Was it the pay?  You paid them a good a salary, a bonus, you gave them shares, gave them your holiday villa to use every summer and let them use your private jet to get there but still not grateful… (ok, maybe not the jet but you would if you had one).

Then another employee leaves, another bad review pops up, again you demand that it’s taken down and justify to the team that “this person wasn’t a good culture fit” and demand to know who hired them! 

It’s like playing whac-a-mole, you know that arcade game with the mallet and all those moles.  As soon as a bad review pops up, you whack it down and another rears its annoying furry face! 

What is the answer?  

 

Maybe it’s the end of the road for perks? Maybe listening is the new beer fridge? 

Instead of giving yet more perks, engage with them, listen to their point of view, they are humans after all, and you may just find all they really want is to be listened to and their ideas considered.  Radical? It doesn’t sound that radical. Hard? Probably - the investment of time is far more than the price of a bucket of chocolate bars on the second floor.  But in comparison to the value of your brand, that’s a different story! 

So instead of taking down the crappy review and waiting for the next one to pop up like that mole, how about you pop your head up, engage, talk, listen and give your side of the situation. 

Usually, when we have all the information, we can make more sense of reasoning.  It may make you feel uncomfortable and vulnerable, but vulnerability is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength and human-ness which is hard to “trash” on Glassdoor.