Ever wonder what employee reviews really reveal? In our latest episode, we dig into real examples and unpack what leaders can do to prevent issues before they show up on public sites. If you want a healthier, more transparent culture, this one’s for you.

Transcript

James: Hi everyone . Welcome to another episode of the future of team podcast. my name is James and I’m joined by my co-host Dee Teal. Very exciting, very exciting week for us, or episode for us, I should say, we record every week. You don’t get to receive them every week, but we are, we’re doing something a little different this time around.

Instead of. Picking a specific topic and going through it. We thought it might be fun to pick a couple of, employee reviews from a site called Glassdoor and, respond to them and think about what it might be like if we were the people team that was in place of these companies and how we might respond to some of this feedback.

If you aren’t familiar with Glassdoor. Glassdoor is, I guess the best way to describe it is it’s like a company rating system. It’s like Yelp for companies. Yelp, if you don’t know what Yelp is, is a rating site for like restaurants and venues and things. Anyway, folks who work at these companies at any company can go onto Glassdoor and leave a review of their experience working at the company.

So as you can imagine, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes you have great experiences and you have great reviews as a result. Sometimes things haven’t worked out with the individual who’s writing the review and that can skew their of course. And so while we’re not going to be claiming Any of these is like absolute truth.

Our goal in doing this, I think, is just to surface hypothetical situations based on real life experiences that we can use as a springboard for some conversation. Does that sound right, Dee?

Dee Teal: Yeah, that sounds pretty good to me. I think, uh, yeah, I get a little bit cautious of reviews because. You do run that risk of somebody having a bad experience and then just truth bombing in their opinion or their, venting, I guess is probably the better way to, to describe it, just venting their frustration or disappointment or sadness or anger.

On a review site. But I do think, especially, I think if you also look at the kind of aggregate, number and the number of reviews that you’re getting, you can get a little bit of a flavor of what, the company may be like to work for. So it can be interesting, particularly if you’re preparing to interview with someone.

To kind of get a sense of some of the questions that you should be asking, I guess, based on, on what people are saying. So, yeah I’m interested to see what we’re going to see and, and, to respond to some of, people’s criticisms. I don’t think we’re going to identify the companies that we’re reviewing, are we?

We’re just going to talk about just look at what people have said.

James: We are pulling out of what we know, which is the WordPress ecosystem. So these are, if we were to give you names, they would be quite familiar to many of you. We’re not here to name and shame. We’re here to be productive and supportive.

So that’s what we’re going to do. So I’m going to start with one here. This is from a couple of years ago, and this is from a sales consultant. So it’s a company that has a sales team. And, they’ve rated this company as a 1. 0. so here’s what they had to say. Forcing and lying to the customer.

Most people are not interested and you’ll have to pretend like the company care about them or provide. No, I’m sorry. I’ve got to stop right there. Not doing that one. Oops. The daisy. This is the other challenge, right? Sometimes you pick them and you think you’re going to get gold, but you don’t here’s another one.

So this is a software engineer from a fairly well known mature company. And when these reviews are written, you get pros and cons. So we are specifically looking at the cons. This is not because, there aren’t pros written about them, but just that. You know, we want to focus on opportunities to grow and improve.

So here’s, here’s one, this came in actually quite recently. So within the last week or two, this review was put on and it’s already received a response from the company. So that says something right there. That’s awesome. Yeah, it’s a plus. So this is what they said. Pervasive cost cutting, especially since the start of the year has not only made it hard to be efficient, but also stifles career advancement.

The only way to progress. To progress in your career is to leave. Long time employees will probably stay because they have big stock grants waiting to vest. But for anybody else, the pay is junk. The cost cutting has gone way beyond what is reasonable. Tools keep disappearing even if they weren’t that expensive to begin with.

They want to get rid of slack to save money. Slack, maybe they won’t, but it keeps getting floated as a credible idea, so I wouldn’t put it past them. Security is the number one priority, but there is no foresight or long term plan, so the security edicts come in as a request of the week, to be completed yesterday.

Usually, we have one to two weeks. It kills morale because, aside from providing no value to customers, we have to drop everything to get it done in time. It almost looks like they’re trying to make the working environment unpleasant on purpose to create attrition. So they can avoid the bad publicity of mass layoffs.

