Candid Culture: Embracing Employee Complaints
by Lindsay Edmonds Wickman
Ever hear the tagline "Your Vote Counts?" In corporate America, the mantra might read "Your Opinion Matters."
Unfortunately, creating a workplace that values candid feedback is no easy task. Cultures in which employees feel safe sharing their inner thoughts and breaking down barriers are rare. Promoting this type of candor, however, can produce substantial benefits including the ability to harness innovation, root out underlying problems and increase productivity.
"Organizations and leaders look at risk management, but they don't look at the risk of poor communication and lack of candor," said Jim Bolton, CEO of Ridge Training, which provides interpersonal communication skills training. "If people felt empowered to talk openly about how to resolve the problems they encounter on a day-to-day basis, huge gains could be made in productivity and efficiency."
General Electric's Approach to Candor
The legacy of candor established during Jack Welch's tenure still reverberates throughout General Electric. What was once considered the CEO Survey during his reign has become an enterprise-wide initiative known as the General Electric Opinion Survey (GEOS).
Approximately 235,000 of GE's 330,000 employees are eligible to complete the GEOS. Because of its size and scope - it takes six months to prepare and disseminate in 29 languages - the survey is biennial, allowing GE's business units more time to act on the data.
"[We] decided to move it to a two-year cycle to give us more time to work with the insights we had gained," said Nancy Schumann, GEOS survey co-leader. "Employees have provided their voice, their perspective, and it's very important for them to see that it's acknowledged and acted upon."
While a survey is a great method to gather candid feedback, it can only provide numbers, not stories. The cycle of candor is complete when the managers take the GEOS data back to employees and they work together to find solutions.
"We ask the employee's opinion - take it online, put [it] in reports, summarize it, analyze it, review it and cut it in different ways," Schumann said. "The meaningful part is once [we] have that information, [we] go back and share what we've learned in the aggregate, then have more conversations and ultimately take actions as a result of what was learned. It's closing the loop. We start with the employee, and we complete with the employee.
"We have a terrific culture with respect to candor and employee opinion, but the survey is just one mechanism. It's an important one, but it's strengthened because we also have other forums by which our employees speak with our leaders. You need multiple touch points. You can't ask enough: What's the pulse of the employee?"
US Airways: A Different Kind of Candor
Airlines struggle with many industry-specific challenges such as developing an aura of candor in an environment in which the majority of employees work from a cockpit, galley, runway or airport instead of a traditional four-walled office. US Airways overcomes this obstacle by meeting its 36,000 highly dispersed employees where they are: in the field.
Cultivating candor at the airline is especially crucial because some areas still operate with two different cultures, a lingering result of a merger in 2005 between US Airways and America West. To complicate matters, US Airways is highly unionized and still is battling to merge two labor contracts into one.
To deal with these sensitive issues, the company has adopted a policy under which comments, complaints and problems are addressed head-on.
"Truthfully, I don't think [employees would] let us have any other culture here," said Elise Eberwein, US Airways senior vice president of people. "Airlines get so much press; if management's not listening, [employees are] going to tell the story to someone who will."
The airline also gathers employee opinion during brown bag lunches that take a relatively informal tone.
"You'll hear about things that if you listed them all, you might say, 'Gosh that's a lot of minutia,'" Eberwein said. "But minutia adds up to something greater: the real story. If you really want to focus on things that matter to your employees, especially in the service business, get out there and listen to them because they [know] firsthand what's really happening."
Eberwein said candor at US Airways is a commitment modeled from the top of the organization - CEO Doug Parker - down. Without that pledge, it becomes a broken promise in which leaders say candor is important, but their actions illustrate otherwise.
"It's imperative to find someone at the top who doesn't just give it lip service," she said. "I would submit that if you checked Doug's calendar and our president's calendar, a good 55 percent-plus time is spent on employee communication in one form or another, and that says a lot."
