employee engagement – Page 11

June 22, 2019June 29, 2023

Experts Advise Revising Ailing Time-Off Policies

Presenteeism is heralded as a big problem in business as it’s something that can decrease an individual’s productivity or affect that of their co-workers as well.

Presenteeism, which is chiefly defined as employees who are not functioning at maximum capability due to illness, injury or another condition, could be helped if employees took time off when sick or vacation days to unwind. But the issue is not that simple. Reasons for presenteeism depend on many factors, whether it’s an individual’s attitude toward work, an employer’s workplace culture or the overall economic environment.

Employees taking time off bottomed out during the Great Recession. Over the past decade, the numbers haven’t recovered, said Steve Koepp, former Time Inc. editor and founder of From Day One, a Brooklyn-based conference series focused on creating a more collaborative, empathetic and productive workplace.

The United States is the only country without mandated vacation or sick leave. If the nation doesn’t set the tone that time off is important, it doesn’t trickle down to companies, Koepp said.

There are some things companies can do to address presenteeism, based on the reasons why employees are not taking time off.

Company Culture

Employees may face barriers to taking time off if the company has overt or subtle ways to vacation-shame employees, Koepp said. If a manager responds to a request for time off with a negative response like, “But this is the worst time,” that may have a “chilling effect” on future requests, he said. In unhealthy workplace environments, an employee may return from a vacation only to hear from their manager that something stressful would not have happened if the employee had been at work.

“Companies should lay out some structure, and not just about the number of weeks but about how managers should handle the request, the return and everything about it,” Koepp said.

Leadership expert and coach Jack Skeen shared other ways to address presenteeism. Managers can help create an environment where people feel comfortable taking time off, perhaps by taking time off and talking to employees about how they used it.

Skeen had further suggestions for employees anxious that their career, salary or reputation could be tarnished by using paid time off. The crux of the matter is that you can’t convince people of anything if there’s not trust in the employee-management relationship, he said. That trust is key to delivering PTO-friendly messages successfully.

Skeen suggests that employers clearly and repeatedly tell employees that PTO is encouraged, supported and respected. Employers can share stories about employees who both used PTO and were promoted.

For formal vacation and sick-day policies, Skeen said that they must be fair to everyone in the company, from the frontline workers to the executives at the top. Also, employers should make sure that the policy is clear, specific and not open to excessive interpretation.

Tom Parry, president for the Integrated Benefits Institute, a nonprofit focused on research and benchmarking the link between health and productivity, agreed that trust between the employer and employee is paramount.

“Employees have to trust their employer. If they don’t trust their employer, if they have that culture that lacks trust, then you’ve got a problem [bigger than presenteeism],” he said.

Also read: Eggnog With a Splash of Paid Time Off

Given the vast number of reasons employees don’t take time off, Parry said it’s important to survey employees anonymously to determine what’s standing in the way.

Reasons to Support Time Off

The institute seeks to quantify the impact of presenteeism, Parry said. Absenteeism is visible but presenteeism often isn’t, he stressed. While managers can clearly see if an employee is not at work and estimate some business impact, it’s harder to quantify presenteeism.

IBI has done four studies with CFOs in recent years, Parry said. Conceptually, they understand the link between presenteeism and business impact. Practically, though, they won’t take action unless there’s data.

The most important takeaway for employers is to consider the forces outside of their company, Parry said. “What happens a lot of time is we take employers out of that economic and business circumstance that they’re in,” he said.

When an employer is thinking about its individual business, long-term thinking is key alongside short-term opportunities.

“You have to be willing to bite the bullet and maybe not take advantage of every business opportunity if it’s going to have a long-term effect on your workforce,” Parry said.

June 20, 2019June 29, 2023

Workforce Names Its Class of 2019 Game Changers

A strong international contingent leads the Class of 2019 Workforce Game Changers.

This marks the ninth year of the Game Changers, an awards program designed to recognize those in workforce management under 40 years old who are pushing the field forward with innovative people-management practices.

How Employers Can Utilize Well-Being in the New Social Contract With Employees

Few people realize that the notion of a workplace social contract came about accidentally nearly 80 years ago as the result of an executive order on wage controls issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Cutting-edge companies at the time then began offering health insurance to employees as a recruitment incentive. And, in the early 1950s, the Internal Revenue Service deemed that insurance and similar benefits wouldn’t be counted as taxable income. Viola! The workplace social contract was born.