Plus, that way, the people who are left will be so demotivated that they won’t expect raises. Their advice to management? Give people meaningful careers and reward excellence, because happy employees do better work. If you want to trim payroll, be direct and lay people off, instead of irritating them until they resign.

Dee Teal: Out. Just imagining being on HR on the receiving end of that. I think it’s so interesting because, I mean, we talk a lot about all of the different areas in which, Employee crafting, we talked about crafting the employee journey and how, or talking about how we want to affect and improve the experience of working.

And we have all of these pillars that outline all of the things that make going to work. Interesting and rewarding and, and all the things that we talk about are the things that come up in the negative reviews, giving people autonomy, giving people, you know, a reason to want to come to work and giving people space to grow.

So what would you say to somebody in this situation where we are in challenging times? How do you respond to those reviews that says. Yeah, we’re in a tight spot at the moment and we do need to cut costs. How do you do that better?

James: Oh, You know, the way this reads to me is a lack of transparent communication, right, or transparent leadership.

Yeah, where what is being discussed in the very top levels of the organization are not being trickled down to To the individual contributors who are, are for the most part on the receiving end of whatever directives come from the top. And so because there’s no context and there’s no why and there’s no, anything like that, you get people start to fill in the gaps and they often fill in the gaps with the worst case scenario or the worst possible thing they can imagine.

You know, for example, here, they talk about, the request of the week coming in as an edict, or trying to get rid of slack to save money, right? Slack. Now, those are, are, the, the slack one’s a really big one. I bet you it might have been floated once. Right. Yeah. And that became a thing. Yeah they say, but

Dee Teal: yeah, that would be, I was going to say interesting to know, but yeah, I hear that and it feels very much like, this is a thing that has been done.

To us. And I’ve been in companies that have had those tight moments that have had those stressful moments, but have communicated that and gone with the team. Pre COVID, I remember I was at at the time and we were going through a really tight spot and, but it felt like we were all in it together because of the way things were communicated.

So we could say, You know, there’s not going to be a company retreat this year fun. A COVID, but B, you know, as we came out of that and the tight. Places that we’d been in. We all knew we all accepted that we were in a tight space and that we were all tightening our belts for a season. And here was how we were going to do it.

This wasn’t a thing that was being done to us. This was something, this was a boat that we were all in and that we all navigated together. So that sense of. And I, I appreciate that that’s harder to do in a company that’s bigger, but that’s, I think the critical point there, like you say, is the, the transparent communication.

James: It is. And it’s interesting what you said as well. You know, it sounds as well like they’re trying to avoid layoffs. That was another thing that was mentioned here, right? Was if you want to trim payroll, be direct and lay people off instead of irritating them until they resign. And That does happen, right?

There is quiet firing. There, there are people who are earmarked for exit. And, I don’t doubt there are conversations that, that are like that. It is weird. Like, I don’t know. Like, I wonder, I mean, it’s hard because in my own experience, I’ve, I’ve been quiet fired. Very much so. But was it a situation where I was, like, like they weren’t necessarily making my life or my work life miserable to get me to quit.

It was just that they’d already decided they were going to eliminate my position. And so rather than, keep going until the day it was announced, they just shut, you know, shut down or checked out and left me high and dry.

Dee Teal: Yeah,

James: you know, like the victim mentality can come in as well as a Individual and you end up there.

But

Dee Teal: but I think the other interesting thing too is that sentiment from that reviewer that said either is there’s that fine balance too if you are actually actively trying not to fire people and cut costs elsewhere. There’s benefit in that too. Oh, it’s really easy to say, I’ll just cut them off and fire people.

Yeah. But that’s people who are losing their jobs. And so if the company is also trying not to fire people, have that conversation. Here is, here’s what we can do. We can lay people off. We don’t want to do that because we want to keep our team together. So here’s how we’re going to have to restructure to make that work.

