Management –Employees mistrust

Management –Employees mistrust

Imagine walking into an office where each employee confined to his/her desk. No communications, no greeting and no trust. Have you ever lived this type of situation? Have you ever walked into your office feeling as if you are stepping into some type of war zone? I am sure most of us went through this type of situation sometime during our working years.

In the past few weeks, I have been dealing with the issue of mistrust in my company, the CEO is on one side and some of the employees on the other side and I am “ as the General Manager”, acting as a messenger between the two parties.

After working with the company for almost five months now, I can see why there is a mistrust and how to resolve the issue.

CEO point of view and complaints about the employees:
1- We are a small company and every employee need to pitch in time of need
2- I have to, consistently, guide and supervise employees, why can’t they work with little supervision?
3- Other employees with the same situation, but in other companies, are doing better work

The point view and complaints of the employees:

1- We don’t have a clear job description, we don’t know what is expected of us
2- We are not trained to work in each and very task asked from us by the CEO or Management
3- Other companies are paying far more for our type of jobs

My views and complaints:

1- Before I joined the company, the owner (CEO) was in charge of the daily operations of the company and he didn’t give any clear and precise job descriptions to most employees
2- The CEO is trying to run the company as “One man show”, he is trying to make all employees work together without assigning clear responsibilities to each employee, this leads to lot of conflicts between employees and management
3- Employees don’t communicate well with management, when there is a problem, most employees wait for the management to find out instead of letting management up to date on urgent issues
4- To resolve this mistrust, the company must write clear policies regarding employees job duties, management-employees communications, role of the CEO, and the role of management

The core of this mistrust are based on two things:
1-No clear written policies regarding various companies operations
2- Failure from both side, the CEO and Employees to communicate

Communication is the best conflict resolution method

Today’s corporate world is very complicated and the relations between employees and management and between employees themselves is even more complicated.

Conflicts at work place is a common phenomena, there is no best way to resolve this issue since there is so much involved in the modern work place. Today’s workers are better informed and more educated than their parents were; they have more needs than just a place to get a paycheck from.

In almost every work place conflict I witnessed, the conflict could have been avoided had the communications channels remind open.

What really lead to conflicts?

1- Management not willing to listen or too busy to listen
2- Employees not willing to come forward to express their feelings or concerns

In a few conflicts that I have witnessed, the lack of clear and open communications was always the cause of the conflict, as soon as the communications channels were re-stored, the conflict resolved itself and all the parties felt silly about the conflict.

So talk to your employees, make sure they are not holding something back, some of your employees will need time to speak out and express their concerns. Most of the time, conflicts are caused by really small and trivial things, but when the communication breaks and parties don’t talk, the tension level rises and may lead to some very serious outcome.

As soon as you see signs of conflict, have a meeting and talk things out.

When you know more than your boss does

Have you ever felt that you can run the company better if you get the chance to be in your boss place? I think most of us felt that way sometimes during our working years, some of us just keep working hoping that our boss would listen to us one day and implements our ideas.

Management, usually, is not ready to implements new ideas or innovations just because you think they are great. Management doesn’t like to change the way business is done since it would have taken them a great deal of work and time to have a system in place.

If you have that great idea that you think will improve how your job is done, than you have two options:

1- To be patient till management is ready to talk to you
2- To quit your job and start your own company where you can implement your ideas

Many great companies started by individuals who one day knew they know better than their bosses do, they took the chance and started new ventures.

Some people don’t have enough confidence to believe they could know more than the boss could, but the truth is many great ideas and inventions took place because sometime somewhere someone thought he knew more than his boss did and he had the confidence to translate his thoughts into actions.

Is it a cultural thing?

I have written many times about work and culture, travelling around few countries, I thought I knew a lot about the world around me. Recently, we had a major management-employee conflict at the company I work with.

As a manager working with employees with various backgrounds, I tried my very best to reach to each of my employees through encouragement, communications and respect, but it seems like the more I try the less cooperation I got from some of my employees.

Now I started to feel like not every culture value hard and honest work the same, in some cultures you can not be straight forward with your employees, you must play tactful office politics in order to get things done.

Today, I really feel disappointed, I manage a group of people who happened to be far less educated and experienced and I have worked very hard with them to help them get advanced in their fields, but unfortunately, some of these employees thought of that as a weakness in my part because they came from a culture where managers usually don’t mingle with their employees.

So it is a cultural thing?

Should you promote based on seniority or based on skills?

What is the best policy to use when it comes to promoting employees, I know many companies use seniority as a factor when it comes to promotion, in facts it’s a tradition being practiced in many countries.

One famous success story is with Nissan Car Company, the company was suffering from serious market share loss and it felt as if Nissan was not able to innovate anymore. Nissan had a long an old policy, as with many Japanese firms, of promoting from within, this policy of not looking outside the company for talents and ideas led Nissan to, over time, lose its edge on innovation.

Nissan took a drastic measure, and hired a CEO who was not Nissan employee; he was not even Japanese. The first thing the new CEO did was to cancel the old tradition at Nissan and he started to look for talents outside of the company, and sure enough, the company was back again as one of the top auto makers in the world.

