10 Reasons Your Workers Hate You

John P. Mello Jr. -- Expert Business Source, 3/27/2007 2:43:00 PM

Every boss can’t be loved by their employees, but they can minimize the angst among their workers. The first step is understanding the most common reasons employees hate their managers. Here are 10 of them (adapted from the new book, 30 Reasons Employees Hate Their Managers, published by AMACOM/American Management Association).

1. Lack of respect. In surveys conducted by his firm, Discovery Surveys, Founder and President Bruce L. Katcher notes that only one out of two employees believes their boss respects them. “People are thirsting for respect no matter what they do in an organization,” says Katcher, the book’s author.
2. Pay is too low. “In very few organizations do people feel they’re well paid,” observes Katcher. While he acknowledges that employees satisfied with their compensation may be a rare commodity, bosses can blunt resentment by making the pay philosophy of their companies clear.
3. Lack of freedom. “People should be treated as adults,” Katcher says. “Don’t spy on them. Make sure their privacy is maintained. If they need to work unconventional hours but are good workers, let them do it.”
4. Afraid to speak up. Only one out of two employees feels free to voice their opinion openly, Katcher says. Employees feel they could lose their jobs or suffer other retribution. “This is a pervasive problem even in the best-run organizations,” he maintains.
5. Inequality. “We live in a culture where everybody has equal rights, and when people see things that don’t happen exactly that way, they get upset by it,” Katcher contends. Here, too, flexibility, rather than rigid rules, can reduce resentment. In a flexible environment, employees tend to better cope and accept workplace inequality.
6. Quality concerns. “In many organizations, people are upset about the quality of their products and services,” Katcher says. “They complain about producing things not up to company standards but being told by management to ship it anyway.” His recommendation: “Give employees a balanced picture of the situation. Sometimes people think that the quality of products wasn’t that good, but it really was.”
7. Red tape. Fifty-three percent of employees feel there’s too much red tape in their organizations, according to Discovery Surveys, of Sharon, Mass. That’s true in small as well as large organizations, says Katcher, indicating that management must constantly evaluate procedures. Policies that made sense in the past may not make sense now.
8. Micromanagement. If an employee can’t make any decisions without first checking with a boss, that’s undermangement, not micromanagement, argues Bruce Tulgan, a principal with RainmakerThinking in New Haven, Conn. “If you want someone to take action or make a decision, you need to prepare the person in advance,” says Tulgan, author of It’s Okay to be the Boss (published by Collins). “If the person hasn’t been managed upfront, then he or she has to keep checking with the boss.”
9. Inadequate internal support. That perception can oftentimes be linked to stereotyping, Katcher asserts. “We all stereotype other departments,” he observes. “And we often stereotype them negatively: They’re not as competent as we are; not as customer-service oriented as we are; not as understanding of what we need and when we need it.” Role playing can be helpful in breaking down those stereotypes; in other words, get departments to “wear each other’s shoes,” Katcher recommends.
10. Too many meetings. Katcher admits that meetings are a necessary evil, but to make them less annoying, he recommends imposing time limits on them, appointing a process facilitator to get people to talk, summarizing what actions will be taken by meeting members once the session ends, and evaluating the meeting’s good and bad points – so the next one will be better.