I love creeping on companies' Glassdoor reviews because they’re basically Yelp reviews of a company’s culture. Instead of hearing about someone’s dining experience and whether they thought the pizza tasted like cardboard, I get to read about people’s experience as an employee and talk about things that matter in the workplace. Things like their coworkers, processes in place, benefits and pay, their relationships with their manager, whether there’s a good work/life balance, and most importantly whether they approve of the CEO!

Is it possible that the poor reviews are written by people who are unreasonable and have a personal vendetta against the company? Of course. However, just like Yelp, you’ve got to have a bit of trust in your peers that sometimes the pizza does taste like cardboard. 📦 Today we take a look at the underlying messages of negative company reviews, and how we can avoid these mishaps in our own agencies.

Here are some reviews that deserve a second glance:

So what might these people be dealing with here?? Well, in an industry where things need to be shipped early and often, you’ve no doubt heard or dealt with technical debt - the cost to rework something later on due to decisions made to get services and products out the door faster.

Types of debt you might be less familiar with, but are just as harmful, are the concepts of HR Debt and Culture Debt. These both address the impact of ignoring things like:

Candid conversations to grow the team and company
Problem employees -- this includes leadership and managers!
Lack of infrastructure for employee growth and education
Consistent high turnover
Environments where teams don’t feel safe voicing their opinions / input for improvements

If your company experiences any of those listed above, you might be overlooking some HR or Culture Debt. Just like technical debt, the problems don’t go away by ignoring them and hoping it will all work out. You can almost guarantee that your best employees start walking out the door and the entire company will feel the effects of what comes next. And guess what, studies have reported that it costs approximately 33% of someone’s salary to find their replacement. 💸

Without further ado, here are some steps you can take in squashing HR and Culture Debt for good:

Get Your House In Order. As a leader, figure out your personal sh*t or else it’ll bleed into the company in every aspect. Remember that as a leader you set the tone for culture. This happens no matter how much you push for the team to create their own culture, it’s just one of the things that comes along with running a company.
Survey Your Team. Get some baseline data from an Employee Engagement Survey like the ones offered by Culture Amp. If you’re a small company (25 or less), the good news is you could skip a survey and simply set up meetings to speak to people directly. Although, you might want to consider creating an option to take an additional anonymous survey if you think you’ll get more honest feedback that way.
Delegate Ownership of Initiatives. Once initiatives have been identified, have a dedicated person for each initiative and make sure it’s clear what their role is. Most important initiatives die or lose steam because there is no one to champion it. Also, make sure you’re not overloading the person with initiatives. Keep it to one initiative at a time if you’ve got limited resources.
Management Matters. Hire competent managers who understand the importance of the role as well as how to manage. I’ve seen managers negatively affect the culture and instead of fixing issues among the team, it actually worsens.
Psychological Safety. Create a safe environment for your team. If you penalize people for “making mistakes” they will be conditioned to try and hide them in the future. Or, you’ll miss the opportunity to hear why it happened in the first place and how you can make improvements moving forward. I have seen time and again where people get shut down for asking questions and making mistakes and it has GOT. TO. STOP.

It is time to take a hard look in the mirror and really ask how healthy your company is. Have you put off initiatives that are long overdue? Whether it’s a breakdown in communication across the organization, teams that don’t work well together, or a lack of performance management systems in place to grow the team, this is important to take seriously now! Down the road, you’ll be grateful you took these steps.

You can’t change where you are today, but you’ve got some power over where you’ll be in the next 6 months or 6 years!