HR Desk: 10 signs of a company that doesn't care

A company culture doesn’t change overnight; it normally takes months or years to transform for better or worse.

Last year research commissioned by Red Letter Days for Business titled ‘2015 Employee engagement: how British business measures up’ found a high correlation between caring line managers and high engagement.

Despite this, high-profile examples of company cultures which don’t develop this type of attitude are still all too frequent. One example of this is Amazon, whose less-than-favourable culture was defended by their CEO Jeff Bezos in a letter to shareholders earlier this month.

HR can stop situations like these developing by noticing the signs early and acting accordingly.

Writing in Forbes, Liz Ryan, Owner and Founder of Human Workplace, gave her ten signs that a company doesn’t care.

1. “They pile on the HR policies until you can’t take a step without getting a manager’s approval. Really bad companies have all of these obnoxious and insulting policies in place:

• “Funeral notice required in order to get paid bereavement leave when a loved one dies.

• “Stack ranking that pits one employee against another in a ‘Lord of the Flies’ competition every year.

• “Bell-curve performance reviews that limit the number of excellent and very good performers any manager can have on his or her team.

• “Attendance policies that treat qualified adults like wayward children.

• “Stitch-level dress code policies that assume your employees don’t know how to get dressed.

• “Sick-time policies that penalise you for catching a cold — even catching it at work from a co-worker!

2. “They ask for your feedback once a year in an Employee Engagement Survey and otherwise couldn’t give a dang what you think about your job, your pay or your supervisor.

3. “They have never heard of flextime and telecommuting options that other companies have had in place for decades.

4. “They don’t want to hear about your personal obligations. They call meetings at 7pm or on a Sunday morning.

5. “They install supervisors and managers who are qualified for those posts only by their willingness to boss people around and threaten them.

6. “They use ‘Progressive Discipline’ and ‘Performance Improvement Plans’ instead of behaving like adults and solving problems in an open-ended and empathetic way.

7. “They make it a crime to talk about your pay level, and they pay people as little as they can.

8. “They terminate employees at the drop of a hat.

9. “They lie to their employees or keep them in the dark about the company’s progress and the employees’ own career path.

10. “They make every decision based on its short-term financial impact. Employee welfare is not a factor.” 

Source: HRGrapeVine.com