If you’re communicating that and that sense of we care about our people and we don’t want to lose them. But yeah, I just think that’s a really interesting cut and dry thing. Wow. It’s really easy to say or just cut them off, but it’s also easy to forget that if you do that, that’s people’s livelihoods that you’re affecting

James: on the receiving end of that as well.

not good, not good. But you’re absolutely right. It’s one of these things where I, and I agree with you. You know, I’ve been in situations, quite recently even where, you know, I was trying to get hired by a company and the company. Decided to pause external hiring and do internal hiring rounds because they wanted to keep as many folks in roles as they possibly could.

And, it sucks on the outside when you’re sort of going, Oh, but you know, like there was a role there for me. And yeah. but at the same time, you kind of can take a step back and go, yeah, but think about what they’re doing for, for the employees that are there. They are fighting tooth and nail To keep everyone who’s already there, right.

Who wants to stick around. Yeah, man, to work for a company like that would be. Pretty special, I think, right? Because, because they’re doing everything they can. Doesn’t mean they’ll, they’re necessarily always going to avoid layoffs or that there won’t be selective cuts because maybe a project ends or a business, project decides that it’s, you know, they’re going to just shelve it because it’s not working out.

Like that stuff happens. That’s just natural. anyway, well, that’s, that’s one. Do you have one over there that you’re looking at that you want to.

Dee Teal: Well, I’m seeing a theme rather than looking at a particular review, I’m seeing themes in the company that I’m looking at that all say, there’s no way to grow.

There’s no way to move there’s, I’m just, I mean, scanning through the whole thing. There’s a lot of reviews on this particular company, but the, changes of

Values used to be. I, yeah, I, yeah, I haven’t got another one that I’m sitting here looking at. I’m struggling a little bit actually, because I’ve seen just this flood of information, but this whole thing that keeps saying, I wish we had more ongoing technical training past a certain point it’s left for the employee to continue.

That’s fine. But even once monthly trainings on various related subjects would create a more able word, more able workforce.

James: That’s an interesting one. And, you know, you think of. Organizational development and growing your team, your team skills, right? And transferable skills and, just getting more versed in, in the skills that they have.

Is there a point where a company’s responsibility ends and an individual’s responsibility starts? What like, I, I mean, I get, I guess I get that there’s a spot where there’s alignment, right? Like you want as a company, you want to facilitate your team getting stronger and better at the things you need them stronger and better at.

But is there a point where they’re at or media or exceeding expectations? What do you do then? What does career progression look like for them?

Dee Teal: I think that the next review down from the one that I just read was don’t expect to get anywhere if your supervisor has no interest in working with you and putting the onus of building trust between the two of you entirely on yourself.

So engaged management is, I guess kind of related to that, right? Or that sense of how much are you sitting there relying on your employer to spoon feed you? And I’m not saying that this is what they’re doing at all. I’ve certainly been places where disengaged management makes you demotivated, not that that’s the only thing that motivates you, but you know, their advice to management in this one is care about your employees to an extent you do, because it helps you get a what every year, but don’t care, but care.

Don’t tell me you do because you don’t. So they’re like, that person’s obviously left feeling very much as though they were a cog in the wheel. And so the takeaway for me there is as a manager, it’s absolutely critical to be interested and for your contributors to feel seen and that you as a representative of your company, regardless of how big or small it is, have a huge responsibility in terms of how the company is actually seen in the world.

When you, you know, when you go and you see a string of reviews that say a similar thing. My manager didn’t care about me

James: for me. Yeah. I think I see that whole thing as well. And, and I, I think that when,

when you’re a manager, it’s really hard. We’ve talked about it before to transition from that task view. To that people view and the the change that you have to go through as a manager to kind of get there. It’s I’m, very like I naturally lean into tasks. So I would read that review and I go. Oh, yep That’s me.

That’s totally me. I would totally do that, right? I would be challenged to not see my team as cogs in the wheel. I’d be, you know, my head would be full of projects and the accountability I have and the responsibilities I have, and then the metrics and KPIs that I’m Responsible for and what I’m trying to do and I’m be thinking, you know, how do I, how do I get you, my team motivated to and around this, the delivery of this project or the delivery of this KPI and, of, you know, like.

Be thinking out loud right now, I’d be like, Oh, what’s one way that I can get them, get my team to be more interested in servicing their own ideas so that they have a sense of ownership of it. But in all of that, everything is task project KPI. I love how we’re so

Dee Teal: different because I look at that and I’m the complete opposite.