Over the last half-century, social contracts between employers and employees have evolved to the point where modern social mores drive a very different conversation today. The old agreement that employees would work for a company in exchange for wages, health insurance and little else sufficed as an agreeable social contract for both parties for decades. Today, however, 56 million millennials and an upcoming 61 million Gen Z workers are reshaping the contract terms.

Also read: The New Employer-Employee Social Contract

And, because younger employees comprise approximately 70 percent of today’s workforce, employers who listen and respond to their demands will be in a better position to compete for and retain top talent than those who ignore their concerns.

One employee benefit that can address these concerns is the often-debated employer-sponsored well-being program.

Many C-suite executives have a hard time seeing a return on investment for their well-being efforts. After all, under terms of social contracts from days gone by, well-being programs were designed to keep employees off the health care merry-go-round, thereby containing the employer’s health care costs. Employees participated in health screenings because employers mandated it, and no one found it to be fun or engaging. What’s more, this approach hasn’t shown improvements in overall employee health.

Today, fortunately, the new social contract between employees and employers presents a tremendous opportunity to leverage well-being as a strategic business tool to not only realize cost containment but to increase productivity and enhance recruitment and retention of top talent.

With these new conditions in mind, employers can utilize well-being benefits as part of a new social contract to address employee demands by doing the following.

Keeping an Integrated Mindset

Well-being initiatives are connected to health insurance and, therefore, overseen by the benefits or human resources department. However, companies won’t get full value of a well-being program if it is viewed solely as a benefit or cost rather than an engagement, culture and productivity driver. Well-being activities should be incorporated more broadly into:

The entire organization by including safety, recruitment, onboarding and training departments.
The entire work day, rather than expecting people to engage on their own time. Incorporate huddle stretches, encourage your supervisors to set an example by walking around to check in with their direct reports, bring in healthy snacks or ditch the junk food vending machine altogether.
Employee-based challenges beyond physical activity. For example, try challenging employees to keep gratitude journals, track their sleep to identify potential sleep issues, even to drink more water. Most employers don’t realize that most of us are dehydrated to some extent and that lack of hydration can play a role in impaired cognitive ability.
A single place where employees can access and interact with all of their benefits. The mind-boggling speed of technology growth in the consumer market mandates that companies evolve just as quickly to provide employees with personalized, consumer-based experiences.

Looking at Your Entire Work Environment

Your employees today expect that every touchpoint of their experience at work be influenced by terms of the new social contract. Are the restrooms well maintained? Do you provide sedentary employees with sit/stand desks and stationary bikes for lunch-hour workouts? Does the cafeteria offer healthy food options?

If you aren’t attending to basics such as these, you’ll send mixed messages around how you’re prioritizing your employees’ health and well-being, which can create confusion and cause employees to question the authenticity of your commitment.

A growing component of the new social contract comes from workers who want to work on their own terms — remotely, from home or while traveling. In fact, a 2019 survey of 1,000 hiring managers revealed that up to 73 percent of all departments expect to have remote workers within the next decade. Smart managers will remember to include these workers in well-being efforts to ensure they’re also happy and productive, even though they might not experience the physical work environment on a regular basis.

Getting Your Leaders Engaged

Employees in the 21^st century expect their bosses to walk their talk. If your company’s executives verbally extol the virtues of the corporate well-being program, then they also need to actively participate if they’re to meet terms under the new social contract. Do they run in the company 5K? Do they avoid eating lunch at their desks, opting instead for the cafeteria or break room? Do they participate in annual biometric screenings? Are they transparent about their own challenges and efforts?

When your C-suite executives and department heads participate, they organically connect with employees on a human level and will contribute immensely to the success of your initiatives.

Contracts, by their very nature, are designed to protect the best interests of both parties. Today’s new social contract between employees and employers is forcing companies to expand their definition of employee benefits, stretch old-school operating procedures to manage talent and look beyond traditional HR channels to deliver a more fulfilling employee experience. Employers who are up to the challenge can expect that their employees will take more responsibility on their side of the contract to participate in activities that lead to long-term well-being habits, resulting in a rested, alert and productive workforce.

June 13, 2019June 29, 2023

Don’t Slack on Employee Communication

If you have more than a handful of employees chances are they are using some kind of internal communication platform.

Maybe they are among the 10 million people who use Slack every day, or maybe you’ve deployed Microsoft Teams, Yammer, Workplace by Facebook, or some other internal chat tool.

