Communication is Everything – What HR Managers Need to Know

As a manager or even a co-employee, how you interact with others is a critical component of your job. Many employment lawsuits are built on a failure to communicate as well as fundamental communication errors. Many HR consultants and trainers recognize the importance of communication – there are a wide variety of programs to help managers become better communicators, understand multiple communication styles, and improve their skills when mitigating risk. However, the emphasis on communication and not saying the wrong thing can also sometimes paralyze managers, leaving them to say nothing at all, which creates another set of issues. There are some fundamental principles that can assist managers in meeting their communication goals. 

Basic Truisms of Human Resources

There are a number of basic rules in human resources that are essentially immutable. The first of those is that things go wrong. No matter what you do, you will make a mistake, things will go wrong, you will say the wrong thing and there will be risk.

1. Be clear and to the point. If you are dealing with human beings, there is risk in every moment of those interactions. You can mitigate that risk by communicating in clear and concise ways that support your goal, which presumably is an efficient and well-functioning company. Attention spans are short. Plan accordingly.
2. Don’t be an ostrich. Ignoring things rarely makes them go away. Like infection control in a hospital, getting ahead of the problem usually means you have a less severe issue to deal with later; however, managers need to note that ignoring a problem is not the same thing as scheduling a problem. Every single day most managers have more on their to-do list than they could ever conceivably get to. For many managers, you might not even get to the number one thing on your to-do list because you are dealing with emergencies. When an employee brings problems or issues to you, or when you spot an issue, that doesn’t mean, in many instances, that you have to deal with it right that second. There is a difference between scheduling and ignoring.

   If an employee comes to you with a problem and you do not have the ability to deal with it at that moment – maybe you are stressed, you are tired, it’s the last five minutes of the day, you have another meeting – and the problem is not an emergency, set a time to talk. In other words, if nobody is bleeding, if we don’t need a workers’ compensation intervention, if nobody has been assaulted or directly harassed in the last 20 minutes, then set a time that works to talk with the employee. That could include something like, “Right now I’m in the middle of this project and can’t give you my full attention. Can we set an appropriate time tomorrow?” That doesn’t mean you’re procrastinating – you are getting to the issue as quickly as you can.

1. Don’t be a jerk. A lot of things would be solved if we would all abide by this principle. Be polite, be straightforward but don’t poke at people, call them names, belittle their skillsets or any of those types of things. A performance problem is a performance problem and should be addressed as such. It is not necessarily a personal or moral failing.

Principles of Communication

Managers are asked to address a lot of things during the day and sometimes it’s from employees who aren’t sure how to solve a problem or ones who would prefer someone else to resolve the problem. It is important for managers to try to create distinctions between those issues. If it’s harassment or something similar, employees should not be forced into a situation where they have to solve their own problem. Employees need to have managerial support when problem-solving. But not all things where we don’t agree are problems. For communication, we want to evaluate:

1. Is it true? Is whatever we are being asked to talk about true, is this someone just venting, or is something else going on?
2. Is this something that needs to be said? If an employee is simply fussing about how somebody behaved at the local baseball game is that something that needs to be said in your workplace? Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s workplace behavior and carries over, sometimes it is not. Certainly, in the current EEOC guidelines regarding workplace harassment out-of-work behavior is recognized as potentially being detrimental within the workplace but sometimes it’s just something we don’t need to talk about.
3. Are you the person to say it? Are you the right person for this conversation? Should this be the employee? Should this be someone above you on the decision-making food chain or even below you? Is this an employee you supervise or somebody else’s employee? You want to make a determination as to whether or not you are the right person to speak.
4. Is now the right time to say it? When an employee walks in the door and announces that their child has pneumonia, they got in a car accident this morning and they spilled coffee all over themselves, that might not be the best time to address something that is small and doesn’t need to be addressed on an emergent basis. Understanding the circumstances can help you schedule conversations so they can be the most productive.
5. Who else needs to know? Who within your team needs to know the information that you are discussing? If an employee comes to you or you are simply having lunch together and says, “My depression is making it hard for me to get to work on time,” you as the manager are likely now on notice that they need accommodation of some type in the workplace. This means you need to bring HR or whoever manages your ADA/ADAAA accommodations into that loop. Let the employee know that you will be talking with others, but you now know, as a manager, and those issues will need to be addressed.  If someone is complaining about their second cousin at the baseball game or talking about a co-worker’s haircut, that is not something you need to repeat.