This is only a small instance of how companies should look for talents and skills everywhere and not only from within the company.

H-1B visa again and again

Being in the IT world and especially in the US, you cant afford to ignore the controversy over H-1B visa program, a program that allows foreign workers to come to the US and work mostly in IT related Jobs.

The program was designed initially to help IT companies with their needs for skilled labor, most of the early holders of H-1B visas were International students graduate of American colleges and universities, the program was designed to keep those international students who can secure jobs after graduation from living the country.

Initially the program worked well, mostly the hiring companies were paying the H-B1 visa holders the same wages that they would pay American workers, and there were more visas available than there were job seekers. I know this because I worked in an IT companies with few employees holding H-B1 Visas. Those employees were getting paid the same as American workers and our company lawyer used to tell me “there are more visas than there are job seekers.”

This whole program started to get controversial when some IT companies started to setup recruiting offices overseas to hire IT workers on H-1B visas and thouthands of workers (sometimes not-qualified and not-well paid) started to enter the US labor market.

All things being said, lets look at the actual number of H-B1 Visa holders and how they are affecting the American labor market and than you can make your own judgement.

The US population is about 300 Millions (estimated), and the H-1B visa holders would be by now about 1 million workers, if we assumed in the last 10 years we have 100,000 new H-1B visa holders coming each year and not living the country. If you do the math, you will find that the H-1B visa holders are not even 0.05 of the total US population.

Job Security of IT professionals

Why I feel IT professionals have more Job security than other professionals do? I have been working on the global scene for over a year now, and everywhere I went, the demand for skilled IT forces is high and growing. IT skills are universal, what you have learned in the US, you can apply it in Asia, Africa or anywhere else.

Many industries, such as law, medical, engineering, etc, are regulated by where you practice your profession, but IT industry is not regulated by countries, it follows international accepted standards and that what make any experience you gained in any country counts toward your total experience.

Its relatively easy to transfer IT force from one country to another, since IT professionals don’t need any familiarization to the new country standards, and if there is any, it will be minimal.

So if we in IT and you love your job, feel secure about your job, your skills demand worldwide, you basically can pack, get in the plan and start new job in new country with in a week

Will you give up 10 percent of your pay to telecommute?

As gas prices and energy cost keep going up and as technology makes is possible to work from remote locations, will you be ready to give up portion of your pay if you can work from home?

Back in 1999, I had a job as web application tester, I had to commute about 45 min to work on each direction, besides the weekly meeting with software developers, my job was to sit in front of a computer all day long trying to crash the web applications our company was developing, there was no need for me to be in my office, I could take my work home and work from there, and only come to the office when there is a meeting. I asked my boss if it was ok for me to work from home and save me the daily trip I make to work, the idea seemed foreign to him and he said “no.”

Since than, I left my full time job and I started to work on contracts, my company office was my home office, I would conduct my business from home and from my cell phone, and only go to the client site only when needed. Working this way lowered my total take home pay each month, but it:

1- Made me feel more relaxed, I forgot when was the last time I had to drive through morning rush hour
2- Gave me a lot of time to do more social activities that many IT professionals only dream of
3- Made me love my job as IT consultant, when I had corporate job, I would count the minutes till is time to go home
4- Made me make better use of the current technology which makes working remotely possible

So what would you say, take a lower pay for more relaxed life-style?

What is an ERP?

ERP stand for Enterprise Resource Planing, ERP is software-based solution for your business management needs. Most businesses have separate software for accounting, for Human resource, and for various services that they offer. An ERP system is software that consists of various modules designed for particular business setup, various business software can be combined in a single ERP system.

ERP solutions vary from vendor to vendor; however, most solutions provide several common features and functionality that can be tightly integrated. Financial reporting and analysis are often the core to most ERP systems since financial reporting is almost required by every business, from there you can add modules as you need them, so for example, if your business needs grow in the future, you can add more modules to your existing ERP system instead of buying new software (solution).

Once an ERP system is implemented in your company, adding new functionality to the system will not require a new training for your employees, you ERP system can grow with your company.

The advantage of ERP system is that you can have a single software that streamline all your business reporting needs in a single software interface.

As a manager, you can get reporting from various departments in one single screen.

HP offer a really nice online introductory course in understanding ERP system, you can check the course at this link: http://h30187.www3.hp.com/sessions/overview/p/courseSessionId/62136?courseId=18829

You will have to create a free online account to access the course.

==== Some of the text used in this article were excerpt from HP ERP course listed in the above link=======

Set a deadline for your cost cutting program

In my experience as a manager, meeting deadlines is a luxury not everyone can afford, I feel deadlines are made to be broken. Having said that, I strongly recommend setting a target date for your cost cutting program.

In my company, I have identified few areas where costs can be cut and instructed my employees to start working on these cost cutting measures, but I didn’t not give them a target date where I want to see those costs cut or totally eliminated. The results: no one really worked on these cost cutting measures.

So to get my employees back on track and get them working again on those cost-cutting measures, I set target dates and target performance measures for them to work against.

I am sure, they may miss the target dates, but having a set target date will keep the pressure on and they will have it on the back of their minds and eventually they will achieve the goals of the cost cutting program.