The warning signs of employee discontent rarely arrive with flashing lights. More often, they show up in ordinary conversations, routine complaints, and management reports that nobody quite gets around to reading.
Consider a hypothetical distribution center with 300 employees and six relatively uneventful years under its belt.
In February, a second-shift supervisor tells the operations manager that employees are complaining about pay compression. New hires are starting within a dollar an hour of employees with five years of service. In April, HR received three complaints about last-minute schedule changes. By May, several second-shift employees who regularly attend monthly town halls have stopped showing up. In June, a former employee takes to social media to share some decidedly unflattering opinions about the facility.
In September, the company receives notice of a petition for a union election.
Surprise! Well, perhaps not entirely.
None of those earlier events necessarily signaled an organizing campaign, but each offered an opportunity to understand what employees were experiencing. The information was there. It just never made its way into a meaningful management discussion.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda: It’s what we say when hindsight makes everything look obvious.
Woulda: We Would Have Acted If We’d Known
It’s a familiar refrain after an organizing petition arrives.
We had no idea that employees were unhappy. If someone had told us, we would have done something.
And management probably believes in that message.
After all, the company has an open-door policy, conducts an annual engagement survey, and holds monthly town halls. Leaders consider themselves approachable. Employees have plenty of opportunities to speak up.
What more could they want? Apparently, someone who listens.
The January engagement survey wasn’t summarized until April. HR handled scheduling complaints individually, without looking for patterns. The operations manager dismissed the pay-compression concern as one supervisor’s opinion.
Everyone had a small piece of the big picture. Nobody was looking at the whole thing.
LRI’s Approachable Leadership® Connection Model describes three building blocks: creating the right space for conversations, generating the right feeling by listening to understand, and taking the right action by following through. This process can help avoid our hypothetical situation.
An open-door policy might get an employee into the manager’s office. What happens after that determines whether the employee will bother coming back. There’s a difference between being available and being useful.
Coulda: There Were Opportunities. Plenty of Them.
The distribution center had several chances to investigate employee concerns before the petition arrived.
Warning Sign | What management could have done
- February: Pay-compression complaints | Compare compensation by tenure/hire date to see if concern was justified.
- April: Scheduling complaints | Review scheduling practices and determine if this is recurring problem.
- May: Declining town hall participation | Ask employees if meetings are useful. Would other communication methods work better.
- June: Negative online comments | Determine whether concerns/criticisms are shared by current employees.
None of these actions required a crystal ball, a sophisticated analytics platform, or a consultant armed with 87 PowerPoint slides. They required someone to ask a few questions and follow through on the answers.
Take the February pay complaint. The operations manager didn’t need permission to hand out raises; they just needed to ask HR whether the supervisor’s concern was accurate.
If the numbers confirmed pay compression, leadership could have evaluated its compensation practices. If they didn’t, management could have explained how it made pay decisions. Instead, the concern died somewhere between the second shift and the operations manager’s next meeting.
The scheduling complaints suffered a similar fate. HR recorded them, handled them individually, and moved on.
Collecting information and doing something useful with it are two very different accomplishments. A spreadsheet full of employee complaints isn’t an employee relations strategy. It’s just a spreadsheet.
There’s also a legal consideration for the timing of certain actions. As the National Labor Relations Board explains in its guidance for employers, employers must be careful about changing working conditions or soliciting grievances in ways that could interfere with employees’ protected rights if organizing activity is in progress. Employers may generally continue established practices and make changes they would have made regardless of union activity, but they should review proposed actions during a campaign with labor counsel.
It’s better to understand and address legitimate concerns as part of normal operations than to scramble to figure them out after a petition arrives.
Shoulda: Someone Should Have Owned the Problem
The biggest failure wasn’t necessarily the operations manager dismissing the pay complaint. It was that nobody had responsibility for making sure concerns like that were investigated.
No one connected information across shifts, reviewed patterns in employee complaints, or checked whether managers followed through.
In other words, everybody was listening. At least according to their job descriptions.
LRI’s Stop, Listen, Confirm + Collaborate technique offers a practical starting point. The operations manager should have taken time to understand the supervisor’s concern, confirm what employees were saying, and work with HR to determine whether a problem needed attention.
That conversation wouldn’t have fixed the pay issue, but it would have established that the concern was worth investigating and assigned someone to follow through.
Employers don’t need another complicated reporting process to accomplish that. A few consistent management practices can make a considerable difference:
- Make someone accountable. HR or labor relations should regularly review employee concerns, identify patterns, and ensure significant issues reach the managers responsible for resolving them. Those managers should be accountable for following through.
- Give supervisors a way to report what they’re hearing. Frontline supervisors often hear about problems first. Make it easy for them to share that information and make sure somebody responds.
- Check assumptions against evidence. Not every employee complaint is accurate. Neither is every manager’s explanation for why it can be ignored. Look at the numbers and ask questions.
- Close the loop. Tell employees what leadership learned, what they plan to do, and why. Sometimes the answer will be no. That’s still better than leaving people wondering whether anyone was paying attention.
Understanding employee concerns is part of running a business. It shouldn’t suddenly become a priority because someone from the NLRB sends a letter.
The Warning Signs Weren’t Hidden
By September, the distribution center had missed months of opportunities to understand what employees were experiencing.
Would acting earlier have prevented the organizing campaign? Maybe. Maybe not. Employees organize for many reasons, and even employers with strong employee relations can face a petition.
But leadership would have understood its workforce better and had opportunities to address legitimate concerns before they became bigger problems.
Instead, management learned an uncomfortable lesson: having an open-door policy doesn’t mean much if nobody pays attention to what comes through the door.
If employees were becoming increasingly dissatisfied today, how would your leadership team know? And who would be responsible for addressing it?
How Approachable Are Your Leaders?
LRI’s Leadership Checkup is a 20-question self-assessment that helps leaders evaluate how their teams experience their leadership. The accompanying coaching guide focuses on the three building blocks of Approachable Leadership®: Right Space, Right Feeling, and Right Action.
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