The key is, your employees have a place to collaborate, plan projects, brainstorm and share ideas. But are you sure that is all they are doing?

If a company has a communication culture where sexist jokes are casually exchanged, or employees think it’s OK to share client information via chat, it’s a just a matter of time before a crisis occurs. With that kind of risk simmering in the background, companies can’t just assume employees are following all the data-privacy rules and social protocols when using these internal platforms.

Unless HR is paying attention, these seemingly valuable collaboration platforms can quickly become problematic, said Jeff Schumann, CEO of Aware, a provider of monitoring software for collaboration platforms.

“A large company might have thousands of different public chat groups going at any given time,” he said. Thousands more employees will be exchanging private messages with other individuals or small groups. “It’s important to know what they are saying.”

Chances are employees are sharing information or communicating in a way that HR should be worried about. Columbus, Ohio-based Aware’s “Human Behavior Risk Analysis” report found that 1 in 50 private messages on these platforms contains sensitive information, including passwords and client data, and 1 in 90 are “negative in nature.” They also found that 1 in every 250 public messages — those shared with a large group — contain confidential information.

The challenge is how to monitor these conversations and respond without scaring people away. Smaller companies can mitigate these risks through human monitoring — assigning an HR person or team leader to keep track of the conversations and to address any issues that arise. But in big companies such oversight is impossible.

Instead, many firms are utilizing monitoring software with artificial intelligence and natural language processing to constantly read messages and alert HR if a problem arises. These platforms can be often customized to look for certain types of information, or conversations that might indicate a regulatory risk (sharing client data), or suggest cultural concerns, or forms of harassment.

Taking a proactive approach gives companies the information they need to prevent data breaches and to respond to bullying, racism or other negative exchanges, said Linda Pophal, founder of Strategic Communications, an employee communications consulting firm.

“If it’s a small issue, managers can address the issue privately,” Pophal said. But if the exchange represents a bigger systemic problem or it puts the company at risk, HR should be ready to step in. In these cases, a response may involve deleting the post, reprimanding the people involved and sending out a companywide reminder about appropriate use of these chat tools.

Pophal also urged HR leaders to post a follow-up message about how the situation was resolved. “You can’t just take something down and assume no one will notice,” she said. “Use these situations as an opportunity to communicate what’s happened, and to change the direction of the conversation.”

Pulse of the Workforce

She noted that monitoring isn’t only useful to uncover communication mistakes. HR leaders can also use monitoring as a way to gauge employee sentiment. “If something is going on at the company people are talking about it,” Pophal said. Monitoring these platforms lets you know what they are saying. Maybe they are mad about hikes in health insurance costs or confused about the new paid time off program. “HR can track these conversations and respond when necessary.”

They can also see when people are excited about a new program and to identify who are the communication influencers and who is opting out of the conversation, added Laura Hamill, chief people officer of Limeade, an employee experience software company. Hamill also is chief science officer of Limeade Institute, which researches employee well-being, engagement and other workplace issues. “Monitoring gives you a sense of whether people feel engaged,” she said.

These platforms provide employees with a virtual community that becomes inherent to the workplace culture. “Monitoring won’t solve your communication problems,” she said. But when HR pays attention to how people communicate, and sets the tone for appropriate behavior, it will ensure that everyone feels safe, included, and connected.

June 6, 2019

Relational Intelligence Can Give Companies a Leg Up

There’s a difference between how people behave in their personal life and how they behave professionally. But businesses can learn something from the tactics people use to repair personal relationships, according to therapist and author Esther Perel.

One of the speakers at the Unleash 2019 conference in Las Vegas in May, Perel has extensive experience counseling couples. She consults organizations on conflict resolution as well.

“As couples’ therapists, we have wide familiarity working with polarized systems,” Perel said. “I know [how] to work with relationships where one person doesn’t believe a word the other person is saying. That’s what couples who are arguing do. So we actually have an enormous amount of experience helping companies.”

Her session at Unleash focused on how organizations can use some of the tenets of couples counseling in their workplace when it comes to working on the relationship between the employer and the employee. She also spoke after the session to answer more questions on relationships in the workplace.

Perel prefers the term “relational intelligence” over the oft-used term “emotional intelligence.” That’s because it’s not a self-referential concept, she said. Rather, it’s knowing how to deal with other people and become in tune with the needs of other.

