I tried to address an issue as a group and got shut down by management

A reader writes:

For the last five years, I’ve worked at a nonprofit with around 80 employees. Up until about six months ago, I was full-time and the two primary roles I had during that time were in middle management. Now I’m part-time (10 hours/week), not in any management/leadership position, and in a different department.

Our organization serves victims of power-based interpersonal violence, so there are several practices/policies in place to try to maintain client and staff safety. One is that our building is at a confidential location and staff have fobs to get in. It’s common to hold the door for a coworker to get inside or let a coworker in if they forgot their fob. If there isn’t someone to let you in, there’s a callbox and the person who answers can electronically unlock the door.

For as long as I can remember, when a staff member has left the agency, our HR director sends an all staff email informing us. A month ago, during my department’s weekly team meeting, my supervisor (our department’s director) informed us that leadership had decided to discontinue this. She said some staff in other departments who were feeling “traumatized” by the number of emails about staff departures. I asked what the updated procedure would be for knowing if someone is no longer employed here so they aren’t inadvertently let into the building. My supervisor said that she expressed a similar concern, but that it had been decided it would be up to each department director to choose whether and how to inform their own teams of staff departures. I trust my director and find her communication to be consistent and open, so after this I pretty much forgot about it despite my concerns. I think I assumed she would notify us of all staff departures once she’d received the update herself.

Fast forward to yesterday, a coworker casually texted me that her supervisor told her that someone who had been hired recently as a manager in a different department had “left.” I mentioned the change to the departure announcement process, and she didn’t even know that change had happened. There has been no all-staff announcement about that and apparently her director hadn’t told her. The day came and went with no update about this former staff member from my director.

I decided to try to approach this as a group concern because I know, based on conversations I’ve had, that I’m not the only one with concerns about this. Inadvertently allowing someone into the building who shouldn’t be there is one concern. Another is inadvertently following up with a team member about a client concern and creating a confidentiality violation, not realizing they no longer work there. Some supervisors are more up to speed on the work and collaboration their teams are doing than others. There’s also the general equity issue that can arise when there isn’t transparency regarding trends around demographics of staff being fired or quitting, although that’s another can of worms.

After some thought, I sent an email to my coworkers, minus the directors/leadership team, with a letter I had drafted asking our leadership team to revisit this process. I expressed concerns regarding transparency and the increased safety and confidentiality risk. I asked in my email for those who agree with my concerns to just sign their name.

A few hours after my email went out, our HR director sent an all-staff email to “clarify” how staff should approach “raising concerns or providing feedback” about decisions, including HR processes. She said she had been informed of an email that was sent out requesting signatures related to an HR change. She said that people need to go to their supervisor or another member of the leadership team first to avoid “unintentionally preventing productive discussion” and “confusion.” She made statements regarding the value of transparency and staff voices while simultaneously basically shutting down what I was trying to do. Several coworkers have reached out to me thanking me for my advocacy. One person told me they would sign on but they’re afraid of being fired. Someone in middle management referenced an ongoing fear of retaliation.

There has not been a direct response to me, nor has there been any acknowledgement of the concern I was raising in the first place. The only form of follow-up so far has been my supervisor sending an email to only our department acknowledging HR’s email and inviting people to talk to her for support or with questions. She added that she’d be approaching her supervisor regarding the current policy and confirmed that the employee I previously mentioned was indeed no longer working for the agency and her plan had been to address that during our next weekly department meeting.

For additional context, as a result of some of my own experiences with our team of directors, as well as what I’ve heard from coworkers, I have little trust in our leadership team and have been disappointed and frustrated by a variety of decisions they’ve made and how they navigate feedback from staff. Complaints of transparency and lack of accountability and follow-up are not new. It seems that most of us tend to just bite our tongues, and then those who do speak up become more frustrated and/or shut down, if not sometimes encounter some retaliation (that’s some speculation on my part though).

What should I have done differently for this to have been maybe more successful? Was I out of line and/or is our HR’s response as misplaced as I’m thinking it is? Do you have any suggestions regarding what I do next?

Yeah, a petition is rarely the way to go at work.

When I talk about pushing back as a group, it’s about conversation with people — talking to colleagues individually or in groups to share your concerns and see if others agree with you, and then talking through what you might be able to do about it as a group.

As a general rule, petitions tend to immediately get managers’ defenses up. Partly that’s because it immediately makes whatever you’re trying to do feel more adversarial. And partly that is because it feels more one-sided; you’re not having a conversation, just presenting a statement. Partly, too, it’s that management — particularly in a small organization like yours — tends to like to think of themselves as approachable (whether or not they actually are), so the idea of people resorting to this method rather than a normal conversation is likely to feel out of sync with how they want to think communication should work in their organization. And frankly, in this case they’re probably not entirely wrong — it was a Big Move to go straight to recruiting people to sign a letter on this when you hadn’t done any of the lower-drama steps you could have taken first, like talking to your manager. It likely felt to them like you’d skipped some obvious steps you should have tried first.

Overall, rightly or wrongly, asking people to sign on to a written statement is a medium that just isn’t used much at work, so if you try it, it’s likely to come across as a much bigger/more dramatic move than if you just talked as a group.

I do see how you got there, though. It’s logical to think, “If a bunch of us have these concerns, why not write them down and have people sign on, so it’s clear it’s a lot of us and not just one or two people? It’s the most streamlined way of doing it.” And in a vacuum, in a situation where we didn’t have decades of established norms about how things do and don’t typically get done at work, it would be logical and efficient! It’s just that you’re not in that vacuum, so it didn’t go over the way you thought it would, for all the reasons above.

All that said, it’s a bit ridiculous that HR, in its “here’s how you should raise concerns” response, didn’t address the substance of what you said! At a minimum they should have said they’ve heard the concerns and will consider and respond to them separately. But you also already knew that you’re working somewhere with problems around transparency and follow-up, so that’s not surprising.

As for what to do next, following up with your manager is a good idea. It sounds like she shares your concerns about the policy change and is talking to her own boss about it, so she’s not a hostile audience on this topic. You and your other colleagues who are worried should all talk to your managers about it (not via written statement, but just through regular conversation).

But bigger picture, it sounds like there’s a pretty serious culture problem there, and that goes beyond this one incident.

The post I tried to address an issue as a group and got shut down by management appeared first on Ask a Manager.

View the full article