Employee surveys are awesome. You can find out what your employees are thinking. But today’s Bad Boss of the Week? He shouldn’t have asked. Here is what happened:
I, and everyone in my department is salaried exempt. We all have at least 20 years experience and advance degrees. Every year the company does a “company morale survey.”
The survey is supposed to be anonymous, but I’m guessing everyone in my group gave bad comments, because since the results were released, the boss has been an absolute jerk to everyone.
So, yesterday he sent out an email requiring everyone to be at work in the office from 8-5:30 every day. My offer letter (from four years ago) states 8:30-5:00. I had breakfast meetings with clients starting at 7:00 a.m. but my boss still appeared at my door at 5:25 “checking to make sure I didn’t go home early.”
I have a client dinner, which will last until late, but I’m sure if I’m not in the office at 8:00, he’ll be angry. It’s very demoralizing to be treated like a high school kid when I (and my co-workers) all have 20 or more years of experience and manage literally millions of dollars in our jobs.
Will it seems your boss has some reservations, if i am not wrong HR managers should not act as introverts. Matters,problems,conflicts etc should be discussed, if one seeks to get it solved.
Please please do NOT use the word “introvert” in this way. This manager is not acting like “an introvert”. There is no relationship between this story and introverted behaviour.
50% of people are introverts. Setting arbitrary rules for work hours is NOT an introvert-typical behaviour!
For an example of owners looking for a pat on the back and receiving something very different, please refer to the Fox TV Show Kitchen Nightmares for the “Amy’s Baking Company” episode, Season 06, Episode 16 which aired on May 10, 2013, and the “Return to Amy’s Baking Company” episode, Season 07, Episode 01 which aired on April 11, 2014.
Wow.
One manager came to my desk too late at my new job. Tried to warn me to not put anything bad in my survey, because i was one of like 6 people in the dept and the “anonymous” ID actually corresponded with hire date so being the only one recently hired – my comments would be obviously mine as all comments were given to dept directors. Oh well, I resigned like 2 months later cause I hate it that much and it was making me sick to be there.
One element of being a professional is to be ready for every possible answer when asking a question. If a manager reacts like a spoiled brat after asking for feedback, then he or she should not be a manager.
Nobody completed the employee survey in SergioLand: http://diaryofagolddigger.blogspot.com/2014/08/in-which-i-think-i-am-about-to-be-fired.html
The other problem about morale surveys in regards to reviews is that they can sometimes be influence by unpopular decisions made by the boss for the good of the organization. For example when one of the two full time staff members was going on maternity leave late in the year, A boss I know warned their staff that the cutoff date for vacation requests would be the end of October and that only one person could be on vacation at a time. The memo went out in September. In December staff was asking for vacation time a were told no. Morale survey went out in January annnd guess what happened. Understand that no funds were available for temporary staff, the manager worked most of the extra unpopular shifts required of the person on leave and allowed everybody with extra time to carry it over (and took flack for it to)
An old boss read my ‘anonymous’ employment survey out loud in the hallway in a mocking tone, chuckling.
This guy was a director-level ‘office cancer’ raging jerk at a place that had gone through two CEOs, two VPs, and a couple of directors (including him, eventually). That office also includes a Stasi-like HR department that monitors warring departments that fight each other passive aggressively.
I used to have people come into my office to spy on me/ask things that my boss wanted to not share with other departments. I have a friend who still works there, and I think he has ulcers.
When a colleague left two weeks notice, he went ballistic and sent her home crying.
It is an evil workplace.
I have a friend who once worked in a team with a manager who decided that everyone should come in at 7am. For a week, they all did. They’d sit with a cup of coffee and stare blankly at the commuter screen for an hour or so, but they came in.
After a week, with HR involved, the entire team (6 or 8 people) went to the manager en masse and said ‘We Quit’. He said “Why?” They said “Hours”.
The manager allowed them to go back to their previous schedules.
I considered being ready for any feedback, not only positive as a part of being a true professional, doesn’t it apply to top management or is their ego so overblown that they can’t(don’t want to) see anything behind it? Leaders with an overblown ego become more and more defensive when receiving feedback thus making this feedback useless. Employee surveys can only be useful if you take the results into account and work on what appears to be your weaknesses and improve your strengths even more. If you’re not doing it then why waste time and irritate your employees?