Some may not agree with US Airways' philosophy of open and largely uncensored candor, but the culture is working.
"Some days it feels like you take one step forward and two back. [But] we're making a tremendous turnaround," Eberwein said. "We just announced our February on-time arrival results, and we came in number one among the large domestic carriers. We are taking the feedback we got last year and making changes in ways that directly impact each person's working environment. That's how progress is made, one step at a time."
Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Candor?
Nurturing open communication is a necessity, but it can be a double-edged sword if it's not managed appropriately and complaints run amok. Craig Mindrum, a strategic management consultant, communications specialist and author, believes true candor is a balance.
"Aristotle said that virtue is a midpoint between two extremes," he said. "We could say candidness is that midpoint between being very closed and unwilling to admit mistakes and [being] candid in terms of constant harping, criticism and a culture of negativity."
Corporations have to be candid, but they also must govern candor to ensure it doesn't foster a negative environment in which employees feed off one another's discontent.
"It's irresponsible for a company to promote candidness and openness and let things spiral down into a culture of complaint," Mindrum said. "Then people experience that company negatively. If you're told this is a pretty crummy place to work, it's going to be a crummy place to work. There has to be some effort to contextualize all the feedback."
To make sure US Airways' culture of candor doesn't perpetuate negativity, Eberwein said the company tries to balance the perspective, as well as add humor to the mix.
"Four times a year, we do a pretty big State of the Airline [address], so we're taking hundreds of questions off the Internet," she said. "You'll get a fair amount of negative comments because you can hide behind the anonymity of the Internet. Typically, what I do with those is summarize the negative [comments]: 'Hey Doug, it's been two and half years - we still don't have a contract? Could you speak a little bit about [that]?' You can work through negativity as long as you don't let it get you down, and you can also release the pressure with humor."
How to Create Candor
Leadership gurus always are proselytizing about how important workplace candor is, but few actually outline how to develop it. Bolton believes cultivating several different skill sets - which include but are not limited to changing employees' internal thinking processes and developing supervisors' abilities to actively listen - can create candor. Part of the process is altering the way employees perceive their ideas and promoting an environment in which they feel safe sharing them.
"Many times [employees] are worried about the worst-case scenario: 'If I say this, people might think I'm an idiot,'" Bolton said. "A lot of times the worst-case scenarios don't come to pass. Try to expand [employees'] thinking so that they're making different censorship choices when they're in that candor moment."
If employees change the way they censor their comments and become more open, managers must be prepared to listen.
"If everybody's talking and nobody's listening, there's not really a conversation happening," Bolton said. "A key skill of candor is the ability to [actively] listen so you can get to the heart of core issues. Candor is not a one-way practice. It's an interactive dialogue when it's working well."
One reason there's no easy how-to guide for creating workplace candor is because it starts with behavior, and changing behavior can be difficult.
"It's easy to put programs in place, create a newsletter or a two-way feedback mechanism," Mindrum said. "It's harder to get managers' behaviors manifested in the right way, [where they] listen to people and say: 'You know what, you have a point there. Let me see what I can do and get back to you.'"
The Value of Candor
Candor is not perfect: Each company must navigate uncharted waters to find the best balance of openness befitting their workplace, culture and employees. If companies develop an environment in which employees feel comfortable expressing their personal opinions, the results can be profound. Having a candid culture can solve operational problems, create efficiency and encourage innovation.
"Give people the sense that they make a difference, that someone is listening to them and that they really can affect their work environment, " Mindrum said. "That kind of valuing is going to have tremendous impact on your ability to attract and retain the best employees. People want the sense that they're making a difference.
"Without that [willingness] to listen to what's going on out in the field, I'm not going to be able to harvest innovations from the people closest to where it's all happening," Mindrum said. "Being able to solve employee issues is great, but even more important is the ability to understand your business and customers better."
