Chapter Two: Opening Up To Trust
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I once had the opportunity to speak with employees of a company that was known for a strong, healthy culture. Despite their genuine commitment to that culture, which was visible in several other ways, the organization had a policy of terminating employees as soon as they gave departure notice, even asking them to leave that same day.
Eventually, one of their team members spoke to me confidentially about the flaws in the existing departure process. “This isn’t who we are,” he said. “We’ve established a great company culture, but we handle departures poorly. We need a process that aligns with our core values.” Company leaders agreed with that assessment; they knew their approach was incongruous with their culture, but they didn’t know how to fix it.
This is frequently how the OTP process starts: when leaders grow tired of departure norms and practices that don’t reflect the values of their organization and decide to do something about it. That said, it’s natural for doubts to surface when you consider adopting an OTP. We faced them too. But as I’ve now consulted with dozens of companies and leaders to help them adopt similar programs, I’ve found that the reservations tend to subside when people understand the benefits and see them in action. In this chapter, I want to directly address some of the possible objections that I’ve heard to OTPs and explain how they can be an essential part of a culture built on trust and respect.
An effectively implemented OTP fixes more than employee departures. It may enable you to engage with an unhappy or underperforming employee before their situation becomes unfixable or damages the company. You may even help them discover a different role within your organization that is a better match for their interests and aptitude. In this way, an OTP contributes to a healthier and happier work environment, demonstrates that you genuinely care about the people you work with, and reduces the costs associated with hiring and departures.
Is an Open Transition Program Right for Everyone?
The fundamental principles of open transitions—healthy trust, open communication, mutual respect, and a commitment to mutually beneficial outcomes—are beneficial for any company. Some organizations, however, will benefit more than others from a full OTP rollout.
Companies most likely to benefit greatly from an OTP include professional services firms, which employ many highly skilled client-facing employees, all of whom are extremely difficult to replace without heavily impacting the organization’s bottom line. An OTP is also extremely valuable for companies in competitive industries such as technology, where managers must compete with a large number of competitors to attract and hire for a small number of specialized, well-paid roles.
In contrast, companies with no problem securing available talent or those that don’t incur much cost from high staff turnover may not want or need to fully embrace all aspects of an open transition approach. If your organization employs hundreds of people who do the same thing—a call center, for example—aspects of this program might not make sense for your business, as it’s easy for employees to step in and immediately perform a recently vacated role. Of course, even if you’re lucky enough to be able to replace employees quickly and easily, your organization can still benefit from the trust and open communication an OTP creates, which is why you’ll want to keep reading.
It’s crucial to note here that a healthy organizational culture is an important foundation for the success of an OTP. It is nearly impossible to build a program dependent on trust when there is none. If your Glassdoor reviews claim that employees don’t trust management, you need to fix that issue before attempting to implement an OTP. But if your culture is already built on trust and transparency and you have evidence employees believe those principles are practiced at your business, then you can begin work to install an OTP.
Tuning Out the Naysayers
Like any initiative that disrupts long-established norms, embarking on an OTP will likely spark some resistance from your team. Most people fight change and don’t like to take risks. Multiple people have told me that while they like the idea of an OTP, they suspect it could never work at their organization.
Here are some of the most common objections I have heard over the years, followed by the realities we and other companies who have an OTP have experienced.
People will steal or spread negativity, so it’s better to show them the door.”
Who is more likely to steal or cause problems: the person who you don’t realize is silently stewing in resentment, counting the days until they can leave, or the person who has initiated a transition with the company’s observation and support?
Employees who are unhappy but feel trapped are often the ones who damage morale by complaining, spreading rumors, copying intellectual property, or creating a toxic environment. Worse, they tend to do this long before giving notice.
In our experience, employees on a transition plan feel a sense of relief, even appreciation. People are often grateful when their company goes out of their way to help them secure a better outcome, and there’s little reason to assume someone would choose to harm an employer who is supporting them in finding a better role or career path.
Plus, in cases where a situation with a departing employee is already too toxic to salvage, you can always manage their departure differently than you’d do with an OTP, given the extenuating circumstances. We’ll discuss handling this type of toxic situation in detail in an upcoming chapter.
“If an employee knows they are leaving, they won’t do good work, and this program will allow them to do subpar work for longer.”
This is the biggest misconception of all, because the premise is false: an employee departing on good terms is not going to be less productive than a silently miserable one who is just showing up and collecting their paycheck until they find a new job or get fired. An employee in the latter group—someone who has mentally quit the company but keeps showing up—may allow key tasks to slide, quietly miss deadlines, or even place crucial client relationships at risk. Worst of all, you may not discover the effects of their lack of effort until they’re long gone.
In the world of employee engagement, ignorance is not bliss. An unhappy member of your team may show up physically at their desk every morning, but that doesn’t mean they are doing good work. Assuming the people remaining in your organization are doing better work than the people who are departing is simply refusing to see the truth.
Conversely, when people have a goal in sight, their motivation may receive a boost. In the short term, we have seen performance actually improve when people are undergoing an open transition, because they can see the finish line and are committed to racing to it.