This skill set is especially important after #MeToo, she said. Now, she added, “there’s tremendous anxiety and restlessness in the workplace about how we relate to each other, how we establish boundaries and how we deal with disagreements breaches of trust.”

People carry narratives about relationships that influence their expectations from an interaction and their interpretations of the situation they’re in. Perel calls this their “relationship resume.” People come to work with this past. Were they raised to be trusting or suspicious? Did they grow up in a household where they were taught to ask for help or figure things out on their own? Do they prefer to work collaboratively or alone?

Answers to questions like this help explain what kind of team member a person will be, Perel said. That’s a missing set of questions that employers don’t consider when they hire.

Understanding boundaries is another key relational intelligence skill useful in both personal and professional relationships.

“These days we have narrowed the definition of boundary and we have sexualized it,” Perel said. But really the term “boundary” refers to a much broader scope of situations. Boundaries in sexual situations are just a small piece of it.

In the workplace, boundaries exist in any team. This can show itself in many ways. It’s the difference between an employee who’s involved in everyone’s business and the employee who hardly interacts with any colleagues. It’s the difference between teams that act like a secret society and teams with more “porous” boundaries.

There are several key boundary questions that exist in a team. They include, Who’s involved in this project? Who needs to say what to whom? What needs to be shared, and what can be kept to oneself? How much can you be absent for three days without anyone noticing? What is private versus what is shared? And what are decisions you make alone versus decisions for which you need to ask your manager permission?

When Perel is consulting organizations, she relies on the concept of “polarity management,”“an approach to conflict resolution that’s about identifying and managing unsolvable problems,” to communicate with her client.

The specifics of how to use polarity thinking warrants its own article. Looking at it more broadly, though, Perel explained some of the key tenets behind it. Before you tell someone what they’re doing wrong you tell them what they’re doing right. Also, you acknowledge that you know what losses someone will face by doing something different.

“Before you go directly from here to here and say, ‘This is wrong, you need to do that,’ you first address the loss. Every change comes with loss,” Perel said.

June 6, 2019June 29, 2023

An Obituary for Employment At-will

Over at her employee-rights blog, Screw You Guys, I’m Going Home, attorney Donna Ballman asks, “Is is time to terminate at-will employment laws?”

Well Donna, there’s no need to terminate these laws; they are already dead. I hear it all the time from clients. “Aren’t we an at-will employer? We paid you for that handbook that says so. Why can’t we fire this employee. This is *!%#*!”

Yes, your employees are at-will. And that and a hill of beans will get you sued.

Employment at-will is dead. Do you have the right to fire an employee for no reason? Absolutely. Yet, if that employee is African-American, Other-American, a woman (or a man), pregnant or recently pregnant, suffering from a medical condition (or related to someone with a medical condition, or you think has a medical condition but doesn’t), on a medical leave or returning from a leave, injured, religious, older (i.e., age 40 or above), LGBTQ, serving in the military or a veteran, or a whistleblower or otherwise a complainer, the law protects their employment. Which means that if you fire them, you better have done so for a good reason.

If you look at those categories, most of your employees fall under one of more of them. In other words, while you are an “at-will employer,” that doesn’t really mean anything anymore. Employees just have too many protections.

So, how do I suggest you respond? Follow the Platinum Rule of Employee Relations. Treat your employees as they would want to be treated. If you treat your employees as they would want to be treated (or as you would want your wife, kids, parents, etc. to be treated), most employment cases would never be filed, and most that are filed would end in the employer’s favor. Juries are comprised of many more employees than employers, and if jurors feel that the plaintiff was treated the same way the jurors would expect to be treated, the jury will be much less likely to find in the employee’s favor.

What does this mean for your poor performing employees? Does they understand the performance problems? Were they given sufficient counseling and warnings before termination? And, most importantly, can you prove it via contemporaneous documentation? If so, there is no reason to give poor performance a pass just because of the risk of a lawsuit. Otherwise? I’d think long and hard before firing.

So let’s all raise a glass and toast employment at-will. It had a good ride.

June 5, 2019September 5, 2023

How an Employee-centric HR Communications Strategy Impacts Your Organization

employee communication, hearing, talk, schedules

In today’s digital day and age, designing an HR communications strategy that effectively reaches an increasingly dispersed, distracted workforce is critical to increase employee engagement — and ensure employees are informed and aligned to meet broader business objectives.