How’s that person? What’s that doing there? And I know, I’m sure I was frustrating as a manager too, in the sense that I so easily and quickly default to what’s this person saying to me and what are we doing wrong? Mm-Hmm. Instead of, hang on. Maintaining that balance of like, hang on. I am also a representative of the company.

We do also have places and things that we need to get done. And so I lean too far probably the other way in terms of, seeing that person first and worrying about the tasks later. Yeah, that’s funny.

James: Balance.

Dee Teal: Got another

James: one. Let’s see here. Okay. So this is, this is from, it’s a content writer. And they have been let go.

So they are miffed. But, I’m going to read a few things that they’ve written. We’ll take it with a grain of salt. I got fired because I did not reply to a Slack message during working hours. But nobody bothered to ask me why I didn’t respond. I wasn’t aware that I had to be present during set working hours, because I was working at different times, sometimes nights and weekends to cover the tasks.

So we’ve got a lack of alignment. Low pay. Yeah. No benefits. Promotion rate is also around, two to a max of 7 percent after one year, which is pretty low. they can fire you any time they want without asking you or telling you anything. There’s a massive workload. no flexible hours. You have to use your personal computer.

Further down there’s another one with a similar thread. which said, really bad management in terms of understanding employee needs, circumstances, conflict resolution, morale, and will for improvement. That’s it. Firing unexpectedly without any prior notice, something you can read in other comments, too.

You are first cut from chat, email, and access to systems, and then you get noticed that you are fired, basically treating you like a criminal.

Dee Teal: That’s, I mean, that’s an episode in itself. how do you let people go? There’s never anybody who’s going to be happy about that, right? And so reviews from people who are fired are always going to lean towards the negative.

And I’m not, defending, assuming that what, again, taking what these people have said at face value, that sense of, cutting everything off before you actually get the notice. Who was I talking to? I was talking to a friend recently and they’ve just had a round of layoffs and the first thing to go was access to the building.

Now, we’re, I mean, we work mostly remote. And so I guess that’s the same thing, right? Access to all of the comms tools. And I do understand how that would feel that the, that, that indicates a lack of trust, right? If we cut everything off, you can’t do anything or say anything in the tools before you exit the building.

For want of a better word, but here you don’t get to say goodbye to your mates. You don’t get to. That’s a horrible, horrible experience. And so we could talk at length about how you actually let people go in a way that’s humane.

James: You’re absolutely right. We could talk probably a lot about that.

I have seen things where when you’re doing layoff rounds. it’s different if it’s an individual versus if it’s around, right? And you’ve got a group, a group of redundancies. So if you’ve got a group of layoffs or a group of redundancies, I’ve, what I’ve seen to be a really neat thing is creating an Slack or an alumni Slack channel where the folks that have been made redundant, they might lose full access, complete access to Slack, but they’re allowed into a, either a separate.

alumni group or an alumni channel that allows them to have interaction with their peers. And if the company’s doing a big layoff round, aftercare, and some, some, resourcing can then be distributed to everybody who’s been impacted. I do see the need for compliance security that certain systems are cut off immediately, right?

Like once, once it’s done, it’s done. Okay. Or within a very short period of time afterward, if it’s a one off, and the changes is not like, if it’s a surprise, it’s hard, right? If it’s a firing with cause. Right? That’s, I mean, that’s just what it is. Firing with cause. But it

Dee Teal: shouldn’t be a surprise if you’re being fired with a cause, that shouldn’t be a surprise.

James: Yeah. Unless there’s been some type of negligence or, very serious situation that requires. And again, but

Dee Teal: you would still know that you’d done a bad thing. Exactly. So you wouldn’t be coming to give a review. Because there’s some culpability there, right?

James: Yeah, that’s it. At least I would

Dee Teal: have flippant hope so.

James: Well, so that’s a good point. And that was, that was one of the things I was going to bring up here as well was, you know, firing unexpectedly. This is what you and I spoke about when we talk, we need our feedback. Episodes was this idea of no surprises that it speaks to, if I was an HR person and I was reading this from folks who have been in my team, The first thing that I would be doing is thinking, okay, there’s a breakdown in feedback between my team leads and their individual contributors, their teams, right?

