When employees don’t speak out

As manager, you may complain about employees who are constantly demanding, but what about employees who don’t speak out? Do you think just because an employee is not complaining that he or she is content or he or she is a good exemplary employee?

Few years back, I had a job as software tester in a small IT firm in Houston, TX, the company was no doing really well although it had many good projects at hand. The senior software developer was an intelligent and very educated person, he knew about the problems the company was facing, but he would not confront the CEO of the company with that, he was afraid to lose his job, he was a foreign national on work visa in the US and he was afraid that if he confronted the CEO of the company with the tough issues that facing the company, he may lose his job and his work visa. The end results: the company went out of business because no one was brave enough to tell the management about the problems the company is facing and the CEO of the company was not wise enough to come and check things by himself, he thought since no one is complaining, we must be doing great.

What brought me to write this article, is a new employee that we just hired, he is constantly complaining about various issues and he really started to bother me, he walked into my office while I was not ready to talk to him and I was about to get really firm with him but than suddenly something hit me, I asked myself “how may be bringing issues to my attention that I may over looked”, and now I am setting here on my desk and planing on actually go over his complaints and see if I can spot an imminent problem.

The other thing that happened and opened my eyes to the “silent employees” is the feedback I got from employees evaluations, I have received the forms I asked our employees to fill out, on these forms there were questions about their goals and future plans. Again, I was shocked to read the future career objectives our office secretary has. She said one of her objectives were to work with a company with better over all benefits. What this tells me? It tells me that she is not happy with our current pay package. She never complained to me about her pay or about any other work related issues, she is hard worker and very quite. She is the “silent employee” I am talking about. All this time I telling myself she must be the most content employee in the company.

So watch out for the “silent employee”.