How to Make Your Team Feel Safe Bringing You Problems

This article comes from Entrepreneur.

How to Make Your Team Feel Safe Bringing You Problems

Try the following techniques to encourage employees to speak their minds and feel confident that you’ll take their comments into account.

Tell them why you need to hear from them as a matter of business.

Emphasize that your openness isn’t because you’re nice or merely want to placate them. Instead, explain that you recognize the downside of not understanding employees’ opinions or acknowledging the risks of having a disengaged workforce, i.e., high turnover.

Research backs up this concern: A Harvard Business Review study by James R. Detert and Ethan R. Burris found that, “When employees can voice their concerns freely, organizations see increased retention and stronger performance.”

Teach employees to use code words.

These will signal to you when they’re coming in with an important matter and want you to hear them out. For example, many of my clients now tell one other to “put their seatbelts on” to signal that they need to have a tough conversation and want to cue the other party that it’s important to keep cool and maintain an open mind on the issue.

Go and seek them out.

If you haven’t heard from crucial individuals for a while, or you suspect there’s an issue brewing no one has talked to you about, create the forum for a discussion yourself.

This doesn’t have to mean summoning people to your office. One of the CEOs I work with says, “I don’t know what I don’t know,” and periodically walks the floor, chatting with everyone and lingering longer and probing more deeply with influencers and opinion leaders to learn what’s really going on.

Show that you act on their input.

Refer to times when you took someone’s opinion and were able to improve a situation. Be explicit, so that the participants and other employees can tell you mean it. You could say something like, “Once Sally told me what was going on, it got me thinking. So I reevaluated that supplier’s performance and asked them to improve their level of service. Now we’ve got a better deal.”

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