Tips for Avoiding Favoritism in the Workplace

One of the most common complaints by employees in the workplace is about supervisors and leaders playing favorites. Granted, there will never be a way to satisfy all of your employees all of the time, but there are a few different ways employee's concerns can be addressed.

1. Provide your employees with an anonymous suggestions box or web-based submission form they can use to submit issues they may have at work. Try to encourage the employees to include their names if possible, so they are still responsible for their complaint or suggestion. However, don't require them to include their names.

2. If you are a supervisor or manager take the time to walk amongst the staff and let the employees know you are there for all of them and available to talk about any concerns they may have. Sometimes an employee prefers to talk in person about the issues that are bothering them most at work.

3. Keep an open-door policy for your employees to email you or come to your office so they can discuss any issues they have face to face. Let the employee know you are listening and if the situation is something that can be corrected you will do what you can to help remedy the situation.

4. If your company has a periodic employee survey figure out what the top complaints are and create focus groups to analyze how to correct the most common concerns. If a lot of employees feel the same way about a situation, then something needs to be done to stop the rumors and frustration the employees are feeling.

5. Sometimes there may be internal job posting available in your office. Even if you or your co-workers have a specific individual you feel would fill the job well, you should still offer the position out to the other employees. Just like an outside job posting set prerequisites employees must have in order to be able to apply for the internal position.