Lack of employee engagement remains rampant among organizations, with a whopping 85 percent of employees today not engaged at work. Yet when employees are connected, organizations see an increase in productivity by 20 percent to 25 percent — making internal communications increasingly critical to the business. Those organizations that don’t prioritize their employees and ensure they are well connected will resign themselves to a serious disadvantage.

Also Read: Focus on Employee Work Passion, Not Employee Engagement

Yet, as companies embark on efforts to modernize the employee experience, many HR and communications teams struggle to scale communications in the face of resource and staffing constraints, often with ratios as low as 1 communicator to 20,000 employees. This reality makes it exceedingly challenging to create, deliver and measure content that is relevant and valuable to all different types of employees. HR and communications teams are delivering greater business impact but pulled in more directions than ever, and are in dire need of a scalable, targeted way to carry out their strategies to support broader business initiatives.

With this in mind, here are a few factors to consider as you embark on designing a communications approach that empowers HR, communicators and employees alike — and why it matters to your business goals:

Connected employees directly impact customer satisfaction

Employees’ value extends well beyond what you pay them in salary. Employees need to feel appreciated and recognized, despite what number appears on their paychecks. In fact, 69 percent of workers said they would work harder if they were recognized and appreciated more, and Gartner predicts that by 2020, 70 percent of companies will implement technology for employee recognition and reward.

What’s more, a 5 percent increase in employee engagement can lead to a 3 percent jump in a company’s revenue. Effective communications not only makes employees feel like they matter to their organization, but also emphasizes their role in contributing to a greater goal and broader effort among colleagues — and that directly affects business outcomes.

Despite the clear business benefits of HR communications, most companies still rely on a single channel for communications. Employees have unique preferences for when, how and where they access communications, and HR and internal communications teams need to adopt a multi-channel strategy to reach all employees — regardless of location, job function and the devices they use.

Particularly as many employees today are desk-less, engaging employees wherever they may be is foundational to successfully connecting, informing and building trust with employees. From a company mobile app to digital signage, email, print and more, HR and communications teams must incorporate multiple, targeted channels in their toolkit, with a system to integrate all channels so they aren’t stuck managing multiple platforms.

And not only does the channel matter, but so does the message. What might work on email may not work for mobile or other mediums, and communications should be designed for consumption on each specific channel you plan to use. It is also important to train and encourage team and frontline managers to create their own content that caters to their team members and direct reports — making content more local and relevant not only ensures the right messages get to the right employees, but also alleviates the burden on HR and communications teams in creating all content.

Build Employee Retention With Impactful Communications

As an organization grows, it is important to share engaging and compelling messages to motivate, inform and retain employees. Shockingly, only 10 percent of employees today report knowing what’s going on in their company at any given time — meaning they are not aligned to larger business goals, setting up those initiatives to fail.

Employee retention doesn’t stop with employee orientation. More impactful engagement goes well beyond day one, starting with studying and understanding your employees — who they are, their unique preferences and motivations. Much like a marketer who analyzes the customer journey, building employee personas and mapping out their journey will allow you to deliver more targeted, effective communications personalized to their needs.

Moreover, organizations should look to not only share relevant, customized communications across channels with employees, but also establish a platform where they can quickly search for and find information they need to be informed at all times. An outdated Intranet for sharing employee information simply won’t suffice when employee engagement, productivity and the bottom line are at stake.

Successful HR communication is vital in engaging employees, maintaining a thriving company culture and boosting both individual employees and the organization. By taking a more targeted, customized and multi-channel approach to communications, organizations can elevate HR and communications teams to support broader business outcomes, while reaping the benefits of greater employee engagement, productivity and retention.

June 1, 2019June 29, 2023

When Job Applicants Lie: Implementing Policies to Protect Your Company

A recent study revealed that 85 percent of employers have caught applicants lying on their résumés or job applications.

The most common lies involve modifying dates of employment, falsifying credentials, training or degrees, inflating prior earnings, or hiding a criminal history.

Throughout the past several years, there have been several stories of prominent executives and CEOs, across many industries, whose careers were cut short for lying on their job applications or résumés.

What should human resources professionals do when they discover that an employee has lied on their job application or résumé? How can employers avoid liabilities stemming from application falsification? What are the legal consequences for employers?

Preemptive Measures

The first step employers should take to avoid potential pitfalls is to implement a clear and uniform policy about the consequences of providing false information on an application.

