No one wants to be the bearer of bad news. But for business owners and team leaders, sometimes it is up to you to make the hard choices that keep the company moving forward. Here is what to do when employment decisions feel unfair. By employing transparency, open communication, and emotional intelligence, you can help your team accept your decisions and move forward, minimizing the emotional impact on your team as a whole.
Unfair Employment Decisions Hurt Your Entire Team
It is important for business leaders to acknowledge the emotional impact of any employment decision on their team members. That’s not just on those who leave your organization, but also on the employees who remain behind. When employment decisions feel unfair, it can create uncertainty and distrust among your remaining employees, who may question how those decisions were made, and whether they may be next.
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Fairness is inherently connected to emotion, and your different team members may have different subjective feelings about what makes emotional decisions to feel unfair. However, there are things that you can do as an employer or team leader to improve feelings of fairness. By supporting business decisions with objective, measurable facts and well-reasoned judgments, and clearly communicating (to the extent appropriate) the logic behind those decisions, you can go a long way to reduce feelings of unfairness and avoid claims of harassment, discrimination, or favoritism.
How to Avoid Making Employment Decisions Feel Unfair
You can’t promise your employees that you will never have to make negative employment decisions. There may be times that you need to dismiss an employee, restructure your teams, or even constrict your workforce. What you can do is avoid making employment decisions feel unfair. By taking advantage of transparency, clear communication, and emotional intelligence, you can minimize the impact of hard choices on your team, and shield yourself and your company from negative consequences.
Establish and Follow Anti-Discrimination Rules
There are a wide variety of leadership decisions that may feel unfair to the employees on the short end of those choices. Most have nothing to do with diversity or your employees’ demographics, but there may be reasons your employees may feel discriminated against if employment decisions feel unfair. To avoid claims of workplace harassment or discrimination, make sure your company has adopted and distributed clear anti-discrimination rules and policies. Your employees should know how to respond if they feel employment decisions feel unfair. Just having a clear way to resolve conflict can reduce the emotional impact of those decisions, ensuring that employees feel heard so their perspectives can be considered before, during, and after difficult decisions have been made.
Document Decision Making Processes
Not all employment decisions will result in hard feelings or legal claims, but you should be prepared to respond if they do. One way to do that is to clearly document your decision making processes, so that you can explain leadership’s priorities and considerations in reaching your conclusions. Your documentation should include:
- Any relevant strategic planning or vision-setting documents
- Budgetary information related to the decision
- Project priorities and goals
- Performance reviews
- Coworker complaints or endorsements
- Disciplinary actions
- Professional improvement plans and progress reports
Your goal should be to draw clear lines between company goals, policies, and priorities and the decisions being made. This will help you demonstrate that the decisions were based on data, rather than unfair considerations.
Clearly Communicate Company Policies
Hidden motives or reasoning make decisions feel unfair and open the opportunity for employees who are hurt to infer negative intent. One of the best ways to avoid making employment decisions feel unfair is transparently communicating how those decisions have been reached. When making tough decisions to reduce your workforce or change the way the team operates, those decisions should follow the clear policies and processes laid out in your employee handbook or internal policies. While the reasoning behind employment decisions needs to remain confidential, whenever possible, you should communicate the policies that motivate your decisions to demonstrate that they were made in fair, non-discriminatory ways.
Use Emotional Intelligence Skills in Communicating Employment Decisions
As a leader, you can do a lot to minimize the broader impact of negative employment decisions by acknowledging and validating your employees’ feelings and being empathetic about the impact of hard decisions. You can use your emotional intelligence skills of self-awareness to recognize how your own behavior is contributing to feelings of unfairness. Social awareness will allow you to respond to how a decision may be received by others.
When negative employment decisions are inevitable, it will be up to you as a business leader to make sure your team understands your reasoning, and feel like their emotional responses are understood. Through transparency, communication, and emotional intelligence, you can guide your team through even the toughest business decisions without causing them to feel the emotional decisions are unfair.
David Stanislaw and Karen Sherwood are leadership and executive coaches with 70 years of combined experience. Together, they apply their psychodynamic training and extensive experience to help leaders, business owners, and employees develop emotional intelligence skills and facilitate conflict. Contact us to meet with Stanislaw Consulting today.
This post was written by a human without the use of AI. Stanislaw Consulting does not consent to the use of its online content to train large language models or other forms of artificial intelligence.
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