Insight on what's going on here? Are we being too 'nice'?
We're a smallish business of ~30 staff (varies seasonally). There's the big boss, and four line managers with a team of 4-6 employees each.
I've been here for 15 years, worked up from the most junior role to manager. In the last 5 or so years the culture seems to have definitely taken a downturn. Whiny, is probably the best way to describe it? Lots of low level issues that people talk about, but if you offer to log it formally, escalate it, or take action to address it, people say 'Nah, don't worry about it'. We have a regular audit by our industry body that takes feedback from staff and anonymises it, and it never raises anything significant. Last one we did we scored 85/100 for development, 88/100 for health and wellbeing and 81/100 for support. Summary was 'Congratulations, your employees agree that you are a good employer'. 🤷♀️
Most people don't talk about these issues to the managers, just round the office when we're not around. We try to be very accessible to people, we have weekly team catch ups with opportunities for ad hoc one-to-one catch ups afterwards, we have formal quarterly one-to-ones, quarterly company meetings with a completely open agenda, we all sit together in an open plan office. Often it's someone else who takes it upon themselves to say so-and-so isn't happy about xyz. If you raise it with the original person they sometimes say 'Actually yeah, that is a problem' but very often it's 'What? No. I never said that/I didn't want that brought to your attention'.
I've asked a number of people why staff won't talk to managers directly and I either get shrugs or the answer from a few more outspoken staff is that people feel like they get 'shut down' too much. Someone said we look too stressed. We implement employee feedback all the time, including really major stuff. For example, our contracts are for a 40 hour week, people wanted to go down to 37 hours. We offered them the option to go down to a 36 hour week pro-rata, they complained bout the pro-rata bit. Our pay is above average for the industry and we couldn't just give everyone a blanket overnight pay rise.
We also implement minor stuff, like people complained they didn't like just going to restaurants for our quarterly socials, so we sent out a form to gather information on what type of socials people would like (weeknight or weekend, what types of activities etc) and based on that feedback we booked a private arcade. We got everyone to agree the date before booking. Almost no-one turned up to the actual event. When asked, people said they were too tired on the day.
Our boss is extremely conflict avoidant and will *always* say yes if he can. This has resulted in two staff members having their job titles changed to include the word manager despite not having any formal management responsibilities. One of them is regularly mistaken for my boss, which doesn't particularly bother me as I don't really care about titles, but it just demonstrates how much the business accommodates staff requests.
Recently we had a senior staff member (who has been with us about a year) complain that people were coming to her instead of the managers and she was becoming the go to person for everyone's problems and it was becoming an issue for her. We have another member of staff (referred to by others as the 'office mum') who also complains about this. We set up an anonymous digital suggestion box so that she could direct issues there if people didn't want to speak to managers directly. No one has used it to date. She came back after a while and said a few staff had been talking and they wanted to have a company-wide meeting specifically without managers present so that they could all air out their grievances and have a spokesperson (her) bring them to the management team. We talked a lot about this and decided it wouldn't be a very productive approach. Firstly it seemed like it might just become a cooking pot of discontent when she is the only person to have formally raised or requested this. To quote another manager 'If the want to do that, can't they just go to the pub?'. I spoke to my staff about it and two seemed pro and the other two were against (these two are newer to the company, one said basically our staff don't know they're born). Secondly she had expressly complained about being everyone's go-to and that meeting would formally cement her in that position.
We already have an employee led group (no managers involved) who formally convene on their own schedule for this exact purpose, so we said that while we appreciated her trying to proactively resolve the issue, we recommended making use of the existing group. She came back saying she was disappointed especially given that we've already got a reputation for shutting people down.
I feel like I'm at my wits end. I can't work out if we're being so permissive that it's creating this atmosphere. We don't have any KPIs or anything. I wonder if people have nothing better to do but moan? Or if I'm missing something and we really are shutting people down too much.
In this time performance overall has been dropping. We've made the least money since COVID and staff chargeability is at a record low. It's like all the momentum has gone out of the business. I've got one foot out of the door myself for this reason but I'm still trying to give it my all as a manger.
Is this normal? What should we do about the meeting request, if anything? Is their anything we can do to fit this weird vibe in the office right now?