For example, imagine you need to let someone go this month due to performance issues, or they just gave notice due to dissatisfaction with their role. The first indications of these underlying issues likely appeared as far back as a year ago, whether you noticed them or not. That was the right time to start a conversation, long before performance and/or job satisfaction spiraled downward to an unrecoverable point. As with most things in life, catching a problem early has the biggest impact on outcomes and endings. When you start early, there are many good options for mutually beneficial outcomes, as both sides are not yet frustrated or at their wits’ end. In contrast, by the time someone gives notice, they are mentally out the door, and it’s usually too late to engage with them constructively.
Furthermore, there will be a lot of problems stemming from that disengagement that have yet to be identified and will be uncovered in the months after they leave. Had you initiated a conversation shortly after the first warning signs appeared—not to transition the employee out of the company but to identify the underlying problems and attempt to fix them—the entire trajectory of the following year might have changed. There are many ways this conversation could lead to better outcomes that will be discussed in the chapters to come.
“It won’t work for junior employees.”
In my experience, junior employees have a flexible mindset that makes them relatively open to training, development, role transitions, and career changes. Most are still shaping their careers and may be more receptive to a change of direction, especially if you engage with them proactively in a trusting and respectful manner. Realistically, younger employees today are going to stay a few years at your company at best, so there is more risk in doing nothing than doing something.
“It won’t work for experienced employees.”
It’s true that experienced employees—those with five to ten years of service at your company—may require some “untraining” in order to implement an OTP, as it likely differs significantly from their past experiences. The longer someone has been doing the same thing, especially with the same organization, the more they are susceptible to status quo bias. They prefer to continue doing what they’ve always done because it feels familiar and therefore right.
People who exhibit status quo bias tend to be apprehensive of change in all its forms. To be fair, this cognitive bias strikes all of us from time to time. It’s human nature, because change brings uncertainty, which feels unsafe from an evolutionary perspective. This is why these employees can prefer consistency to innovation, even at the cost of stagnation. They may cling to routines, political parties, and favorite meals, assuming that other options are inferior or will undoubtedly make things worse. This attitude is summed up by the saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Employees with a decade or more of service may also have greater family responsibilities. They may be more motivated by safety and predictability than junior employees are. If this is the case, they may not be excited if you tell them, “Maybe there’s another job that’s a better fit, and we’d like to help you find it.”
This is not to say that an OTP cannot work for more senior members of your team. You may be surprised at what you can achieve by discussing these issues transparently, understanding what’s important to them, and determining how you might be able to help them achieve a mutually beneficial outcome. If you can help a senior employee with years of service in your company to find a new role that suits them better, they will likely reengage and bring their years of experience to a job they’re interested in doing, and you will save yourself the headache and expense of losing them.
“We already have a process for employee departures (a.k.a. the PIP).”
The most commonly used tool for attempting to improve the performance of underperforming or unhappy employees is the performance improvement plan (PIP).1 Although PIPs can lead to a short-term performance improvement, they’re often implemented too late to salvage the situation. Worse, they usually address the visible symptoms of employee underperformance without touching the deeper root causes.
Addressing all employee performance issues with PIPs is similar to giving an aspirin to everyone who says they have a headache; it assumes that a broad range of symptoms all stem from the same fundamental problem. In reality, one person might be dehydrated, another might be allergic to gluten, and a third may be suffering from a nutrient deficiency. Giving these three people an aspirin may clear up their headache, but if the underlying cause isn’t addressed, the pain will surely return.
Many companies use PIPs because their legal teams tell them that they provide cover, which is fundamentally misleading. A PIP doesn’t stop an employee from suing you or making a legal claim, even if it bolsters your defense. The irony is people are more likely to sue their employer if they feel disrespected and hurt by their dismissal, which can often happen when they are put on a PIP with no chance of success.
The better solution is for companies to engage in honest conversations before problems become unsolvable. It’s important to get to the root of the problem and determine whether there’s a solution. PIPs can sometimes be part of this solution, but only if the employee is still stimulated by their role, realizes they need to improve, and wants to invest in doing so. In these cases, a PIP may be the best option for everyone. Otherwise, implementing one only delays the inevitable.
Remember, if you already deliver regular feedback to your employees, they should naturally be aiming to improve their job performance. This should reduce the chances that you will need to implement a PIP, which is often three scarlet letters for an employee.
You Won’t Know Until You Try
I’ve heard the objections above from leaders at companies in a wide range of industries, sizes, and cultures. But for all these differences, every leader who believes an OTP will never work in their organization has something in common: they are afraid to try.
The OTP’s principles upend the traditional roles of the company and employee—a dynamic that is often considered adversarial in nature. The tension between employers and employees has only increased in recent years due to cyclical shifts in business power dynamics like the Great Resignation and waves of layoffs. Challenging these norms requires leaders and employees to get out of their comfort zones, which is always hard to do, especially when jobs and company outcomes are on the line.
It’s crucial to remember that the best learning in life comes when we get out of our comfort zones. Even if you find the OTP isn’t quite the right fit for your business, you’ll certainly find that many of the principles of the program—concepts like psychological safety and mutual respect—will make your culture healthier and your organization stronger.
So if you’ve made it this far and are already convinced an OTP isn’t right for you, I challenge you to take another step out of your comfort zone and keep reading. Next, we’ll dive into the principles that can benefit any company, regardless of how they handle departures.
Up Next - Chapter Three: The Open Road
Robert Glazer, “It’s Time to Ditch Performance Improvement Plans. Here’s Why,” Forbes, August 2, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglazer/2018/08/02/ its-time-to-ditch-performance-improvement-plans-heres-why.