In the previous article, I shared how employee fears can negatively influence the work culture of your organization, stifling innovation, hampering collaboration, limiting growth and preventing continuous improvement. In this, the second article of a 3-part series, I’ll share the elements of an effective tool to evaluate your organization for employee fears and the impact of those fears.
Comprehensive
An employee assessment tool should be comprehensive, covering all the typical sources of employee fears common to a workplace environment. This would include multiple questions addressing each of the following:
- Fear of failure
- Fear of rejection
- Fear of job insecurity
- Fear of job stagnation
- Fear of conflict
- Fear of bullying or harassment
- Fear of retaliation
- Fear of work-life imbalance
- Fear of being obsolete via jumps in technology
Validated
In order to know how your results compare with the rest of the workforce, the employee survey used should be validated, meaning that it’s been proven on a statistically valid sample that represents the workforce population.
Anonymous
In order to get accurate results, the survey should be distributed and filled out anonymously to protect the identity of the employees. This will result in more candid answers to questions and a more accurate overall assessment.
Effects
And each employee will be affected by and respond differently to the same workplace fears. So, an assessment should also include the effects the employee fear is having on the individual. For example, workplace fear can affect an employee’s trust in leadership, their motivation and their daily work. The following are some examples of important effect elements to be included in an employee fear assessment:
- Work performance
- Employee self-assesses how the fear effects their work
- How it’s impacting their time outside of work
- Able to leave work issues at work
- Ability to rest and relax when at home
- Physical and mental health
- Willingness to share not only good news but bad news such as
- Schedule slippages
- Cost overruns
- Failures or the cost of failures
- Motivation
- Desire to put in extra effort or time into work
- Potential retaliation for bullying or harassment
In this article, I shared the elements of an effective tool to evaluate your organization for employee fears and the impact of those fears. In the next and final article in this series, I’ll share what you, as a leader, can do to mitigate these fears.
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