All of us hear employees complaint about the companies who would treat employees badly, have poor HR policies, don’t pay dues to employees, have poor engagement levels, and have no focus on work life balance. Up to 2005 it worked well! All a disgruntled employee could do was to speak about them with his friends and family or a few colleagues, which didn’t matter a lot to the organizations.
Frustrated Employee
The revival of Internet after a Dot Com Burst has however, changed everything! Internet’s new avatar in form of Social Media emerged as a powerful mass-communication tool enabling everybody who has an access to computers and some writing skills.
Yesterday, I read an employees’ vented frustration about one of my favorite companies on complaints board. BLR Events (a HR consultancy) recently hosted an event, saying “How to save yourself from a disgruntled employee with a PDA and access to free blogs?.”
Listen to what the guys from BLR Events says “Technology is changing the face of the American workplace in a variety of ways. Many of those changes are spurred by the challenges and opportunities presented by the Internet.
The Internet can be a great resource for employees and employers alike, but it can also lead to a whole new world of negative exposure and risk. This is especially true when you have an employee (or former employee) who has a grudge along with a platform-like a blog or a Facebook page-that allows it to be broadcast to the world.”
Social Media is Both Positive and Negative:
Recruiters felt very happy when they found a new friend in social media – aggregation of the information about employee that they plan to hire – Linkedin Profile, Twitter account, and so on and so forth. They started recruiting better candidates by gathering more and more information about from Social Media. But they forget there is NO FREE LUNCH.
Unfortunately, as Social Media is free for employers; it is free for employees also; especially employees with a painful experience in the company or more importantly one having a continued issue. There are many platforms where employees can go and complaint like:
Complaints Board: http://www.complaintsboard.com/
Consumer Complaints: http://www.consumercomplaints.in/
Better Business Bureau: http://www.bbb.org/
Even many online communities allow employees to write about the issue, or they can use question answer boards, yahoo answers, Linkedin discussions to highlight their grievances.
What’s the big issue?
The BIG issue is GOOGLE. Most aspirants now search google for more information regarding the prospective employer, before they make a joining decision. Any content posted on Internet is quickly duplicated in forms of tweets, comments, aggregations. Literally it is impossible to get a comment removed from Internet, once cached by google.
By grace of google, information never dies on internet – some website and one of the google servers always had it. So watch your employee engagement and work to neutralize the dissatisfied employees. Social media is watching! With bad policies and practices in place, it is difficult to attract talented aspirants.
What should employers do?
- Use Google Alert to get information about any information about the company as it happens.
- As soon as someone posts a grievance on internet, post an appropriate positive answer.
- Make sure that nobody goes out of the organization with a heavy heart.
- Make sure your website is good and helps in you employer branding efforts.
- Revise your HR policies and consider each case of dissatisfaction carefully, especially if employee is about to part off.
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[...] Gireesh Sharma casts a line and questions whether Employers can be bad and still attract candidates. [...]
Mr. Gireesh; An excellent post. Hope employers will take care.