Recently our agency held its annual Christmasgathering for employees. It's a great opportunity to share thegood experiences of the past year and look forward to theopportunities of the next year.

Our office has several locations, and this year we decided tohost our gathering closer to Indianapolis. We have severalclients in the Indianapolis area and we worked with our operationsmanager to select the restaurant in which to dine and outline ourgame plan.

After careful review, the operations manager returned with acouple of options. One was a restaurant owned by a familymember of one of our employees, another is owned along-time client.

After reviewing the costs and benefits, my partner and I decidedto go with our client and look at our employee's family restaurantanother time.

Because of the long drive our northern employees would face, wealso decided to reserve rooms at a nearby hotel and provide vantransportation to and from the hotel to better manage our risk.

We also discussed the types of bonuses we would give ouremployees. We wanted to make up for last year, where we did nothave bonuses.

As our operations manager was putting together the plans andfinalizing the details, he found an email thread from a couple ofemployees that he was not supposed to read. The comments belittledhis job as manager, criticizing him and his plans, and the choiceswe made as owners.

He called my partner to express his feelings. This was his firstexperience with this type of behavior so we thought we could usethis as a learning experience.

Our operations manager is 21 years old. He is graduating collegein 5 months and will begin working full time. He has been with ussince he was 16 and has proven very capable at project management,project completion and has a firm understanding of our agencyworkings.

He has the wisdom of a much older soul, but this situation wasvery troubling to him.

After hearing the story from my partner, I called our HRcompany. Our agency outsources our human resources functionsto an outside firm. We essentially co-employ our people with thisfirm for a fee, but the fee pales in comparison to the value wereceive from this company. I talked to our rep, whose immediateresponse was, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

I explained our approach to our Christmas gathering and helistened intently. I asked him to call our operations managerand review with him his feelings and why things like this happen inan office setting.

After that discussion, I received the following email from ouroperations manager (Note: All names changed)

Just wanted to quickly recap with youmy conversation with Mike yesterday. Very positive, veryinsightful, very helpful.

• If we had intentions of givingbonuses to begin with, continue to do so. Reward everyone,even those with poor attitudes. He thinks this bonus mayhelp, but it may not. We can't please everyone, but can giveconstructive criticism come employee review time.
• He would like to hold a handbookreview prior to employee review. We will Skype this conversationbetween ALL employees in the Indy office and Parker Cityoffice. Leah will be present in the Indy office and Mike atthe PC office.
• Topics to discuss:
• |
  • Review policy for use of companyemail.
  • Review policy for gossip andtreatment of others in the workplace.
  • Review PTO (emergency hours,appropriate use, what happens when you go over, etc.)

As a manager of people, I really likeworking with Team Servant HR. I don't know about yourexperiences with them, but I've had nothing but help andrecommendations from Leah, Mike, and Loren over the past couple ofyears. I wouldn't mind some one-on-one training/discussionsover policies and procedures and how to handle them.

The moral of the story: If you don't think your employees arecomplaining about you or your management style, you might need torethink your world.

This type of behavior used to drive me crazy and cause aknee-jerk reaction. Earlier in my career, I probably wouldhave cancelled the annual Christmas party. In fact, that would havekilled morale more effectively than the scuttlebutt that startedthe whole mess.

There is a reason why we have an operations manager and why weoutsource our HR issues. Neither my partner nor I have the skillset or patience to deal with the above situation.

But by challenging our young Jedi and giving him the tools andexperience to better deal with adversity, we are confident that bythe time he's 25 years old, he will have the patience andunderstanding to be not just a good manager of people, but a greatmanager of our great team.