For example, a brief disclaimer can be included near the signature line of the employment application, in which the applicant affirms and agrees that providing false, misleading, or incomplete information on an application, in a résumé, or during the interview process is grounds for disqualification from employment or termination if hired. The disclaimer should also expressly waive any liability for the employer if the applicant is not hired or is terminated for providing false information.

More importantly, employers should be consistent in enforcing this policy. Consistency can protect the employer from legal liabilities — and countless headaches — down the road. To accomplish this, employers should document every applicant’s receipt of the policy.

If a background investigation reveals that an applicant or employee clearly lied on his or her application, the applicant should be rejected or the employee terminated immediately. If the employer only suspects a falsification, HR should engage in a fair and impartial investigation and document its findings. Depending on the results, disciplinary action should be taken.

When assessing an applicant’s background, employers should focus on convictions and not arrest records. Otherwise, applicants may be unfairly prejudiced in the hiring process based on unsupported criminal allegations.

Conducting Pre-Employment Background Checks

Recent federal and state laws have presented hiring professionals with new compliance challenges when conducting a background screening. For example, while there are no federal laws requiring home health agencies to conduct criminal background checks or disqualify applicants from employment based on the results, there are 41 states that require these agencies to conduct criminal background checks.

Those requirements in those 41 states vary widely, including when the background check must be completed, what sources of information must be checked, which positions require background checks, and which convictions, if any, result in disqualification from employment.

The benefits of conducting criminal background checks in the hiring process often outweigh these challenges, especially in fields — such as health care or government contracting — where a failure to conduct screenings can result in hefty consequences.

While many employers may prefer to use social media to research an applicant’s background, employers should exercise caution when using an applicant’s protected characteristics (like race, religion, age or gender) as a basis for refusing employment.

Understanding the legal landscape as it relates to information an employer may request of an applicant is also key. For example, some states have laws that prohibit employers from requesting an applicant’s social media username and password. Additionally, some states have legislation referred to as “Ban the Box,” which prohibits employers from asking about criminal history on a job application.

Unforeseen Benefits of a Consistent Policy

In most cases, implementing a strong application falsification policy can result in some unexpected positive benefits. For example, many states have laws prohibiting employers from revoking job offers based on the discovery of a misdemeanor or other types of conviction with no relevance to the applicant’s suitability for the position.

Nonetheless, even though the employer cannot revoke the offer because of the conviction itself, the employee’s misrepresentation about the existence of the conviction is grounds for revocation.

For example, in a Pennsylvania case, the plaintiff only disclosed two convictions — stalking and harassment — on his application. But a background investigation revealed that he had pleaded guilty to eight additional crimes, including public drunkenness, disorderly conduct and drug crimes.

The company revoked his offer. The district court determined that the company did not violate Pennsylvania’s criminal background check statute because the termination was not for the employees’ conviction, but his lie about it. Importantly, the district court relied heavily on the company’s implementation and communication of a consistent policy forbidding applicants from lying on their applications.

In a similar vein, companies faced with discriminatory failure to hire claims have successfully argued that the later discovery of falsified job applications is a complete defense against the claims. In other words, if the company would not have hired the employee had it known of the applicant’s lie, the applicant cannot later claim that he or she was not hired because of a protected characteristic.

Here too, courts look closely at the company’s fair, equitable and consistent enforcement of its application falsification policy to establish that the company’s decision was not motivated by discriminatory intent.

Another benefit of maintaining a strong background check policy is that it can absolve or limit the company of liabilities down the road if the employee is terminated. Oftentimes, in the course of litigation over wrongful termination or discrimination claims, exhaustive background checks into the plaintiff reveal criminal histories previously unknown.

While an employer may still be on the hook for some damages if the decision to terminate was indeed discriminatory, the Supreme Court has held that a reward of back pay can be cut off completely — and the plaintiff’s potential damages significantly limited — if the employee’s wrongdoing was so severe that the company would have terminated the employee in any event if it had been uncovered. As a result, employers can potentially limit their exposure to liability in later wrongful termination claims by consistently enforcing a no-tolerance policy for application falsification.

While not every application falsification results in a high-profile CEO or executive separation, the problem is common across industries. HR professionals should take care to review their company’s job application process with the help of legal counsel to implement a fair and equitable policy that is compliant with state and federal regulations and train interviewers and hiring professionals of what they can and cannot ask.

The fix can be quite easy, and the benefits are great.

