Page 222 - Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles

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Trust

Antitrust Practices

Trust is delicate, and you can lose points quickly depending
on your behavior. Once broken, mending trust is like trying
to repair a porcelain piggy bank; it is unlikely that you are
going to get it all back together, and it is never going to be the
same. Often, single events such as breaking confidentiality
are responsible for shattering trust. However, the larger and
more troublesome concerns from an employee engagement and
human capital perspective are the ongoing policies and prac-
tices that inhibit trust on a daily basis. As already discussed,
nothing screams “I don’t trust you and your work” louder than
micromanaging employees. If you really want to kill initiative
and discretionary effort, stand over your employees’ shoul-
ders and check their work in detail. Organizations also inhibit
trust when they track their employees’ behavior through GPS
devices and computer monitoring systems, or when they cre-
ate policies that require additional paperwork simply for the
sake of keeping tabs on employees.
Whenever an organization implements or revises existing
policies in an effort to correct a performance problem, I can
almost guarantee you that the solution is going to cause more
problems than it is going to fix. Policies often get implemented
in response to an individual or handful of employees with per-
formance issues, which results in penalizing the 99 percent of
employees who are following the rules. These kinds of policies
end up frustrating your best employees and rarely have any
impact on your poor performers, who will find ways around your
policies and frustrate you in other ways.
Human nature is such that if one perceives that he or she is
being more tightly controlled or watched, that person will pay