Derailing your Communication Purpose

There are quite a few things that will send any communication with employees right off the rails. These include:

1. Talking about how you feel. When you are in a disciplinary discussion or something similar, and you start the conversation with how hard it is for you to discipline people, how you were up all night, how terrible you feel that you have to discipline them, you’ve now lost your purpose. You are about to discipline or terminate an employee – they don’t care how you feel. Further, you have just made what is already a negative experience for them into a story about you. You could certainly say “I’m sorry we have to have this conversation,” but leave it at that with no extra bells and whistles, focus on what you need to say.
2. The fallacy of common ground. When you try to find common ground with someone that you are disciplining or terminating, you can create a false comparative. A false comparative is how something similar happened to you, so you want them to learn from your experience. However, the employee that you are talking with, who is already having a negative experience, may not believe that comparative is valuable due to very different lived experiences. False comparatives or what is perceived as a false comparative can be perceived as paternalistic or minimize the employee’s own experience. While you might feel you have common ground, they don’t necessarily feel that way.
3. Discussing or leading with war stories. When you are essentially reminiscing about your own career or about things that have happened to you, again, you are making this discussion about you instead of the employee you’re meeting with. War stories are very similar to the false comparative issues and can lead the employee to think that you are not focused on current problems, their issues, or how to resolve matters today.
4. Using co-workers as examples. “Why don’t you act more like your brother Jimmy?” is rarely successful in a family and has led to more than one family argument or counseling session. So why do we think “why don’t you act like more employee X” would be successful? Also note that if you are having issues or concerns about a group of employees, those things need to be addressed individually rather than lumping them together in a group as that can be problematic, particularly as issues tend to be at least somewhat different between each of the employees and employees rarely act as a single group.
5. Not being clear. We have all been in a meeting where we get to the end of the meeting, and we don’t know what was said. We don’t know if it was discipline, termination, raise, or promotion. Be clear. Be direct. Be specific. Be short. For example, “We’ve had several performance problems with you. We have discussed X. We are not seeing the improvement we expect…”
6. Forcing a confession. When employees have problems or have behaved badly in the workplace, the point is to open the door for them to tell you what the issue is. Do they need accommodations? Do they need more training? Or are we giving them the opportunity to admit that they stole money, punched another employee, or vandalized property? Regardless of the issue, we cannot “force” a confession. If an employee doesn’t want help or doesn’t want to admit to something, we can’t make them do that. Polygraphs are not legal in the employment context. Clever tricks employers try to get people to admit to bad behavior in many instances will simply backfire and create other problems. Also, when it is misconduct such as vandalism, breaking the rules, or failing to follow policies, and an employee refuses to admit that there is an issue, this can be an indication that they are unwilling to change their conduct and behavior going forward.

What do we want from communication?

In general, what most HR managers want in communication is that communication is improved performance not a termination. Communication should be consistent. If you communicate with one employee about absenteeism, you communicate with others in a similar way about the same types of issues. It is concrete, and you are prepared to explain your reasoning at least to a limited extent. An example doesn’t mean you are going to engage in a debate or long draw out discussions about why or why not something occurred, those tend not to be useful, but you can give one example of what you are discussing and then if that discussion goes off the rails, you can say to an employee, “I understand your perspective is different but we have made our decision.” If we are attempting to solve problems, that is a cooperative process. The cooperative component is particularly true when we are discussing things like accommodations in the workplace.

What do you need to be successful? The cooperative discussion:

Example questions for your employees include: “What parts of your job can you not do or are difficult for you to do? What might help you be successful? What might help you do those pieces of the job? Be prepared to discuss why or why not those suggestions work.

Cooperative discussions are rarely one-and-done and likely will require multiple discussions in order to truly show that you have engaged in an interactive discussion. The ADA requires it and many accommodation requests (such as religious accommodations) require interactive discussions, but many workplace problems can benefit from an interactive process when employees have ownership of the problem but also the resolution.