[About the Author: Lindsay Edmonds Wickman is an associate editor for Talent Management magazine
by Lindsay Edmonds Wickman
Ever hear the tagline "Your Vote Counts?" In corporate America, the mantra might read "Your Opinion Matters."
Unfortunately, creating a workplace that values candid feedback is no easy task. Cultures in which employees feel safe sharing their inner thoughts and breaking down barriers are rare. Promoting this type of candor, however, can produce substantial benefits including the ability to harness innovation, root out underlying problems and increase productivity.
"Organizations and leaders look at risk management, but they don't look at the risk of poor communication and lack of candor," said Jim Bolton, CEO of Ridge Training, which provides interpersonal communication skills training. "If people felt empowered to talk openly about how to resolve the problems they encounter on a day-to-day basis, huge gains could be made in productivity and efficiency."
General Electric's Approach to Candor
The legacy of candor established during Jack Welch's tenure still reverberates throughout General Electric. What was once considered the CEO Survey during his reign has become an enterprise-wide initiative known as the General Electric Opinion Survey (GEOS).
Approximately 235,000 of GE's 330,000 employees are eligible to complete the GEOS. Because of its size and scope - it takes six months to prepare and disseminate in 29 languages - the survey is biennial, allowing GE's business units more time to act on the data.
"[We] decided to move it to a two-year cycle to give us more time to work with the insights we had gained," said Nancy Schumann, GEOS survey co-leader. "Employees have provided their voice, their perspective, and it's very important for them to see that it's acknowledged and acted upon."
While a survey is a great method to gather candid feedback, it can only provide numbers, not stories. The cycle of candor is complete when the managers take the GEOS data back to employees and they work together to find solutions.
"We ask the employee's opinion - take it online, put [it] in reports, summarize it, analyze it, review it and cut it in different ways," Schumann said. "The meaningful part is once [we] have that information, [we] go back and share what we've learned in the aggregate, then have more conversations and ultimately take actions as a result of what was learned. It's closing the loop. We start with the employee, and we complete with the employee.
"We have a terrific culture with respect to candor and employee opinion, but the survey is just one mechanism. It's an important one, but it's strengthened because we also have other forums by which our employees speak with our leaders. You need multiple touch points. You can't ask enough: What's the pulse of the employee?"
US Airways: A Different Kind of Candor
Airlines struggle with many industry-specific challenges such as developing an aura of candor in an environment in which the majority of employees work from a cockpit, galley, runway or airport instead of a traditional four-walled office. US Airways overcomes this obstacle by meeting its 36,000 highly dispersed employees where they are: in the field.
Cultivating candor at the airline is especially crucial because some areas still operate with two different cultures, a lingering result of a merger in 2005 between US Airways and America West. To complicate matters, US Airways is highly unionized and still is battling to merge two labor contracts into one.
To deal with these sensitive issues, the company has adopted a policy under which comments, complaints and problems are addressed head-on.
"Truthfully, I don't think [employees would] let us have any other culture here," said Elise Eberwein, US Airways senior vice president of people. "Airlines get so much press; if management's not listening, [employees are] going to tell the story to someone who will."
The airline also gathers employee opinion during brown bag lunches that take a relatively informal tone.
"You'll hear about things that if you listed them all, you might say, 'Gosh that's a lot of minutia,'" Eberwein said. "But minutia adds up to something greater: the real story. If you really want to focus on things that matter to your employees, especially in the service business, get out there and listen to them because they [know] firsthand what's really happening."
Eberwein said candor at US Airways is a commitment modeled from the top of the organization - CEO Doug Parker - down. Without that pledge, it becomes a broken promise in which leaders say candor is important, but their actions illustrate otherwise.
"It's imperative to find someone at the top who doesn't just give it lip service," she said. "I would submit that if you checked Doug's calendar and our president's calendar, a good 55 percent-plus time is spent on employee communication in one form or another, and that says a lot."
