Reputation Travels

The company Glassdoor is well known by job-seekers and companies alike. While people on the job hunt can look for jobs, they can also research the companies they are interested in and look at reviews from current and former employees. They can also research reviews by people who interviewed at a company to learn their experiences. I know this because I have seen reviews on a past employer posted about interview processes that did not go so well for the “candidate experience” because of inexperienced interviewers.

Employers, to state the obvious, don’t want negative reviews of their company. I have worked for organizations that spend time scrubbing negative reviews. I have also had the experience of making a contingent job offer and then being called back after the candidate was alerted to negative Glassdoor reviews about the company. To state another obvious fact, reputation matters. It is often said that successful employee matches with an organization come from referrals. If your organization has a reputation for misery and miserable management, it will get out. If this information doesn’t end up on Glassdoor, it will circulate by word of mouth.

In “60 Hiring Statistics You Need to Know” talks about how Job seekers will read six reviews on Glassdoor about a company to form an opinion. Also, the article says 69 percent of people looking for a job will not accept a company with a bad reputation (even if they were unemployed, according to Glassdoor); 84 percent would go to another company if offered a position if the company had an excellent corporate reputation. 1, 2

Those identified to manage employees will affect an organization’s reputation. For this reason and for the good of the human beings that are being supervised great care should be put into the determination to the selection of people-managers. When people are treated poorly under the patronage of an organization, the employer will be the entity whose reputation that suffers because that individual has been given the power, that they abuse, by the organization.

Personally speaking, I have been fortunate to have had for the most part decent to excellent bosses. These bosses have been a credit to the organization that selected them to manage people. I have taken enough risks throughout my career to have had a diverse number of jobs, a very few of which have brought in contact with bad bosses/managers. And I have managed at least one toxic employee in my management tenure.

Based on my research of best practices, and my own personal experience which confirms the research, bosses can fall into the following categories, depending on behavior:

Decent to good bosses:

• They let each person do what they are best at, and/or most enjoy doing
• They give workers the task and allow them to get it done – they were non-micromanagers
• They are respectful in treating the people that report to them as adults
• If there are issues, they address them directly, giving the opportunity for interaction
• They are respectful of the power bestowed on them by the company

Poor bosses:

• Are aware of and abuse their power, for example, they have staff do things that they should be doing because they can
• They have poor professional boundaries with the people they are charged with supervising and they transfer their way of interacting with people in their personal lives to their interactions with staff
• They thrive on getting people to fear them or attempt to intimidate staff, just because they can
• They micromanage, they assign work, then manage every detail of the work assigned
• Treat staff with disrespect in many ways, including infantilizing them, treat them like children

  

Organizations would do well to put people in positions over others if they are people who are held to a performance standard more like the former than the latter group. The organizations’ reputation would be the better for it.

Sources:

1,2 Mervyn Dinnen, 6 Recruiting Tips for Companies with Bad Reputations, www.glassdoor.co.uk., Jun 22, 2015. Jennifer Gladstone, 60 Hiring Statistics You Need to Know, Employment Background Investigations, Inc. www.ebiinc.com, May 25, 2017.