Managing Employees’ Sense of Insecurity Date:   Friday , April 02, 2010 Engaging employees has two sides to it. One has to do with cultivating the positive sense of belonging and contribution. The other has to do with removing the sense of insecurity that may come to permeate in the organization for variety of reasons. Before an organization can do wonders in the former, it has to ensure the latter. Recent layoffs, pay-cuts and restructuring have made the need for paying attention to the latter even more critical. However, even in normal circumstances where there has been steady growth and expansion, there are factors that can generate insecurity in the minds of employees and not paying attention to these in time can cause irreparable damage to the morale of people. Larger issues of demoralization and insecurity relating to downsizing and shrinking pay packages are easy to notice and so receive some attention. But there are often many other factors that are less readily noticeable but create enormous insecurity in the minds of people which often go unnoticed. This article highlights some of these insecurity-causing factors that need decisive attention by the leaders. Not doing so will lead to departure of valuable talent. Oversmart Bullies: These are long-serving, smart and highly productive employees who enjoy a lot of equity in the system and therefore enjoy a lot of influence. Some of them turn out to be sophisticated bullies and cause a lot of pain to colleagues. They need not necessarily be team leaders or managers. They are often individual contributors, but with a lot of their manager’s ears. They behave like top dogs and exercise extra-constitutional/organizational authority. They dictate things to their peers and colleagues and ask for unreasonable things – to take extra load, to refuse cooperation or to stay out of a discussion and such others things. Not toeing their line will mean becoming unpopular with the managers who do not have a mind of their own, but who are every ready to be influenced by these smart bullies. Self-respecting and capable employees do not stand this bully behavior and tend to leave when they find their managers not improving the situation and not reigning in these bullies Knowledge-hoarding mafia: Another factor often prevalent in pockets is a group of employees leaguing together to ensure that all the knowledge about the work they do is kept within them and not shared with any new joiner coming into the team. A large multinational and well known office productivity software product company with substantial presence in Hyderabad loses people steadily to lesser known companies just on this count. A couple of employees in many of their groups/units have formed into a mafia like closed cliques ensuring that no new comer gets any knowledge on the product line. Engineers who get attracted to cutting edge products and competitive salary offered by this Company go through this painful experience and feeling frustrated and helpless keep leaving the company all the time. And this can happen in any company if their leaders do not watch out and pay attention to the subtle cues to indicate such mafia-like behaviour in pockets of their organization. Training as a No-No: For knowledge workers, there is nothing more worrisome than fear of obsolescence. Again, we are talking about pockets within organization where this may be happening. Despite good training function and company-wide statistics on training man days and such other metrics, there are teams and programs where employees rarely to get to attend any training. This may be because the leader in charge of the team or program may be a disbeliever in training. Or excessive focus on “delivering today” as against “building capability for tomorrow” as a watchword and culture could be the reason. A culture within a team or program that does not enable updating and upgrading of skills and competencies tend to generate a lot of insecurity in the minds of the employees and the inevitable increase in resignation ensues. Health-checks of project teams are often excessively focused on project milestones and customer sat scores, but employee development as a milestone is ignored leading to widespread insecurity and eventual turnover of talented people. Misplaced recognition: For a variety of reasons, employees tend to view recognition programs with suspicion. While it is difficult to calibrate each and every recommendation for recognition and reward even where detailed guidelines are published and practiced, in pockets three things tend to happen. Firstly, there are managers who over-do recognition to keep everyone happy and secondly, there are managers who do not consider anyone in the team worthy of recognition ever! And thirdly, there are managers who have an uncanny ability to award people who deserve the least for many reasons including personal prejudice and preferences. The net result is deserving people not being recognized feeling doubly disheartened watching helplessly underperforming colleagues getting rewarded. This is one of the often-heard reasons during exit interviews as to why people feel uncomfortable continuing working for the organization. Poor information sharing: A common reason for wide-spread insecurity in organization is poor percolation of company information to people. Senior leaders often share information with the next level managers, but if there are no formal mechanisms and checks and balances to ensure that information sharing flows down to the lowest levels in the organization, it is very unlikely that people will experience being informed on things that matter for them. More often than not, lack of simultaneity in information sharing is not willful or intentional. Middle managers are just too busy to share. Formal mechanisms must be created to measure the free flow of information besides making sure this becomes a measured and monitored goal for the managers at various levels. In conclusion, let me state that besides economic slowdown and the resultant big bang bad news that cause a lot of insecurity in the minds of people, some of the above factors need attention on an on-going basis. Business HR partners and well-meaning senior managers should periodically take stock and nip the problem in the bud in order to ensure that the talent acquired with great efforts and cost should be taken good care of and potential causes for insecurity as listed above are guarded against. The author of the article is C.Mahalingam, Executive Vice President & Chief People Officer, Symphony Services. He can be reached at mahalingam.c@symphonysv.com