One of the first thing, and because it’s a pattern because I’m seeing it in multiple comments, multiple threads, it means that across the board, we’ve got an issue in our team leads or in our middle management where they’re not. Able right or have not been trained in how to provide feedback how to give it regularly and how to actually set people up for success right or gone through a proper process and that would probably be the first thing that I would do as an HR person reading this is go okay that’s one thing that’s in my mind a low hanging fruit yeah that’s a very clear thing that we can we can train on and implement.

Quite quickly.

Dee Teal: Well, yeah, and the, it kind of speaks to the one we were talking about before where engaged management, resourced management and investment by companies in people who are managing contributors is critical, is important so that the experience that both have. Is good for the company and good for the people involved and good for your reviews at the end of the experience, potentially,

James: hopefully.

Well, I’ll give another little piece of advice to, leaders of companies now. Now, we talked a lot about the WordPress ecosystem ’cause that’s where we are. Mostly, but consider your, oh, I had a thought and it’s gone now. Lemme see if I can get it back. Consider your team and your leadership and, the fact that the light bulb just went off.

I remembered. Just because they are leading people does not mean they are equipped or trained to lead people. Yeah. It is too easy for us to appoint the person with the most experience in the room as the leader. The

Dee Teal: longer you’ve been there, the longer. Yeah,

James: right and That you know the most time spent in the trenches does not make you the best leader or the best equipped to take on that role If they’ve been around long enough, they’ll probably tell you that they’re not the right one if they’re still there in that role doing that thing if you are leading this team, the most important thing you can do, whether it’s through acquisition, which this is a thing that happens a lot in the WordPress ecosystem, you get one company being acquired by another company, you import all of their management structure and their hierarchy.

And all of a sudden these people that were managing teams with a very simple and straightforward, product or product line, all of a sudden find them. with multiple layers of reporting, multiple layers of complexity and can’t cope because that’s not ever what they were trained for or knew how to do.

And I think, you know, from what I’ve seen, cause I’ve been in a number of companies where acquisitions have happened, there is little to no training provided to managers in that acquisition process to help them. grow to fit the new reality of what’s going on.

Dee Teal: Right.

Yeah. There’s a whole transition planning and change management episode there as well.

So much to talk about. Yeah.

James: We’ve gone through a couple. Should we do at least maybe one or two that are a bit more positive just to, to end. So it’s not all bad news.

Here’s one. Uh, five star review. Loving it. I am really enjoying the process of being hired and trained in this distributed company.

Dee Teal: Wow. Yay. Good job. Yay.

James: That’s right.

Dee Teal: I like this one here. Absolute freedom to manage your own time so you can accommodate personal matters as well. Continuing growth, which increases the confidence in the company’s ability to scale and offer career progression opportunities.

James: Let’s see if I can find another one here.

Dee Teal: That’s awesome.

James: I have to say that I’m enjoying my time here. I’ve had the pleasure of being here a few years and I’ve seen our growth globally and the maturity that we’ve developed over the years. I can wholeheartedly say that I work with direct leaders that care about my well being, both physically and mentally, and I feel support from my teammates as well.

As the leadership team, it’s not even a question on how much I’m valued here or how much my work matters. You can’t say that about other places.

Dee Teal: Wow. Well, it’s good to know that there’s people getting it right. And there’s people that are getting it wrong in parts and getting it right in other places.

It’s not just a case of, one review review, you know, it reflects the whole company or the, but, um, that’s good. Yeah. That’s the kind of places I want to work.

James: Me too. Well, on that note, we’ll end it here. And if you’ve got stories or you’ve got situations going on where you are, and you’re looking for some outsider perspective, feel free to let us know.

We’d love to, keep it hypothetical and see what kind of ideas and thoughts we might come up with.

Dee Teal: You can leave a comment in the comments below or send us a tweet at future of team.

James: There you go. Awesome. Well, thank you, Dee. Have a great week and we’ll see you in the next episode.

Dee Teal: Will do.

James: Bye, everybody.