Some may not agree with US Airways' philosophy of open and largely uncensored candor, but the culture is working.
"Some days it feels like you take one step forward and two back. [But] we're making a tremendous turnaround," Eberwein said. "We just announced our February on-time arrival results, and we came in number one among the large domestic carriers. We are taking the feedback we got last year and making changes in ways that directly impact each person's working environment. That's how progress is made, one step at a time."
Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Candor?
Nurturing open communication is a necessity, but it can be a double-edged sword if it's not managed appropriately and complaints run amok. Craig Mindrum, a strategic management consultant, communications specialist and author, believes true candor is a balance.
"Aristotle said that virtue is a midpoint between two extremes," he said. "We could say candidness is that midpoint between being very closed and unwilling to admit mistakes and [being] candid in terms of constant harping, criticism and a culture of negativity."
Corporations have to be candid, but they also must govern candor to ensure it doesn't foster a negative environment in which employees feed off one another's discontent.
"It's irresponsible for a company to promote candidness and openness and let things spiral down into a culture of complaint," Mindrum said. "Then people experience that company negatively. If you're told this is a pretty crummy place to work, it's going to be a crummy place to work. There has to be some effort to contextualize all the feedback."
To make sure US Airways' culture of candor doesn't perpetuate negativity, Eberwein said the company tries to balance the perspective, as well as add humor to the mix.
"Four times a year, we do a pretty big State of the Airline [address], so we're taking hundreds of questions off the Internet," she said. "You'll get a fair amount of negative comments because you can hide behind the anonymity of the Internet. Typically, what I do with those is summarize the negative [comments]: 'Hey Doug, it's been two and half years - we still don't have a contract? Could you speak a little bit about [that]?' You can work through negativity as long as you don't let it get you down, and you can also release the pressure with humor."
How to Create Candor
Leadership gurus always are proselytizing about how important workplace candor is, but few actually outline how to develop it. Bolton believes cultivating several different skill sets - which include but are not limited to changing employees' internal thinking processes and developing supervisors' abilities to actively listen - can create candor. Part of the process is altering the way employees perceive their ideas and promoting an environment in which they feel safe sharing them.
"Many times [employees] are worried about the worst-case scenario: 'If I say this, people might think I'm an idiot,'" Bolton said. "A lot of times the worst-case scenarios don't come to pass. Try to expand [employees'] thinking so that they're making different censorship choices when they're in that candor moment."
If employees change the way they censor their comments and become more open, managers must be prepared to listen.
"If everybody's talking and nobody's listening, there's not really a conversation happening," Bolton said. "A key skill of candor is the ability to [actively] listen so you can get to the heart of core issues. Candor is not a one-way practice. It's an interactive dialogue when it's working well."
One reason there's no easy how-to guide for creating workplace candor is because it starts with behavior, and changing behavior can be difficult.
"It's easy to put programs in place, create a newsletter or a two-way feedback mechanism," Mindrum said. "It's harder to get managers' behaviors manifested in the right way, [where they] listen to people and say: 'You know what, you have a point there. Let me see what I can do and get back to you.'"
The Value of Candor
Candor is not perfect: Each company must navigate uncharted waters to find the best balance of openness befitting their workplace, culture and employees. If companies develop an environment in which employees feel comfortable expressing their personal opinions, the results can be profound. Having a candid culture can solve operational problems, create efficiency and encourage innovation.
"Give people the sense that they make a difference, that someone is listening to them and that they really can affect their work environment, " Mindrum said. "That kind of valuing is going to have tremendous impact on your ability to attract and retain the best employees. People want the sense that they're making a difference.
"Without that [willingness] to listen to what's going on out in the field, I'm not going to be able to harvest innovations from the people closest to where it's all happening," Mindrum said. "Being able to solve employee issues is great, but even more important is the ability to understand your business and customers better."
[About the Author: Lindsay Edmonds Wickman is an associate editor for Talent Management magazine