You know it’s bad when an employee doesn’t just resign; they do so on a piece of toilet paper! A not-so-subtle message that they didn’t feel appreciated by their employer and are angry.
That’s just what a Singapore-based employee did, according to reporting by The Economic Times. The article shares that “The note read, ‘I have chosen this type of paper for my resignation as a symbol of how this company has treated me. I quit.’”
How do you avoid a similar statement from employees in your own organization?
I have felt some of the same things this employee from Singapore felt. I, too, have felt under-appreciated. Here is how to keep employees in your organization from feeling this way.
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Avoid unnecessary commutes and low-value in-office time.
It’s one thing if nearly all of an employee’s work group is in-office, with frequent in-person interaction. It’s quite another if the employee has few or no members of their work group present in an office they are being asked to commute to.
Generally, if the employee’s boss is not required to appear in-person at the office, neither should the employee. At the very least, if there is a remote boss, the rest of the employee’s work group should be present to justify a commute.
Justifying the commute becomes more important if the office is in a location that is not convenient for most employees. For example, if an office has moved from a central location in a city center to a suburb or the outskirts of a city, the employer will need to think harder about how to justify demanding an in-office presence from employees. If they can’t honestly justify an in-office presence, then allowing the employee to work remotely is a must to avoid the employee’s resentment and anger.
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Don’t rack up cost savings on the backs of your employees.
If cost savings require sacrifice from everyone, executives included, most employees understand. However, if cost savings are realized by subjecting some employes to more discomfort than others, a sense of underappreciation will arise.
This takes us back to the in-office requirements some companies have enacted. Some organizations had the abominable luck to purchase or lease real estate just before the pandemic hit. The purchase or lease may have come with a substantial tax break dependent on the company bringing a minimum number of employees into the office every week.
Post-pandemic, that minimum number became hard to deliver, so to continue to enjoy the tax break, the organization may have decided to enforce a back-to-office mandate.
A savvy company will ask if getting the tax break is worth losing employees and engendering resentment from those who remain. Is employee satisfaction, which may lead to better job performance and better service to customers, more important or is the tax break more important? Looking at it from the perspective of that question, you might say the in-office mandate to attain the tax break is penny-wise and pound-foolish.
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Keep in mind the work time you’re paying employees for.
An employee who agreed to a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., five-days-a-week job with an hour for lunch each day is doing unpaid labor when working at night or on the weekend. Occasionally, asking salaried employees to work at night or on a weekend is understandable. Most employees will understand if they must give up a Saturday when attending an industry conference, especially if that day is made up to them as a comp day to be used whenever they like. Similarly, most are understanding about the need to work at night if a mission-critical deadline to deliver a project to an important client is coming up.
However, when work at night or on the weekend becomes habitual, the employee is being asked to provide unpaid labor. Intelligent, self-respecting employees eventually will realize the company is taking advantage of them.
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Give employees in the same position equal resources.
Based on my own observation, it’s not unusual for organizations to expect more hands-on work from women employees than men employees. I have observed women employees treated like workhorses while the men employees in co-equal positions are treated like high-level delegators. The women are expected to do what the men in their same role are enabled to delegate.
Sometimes, an uneven distribution of human resources is due to a manager taking advantage of an employee who can do more hands-on work than another employee. The two employees are in the same role and have the same amount of work, but one gets a junior employee primarily devoted to help them with tasks while the other does not. The manager has observed that one of these employees is more capable than the other of doing a high level of hands-on work and is taking advantage of that ability.
The problem? The ability of the one employee to do a higher level of hands-on work comes at a cost to that employee. They are capable because they cut into their personal time to complete tasks or they complete all tasks within working hours, but not without a high level of stress and frustration.
What are you doing to make it less likely that any of your employees get so angry at your organization that they resign on a piece of toilet paper?
