Why Your Employees Don't Feel Valued

You’ve probably experienced the bitter burn of a negative review left by an angry customer. What took a customer a few minutes to type will take you years to fix. It can be difficult to understand why someone would leave such an overwhelmingly negative review. But in reality, there are only two types of review-writers: Those who have had a terrible experience, and those who have had a great experience. You will rarely find reviews that exist in between these two extremes. Unfortunately, people tend to grant a lot of faith to the reviews they find online, so that’s how one negative review can destroy your reputation as a business.


But customers are not the only ones who can damage your business. Former employees can be especially caustic if they haven’t appreciated their time within your company. Can it really damage you? The answer is yes, because these feedbacks about your company are made public and encouraged by job sites such as Indeed. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve thought about your job description. If the company doesn’t get 4 or 5 stars in the impartial Indeed’s scoring system, you will find it hard to attract any candidate. So what would make employees or former employees feel so angry about your business? The main reason is that they don’t feel valued.

Are employees unimpressed with your company?

They’re not paid to their full value

When was the last time you review your employee’s wages and compared them through a market’s salary benchmark tool? It doesn’t matter than you’ve decided to call the job “Digital Marketing Grasshopper” in an attempt to stop your staff from comparing against similar job titles. In the end, the job title isn’t relevant. Only the skills matter. Consequently, each job should receive the right remuneration for the skill set it requires. In other words, if in your company, a Grasshopper is someone who has previous professional experience and who can manage small projects on their own, it’s fair to say that you can’t justify an entry salary. Other companies also try to make the most of their job perks to compensate for low pay cheques. At the end of the day, if your staff feels underpaid, they’re likely to take their skills somewhere else.

They’re expected to work overtime

Everyone has read in job specs something about expecting the right candidate to be hard-working and motivated to go beyond expectations. But as the Codist points out, your standard work week is considered to be 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. While it’s expected that some projects might require you to work a few extra hours from time to time to get things running, employees are beginning to realise that working overtime is the equivalent of unpaid work. In fact, with your average employee working up to 10 to 15 hours overtime per week, that’s a whopping 60 hours free at the end of the month. Millennials, who represent the largest proportion of the workforce, are extremely attached to their work/life balance. As a result, they’re likely to resent a company that values overtime.

Their contribution is ignored

Your employees are not in a popularity contest in high school anymore. When they provide a positive contribution to the business productivity, the least they expect is someone to notice. However, a lot of employees still go unnoticed while managers are busy interacting with their favorite staff. Some people might naturally be forgettable even though their performance remains noticeable, as they have chosen not to contribute to meetings other than by taking notes. In reality, it’s your job as an employer to make sure that your staff remains engaged. If they don’t contribute to discussions, it may already be as a result of feeling ignored by the management. There have even been cases where someone else took credit for their hard work and, even though as a manager you noticed the fraud, you never mentioned it. The bottom line is, when people feel wrongly ignored, they resent your company.

You give them menial tasks

So you’ve hired a fully qualified employee, but you’ve been requesting from them some simple and, let’s be honest, insulting tasks as it’s the case in this employee’s complaint. Employees can find it hard to discuss feeling undervalued with their manager, especially when the menial requests are put as additional needs of the business. More often than not, they quit for something better and are quick to warn future candidates about management issues in your company.

The way you treat your employees has a direct influence on how they feel about your company. With the growing potential for user-generated content online, companies should pay close attention to their staff satisfaction. An unhappy employee is not just a quitter. It’s someone who can also stop others from joining you.