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A friend of mine was complaining to me a bit. He cooperates with the external recruitment agency, which is working good and the consultant knows it. But the dream job of the consultant is a job of a friend of mine.

She is clever, she started to network with his peers and managers inside the organization. He did make a mistake. When you run the external recruitment, never let the agency to get in touch with your managers, when you are not sure about the person on the other side.

She started to prepare graphs with the numbers of candidates and positions filled by her. And the friend of mine was just observing. He caught it, but it took a lot of time to him to get her out of the organization.

The HR Employee has to be able to report the result of work immediately. Do you know how many job interviews did you make last year? And how many issues did you manage? No?  Go and count it. Now.

The open compensation policy is transparent and fair. Theoretically. The HRM Function has to be sure about the power in the managers to protect the compensation policy from the attacks.

The confidential compensation policy can be fair as well, but it has to be managed and forced by the HRM Function fully. The managers tend not to trust in the compensation policy and they will try to unhide the compensation policy as it can bring some benefits to them individually.

The main reason for the confidential compensation policy is usually a wide spread of employees around the policy numbers. When the policy declares the spread of 20% around the optimum and the employees are in the range of more than 50%, the HRM Function cannot open the compensation policy publicly as the compensation budget would be under a huge pressure and the level of the employee satisfaction would drop quickly.

The HRM Function has to decide carefully about the compensation policy. The managers have to be mature, trained to argue and they have to feel the power to face the employees asking more. The HRM Function has to provide enough data and arguments to the managers for making employees believe the compensation policy is correctly set.

This is a very common technique. The manager does not communicate honestly and openly about the issues in the outputs of the department and does not provide the employees with the honest feedback about their job. Good. But the manager makes the reality nicer in the eyes of the employees. No issues, no problems, everything is goes fine.

The organizational climate can help to discover the real issue. When the times are not good, the employees can feel good about that. The employees know the reality as the feedback is provided to them in corridors and they feel the difference in the communication. They recognize the difference between the real celebration party and the party to celebrate “we are still here”.

The manager has no trust of employees and they see no value added in their own job. The employees stop to listen to the orders and wishes and their creativity is lost for the organization. The manager can try to do his or her best to improve the emotial and trust level in the department, but it helps for a short time and then the things get even worse.

The only cure is a real honesty to the employees - the issues have to be discovered, discussed and connected to the real people to get solved. The only chance to build a real team is to be tough, honest and fair.