May 31, 2019June 3, 2019

Bully or Tough Boss? Here Are Some Guidelines to Define Leadership

The good news: Many companies invest in programs that support employee physical and mental health of their employees. They understand that flourishing human beings generally translate into happier and higher performing employees.

The bad news: Not all bosses have gotten the memo.

It’s bad enough that after having to dodge bullies in school; we still confront them even as adults. Even worse, the bully may be the person who’s supposed to be in charge of your mentorship and growth, yet it seems like they’re more interested in intimidation and threats.

So how do you know when your boss has crossed the line into being a bully, and what do you do when he or she has?

How to Spot a Bully at Work

Having cut my teeth at a Fortune 50 technology company, I’ve heard a lot of debate on whether a boss was tough or simply a bully. It can sometimes be hard to tell if a boss is pushing you to reach your limits or trying to push you off a cliff.

A boss that only wants to be liked and lets his or her team walk all over them is another kind of danger. But being assertive and demanding can go too far. Leadership is tricky; one must be aware of their own personality derailers, understand positive and impactful boundaries, and be able to inspire others to help drive lasting results, without being a bully.

The Workplace Bullying Institute defines bullying as “threats, humiliation, intimidation, work sabotage or verbal abuse.” In its 2017 report, they found that about 1 in 5 workers are bullied at work, and 61 percent of the bullies are bosses.

If you want to know if you’re being bullied, ask yourself how you feel. If you’re being pushed by a tough boss, you should still feel inspired and psychologically safe. If you feel nauseous at the thought of going to work, unable to sleep and stressed to the max, you might be being bullied.

Bullies come in a few varieties, some easier to spot than others.

The easiest one is the loud, abusive boss. They humiliate you in front of others. You’re the butt of their jokes. They curse at you. It feels like the playground and you’re being pushed in the dirt by the big kid.

There is also the boss who is a passive bully. They torment their targets with quiet but piercing techniques such as undermining their employees, dividing their team, gossiping and sometimes even creating lies. This one feels a little more like high school, whispering in the halls.

How to Handle a Bullying Boss

There is not a single or simple answer to how to manage a boss who believes the best way to develop employees is to give them tough love or build thick skin by being abusive, abrasive or explosive.

If you find yourself in this type of environment, let me start by saying it is not OK and it is not your fault. I understand how being in this type of situation can tear you apart emotionally and physically. Breaking you is what the bully wants to do.

The most important thing you must do is take care of yourself. Removing yourself from the situation is always an option.

Some may criticize me for suggesting you leave the bully boss situation, because it may look like you’re letting the bully win. But it is an option you have and sometimes this is the best option for you.

If you choose to take on the situation head on, here’s my advice:

Have a plan. Be thoughtful and deliberate about how you will show up, perform, communicate and get results.

Continue to perform. Bring others along on your journey and deliver results. The bully will have a hard time attacking you if others are involved and part of your work.

Document. Even the little things should go in a log. A bully often makes mistakes that will leave them vulnerable to being reported.

Be careful who you trust. You may find yourself in a situation where you are ganged up on because another person the bully attacks is looking for any break from the bad behavior and they actually side with the bully. It reduces their torment. It sounds crazy, but it happens.

Talk to someone. Many people think this is a sign of weakness but it is not. You might want to talk with someone outside your organization so you know it won’t get back to the bully.

Remember That Bullies Are Ultimately Pathetic

I have come across a few bullies in my career and they were miserable people. They talked about others all the time, bringing everyone around them down.

Their home lives were sad. They were often unhealthy. When they did smile, it was forced. They carried a lot of stress and it showed up in their work, relationships, family and community.

The one thing I remind myself of frequently is that bullies I have come across in my career have to live with themselves every day.

You can escape your bully, but they cannot escape themselves. In time you will rise above the situation and never look back and your bully has the pleasure of living in their hateful and unhealthy life. That is their punishment.

Most bullies lack confidence and feel powerful when others feel powerless. Bullies are often threatened by the person they are bullying. It sounds silly and it is, but it is often true. You must take care of yourself if you find yourself in a situation like this. This will impact how you show up for yourself, your coworkers, your team and, more important, your family and friends.

It’s never OK for someone to bully another person. If the bully is making it sound like it is to get the best results out of a person or toughen them up, feel free to call it out.

There is no place for an abusive boss, including verbal abuse. I believe strongly in accountability and I set a high bar — professionally and personally — for my peers, my team and myself. Please do the same for yourself.