Hi. My name is Candice Elliot, and I am a Human Resources Strategist. Today we are going to be talking about when things go wrong with your employees. In order for you to know that things are going wrong, you need to have a mechanism for that. It may be you that you are working with your staff every day, and so you see what is working, what isn't working. It may be you that you need to have other people come to you and feel safe coming to you, to tell you about things that are happening.

One of the things that I recommend, just generally, as a policy to support your company and you and your business through difficult times with staff is to have an open-door policy. What that means is that you and your managers are available for your staff to hear about their comments and their complaints. It's really anything that's going on in the workplace, that you want them to come to you with those questions and concerns, so that you can answer them so that you can address them, and so that you can incorporate them into the way that you're doing business so that we can grow a company that is really representative of everyone who works there.

Having an open-door policy is really just the first thing. It goes in the handbook and it's something that you talk about in orientation. It's something that you may be bringup here and there throughout staff meetings and things like that. It really [00:02:00] is a way of being, and it's a way of embodying being a manager. It's a way of asking how things are going for people, asking if there's anything going on that you've been wanting to talk about, leaving open-ended questions when you're doing performance reviews, or when you're doing check-ins with staff, so that you can find out if something is going on.

If something really difficult is going on, like if there's harassment or if there's just discriminatory behavior, even if it's just that someone is not being particularly nice, it can sometimes take a while for a person to get up the courage to say something about it. It takes a lot of courage to go to your boss, or the owner of the company that you work for and to tell them if something is going on that doesn't feel right. Then when you find out that something like that is happening, it's your responsibility to inquire into it and to come to a resolution around it.

It may be something as simple as just having a talk with the two. If there are two people and they're having a disagreement, and having a talk with them, getting everybody to set it aside. It may be a systems issue where one system that you have is in conflict with another system that you have, and so creating a better linkage between the two or a different way that those two systems work together could be a way to move forward.

Having an open-door policy and embodying that in your management and your leadership is a way that you can find out about things that are going on. When you [00:04:00] find out about things that are going on, that's when you can do something about them. If you don't know that they're going on, then you really can't do anything about them. Step number one, open-door policy, being open to the situations that your staff may bring forward to you.