What are office politics in the workplace?

Office politics are present in any type of work, whether corporate or blue-collar, remote or office-based, part-time or full-time. These politics describe employees’ activities and behaviors to advance their personal agenda at work. They include conversations, alliances, and strategies to progress their own careers or put themselves in a better position.  

The word “politics” has such negative connotations, conjuring up cloak-and-dagger images of secret meetings, sabotage, and backstabbing. While these activities likely occur in the most toxic workplaces, many other companies realize that workplace politics are simply a sign of eager, ambitious employees. When approached with integrity, companies can foster collaboration and motivate workers to progress in their careers without any unsavory politicking.  

What causes office politics in the workplace? 

Office politics are the result of some common workplace issues: heirarchies and power struggles, resource competition, company culture, personality clashes, and poor communication.

Hierarchies and power struggles 

Unless you’re working for a company with a truly flat organizational structure, ranks and roles will play a huge part in your workplace’s power dynamics. Employees looking for the next step up may engage in gameplay to get ahead. Speaking on the No BS Leadership podcast, host Martin Moore explains, “Politics is the path that many choose when they can’t deliver results. What they lack in ability, they make up for in ambition, so they find another way to climb the ladder. And that’s often by using politics to someone else’s detriment.” 

Resource competition 

Much like in the wild, employees lean on politics at work to compete for something that is scarce. For example, if there’s only one promotion opportunity in the department or a single invitation to join the CEO at a networking event, coworkers might make maneuvers to get there first. 

Company culture

Company culture plays a huge role in the presence of office politics. An organization that sets the tone for collaboration is likely to experience transparency and open dialog as part of its growth culture. In contrast, a company that welcomes competition as a core value could attract politically-charged behavior. 

Personality clashes

Every individual in your organization is unique—each has different opinions and experiences and may clash when working closely with others. If these interactions turn sour, toxic office politics become a tool for getting ahead while hindering collaboration.

Poor communication

Misunderstandings or lack of clarity cause serious frustration. And this may drive employees to seek alternative ways to get their messages across or achieve their goals. Poor communication can also create information silos, making some employees feel out of the loop and invoking their political skills to stay informed or exert influence. 

5 examples of office politics 

Employees may engage in some of the following politics to stay ahead at work: networking and personal relationships, high ambitions, backstabbing, withholding information, and impression management.

1. Networking and personal relationships 

In Workplace Competition: Why We Compete at Work, Robert Hogan, PhD, founder and president of Hogan Assessments, explains that in a group context, humans are driven by a need to get along, get ahead, and find meaning. Networking achieves the first two of these, allowing employees to build bonds with influential people within the organization. 

In some situations, an employee may carefully position themselves as their manager’s trusted advisor or develop a network across the company or wider industry to ensure they have strong connections to tap if needed. While networking is inextricably linked with politics, these relationships also provide access to people and resources that can ensure a team’s success.

2. High levels of ambition

Every employee in an organization is on their own personal career advancement journey, and only a few will make it to a leadership position. Ambitious employees may see workplace politics as necessary to get ahead, using any means available. 

3. Backstabbing 

Backstabbing is one of the darker sides of workplace politics, a weakness that shows up when employees are desperate to protect their position or advance it. Peers may deliberately harm others in the organization through: 

• Character assassination: Deliberately tarnishing someone’s reputation by spreading rumors or sharing false information that undermines others’ confidence in them. 
• Scapegoating: Letting someone else take the blame to protect themselves when things go wrong. 
• Being two-faced: Publicly supporting someone but taking a different stance in private.  

4. Withholding information 

Some employees may withhold information that could benefit the team or colleagues who are engaging in politically-motivated behavior. This may include keeping secrets, hoarding resources, or deliberately leaving others out of important conversations or meetings. This type of politicking harms team dynamics and makes it difficult for groups to work effectively together. 

5. Impression management  

To put a positive spin on their own endeavors, some employees will significantly embellish their achievements to pass them off as something remarkable. They may exaggerate their role in a successful project or selectively highlight their contributions to manipulate others’ perceptions of them. 

How office politics affect business 

At first glance, workplace politics may appear focused on individuals—but they also affect the organization’s morale, innovation, turnover, and strategic alliances.

Undermines morale and engagement 

Gallup research highlights only 23% of global employees feel engaged at work, illustrating the fragility of the employee experience. There’s potential for negative office politics to erode morale and even your workers’ mental health as colleagues distrust each other. 

Influences innovation

When HR teams and leaders recognize those highly motivated employees capable of excelling in their roles, they can convert their energy into innovative and productive outcomes. On the flip side, employees obsessed with the next promotion opportunity may spend more time strategizing instead of generating exciting new ideas and solutions for the company. 

Creates turnover issues 

In a working world where 46% of employees plan to look for a new job in the next three months, companies must be aware of how internal dynamics can influence employee satisfaction rates and push people toward the exit. Employees who feel overlooked for promotion or constantly embroiled in internal conflict may want a fresh start elsewhere. Similarly, workers whose professional development efforts haven’t worked as planned may seek opportunities with a different employer instead. 

Fosters alliance-building

One of the greatest positives associated with employees engaging in office politics is their ability to foster strategic alliances. When they forge connections with customers, business partners, or even team members in adjacent departments, the overall business can benefit from these relationships through improved retention rates and increased profit.  

How to address office politics

After identifying political behavior in your organization, try the following techniques to shepherd your employees toward merit-based success rather than manipulation.

Build strong team relationships 

Encourage your team members to respect and learn from each other. Every new hire arrives in your organization as an individual, but integrating with the wider team will allow them to reach shared goals. According to Hanne Wulp, Leadership Development Trainer and Executive Coach at Communication Wise, “Social influence is a force that will always exist (we are social creatures) and can be used for good and bad. With this piece of knowledge, HR leaders and managers can nudge people toward acting in deliberately helpful, desired, inclusive ways, versus acting for their own personal or elite group gain.” 

One way to build stronger relationships is by leveraging employee engagement solutions like Rising Team. Rising Team is an employee engagement solution that fosters stronger relationships between coworkers. Aimed at remote, hybrid, and on-site teams, its 45-60 minute Connection kit encourages each team member to reflect and share personal experiences with the wider group. 

Promote peer recognition 

Another way to solidify team relationships is to encourage peers, managers, and leaders to express gratitude for the contributions of those around them. Negative politics are less likely to take root when you’ve established a culture of appreciation for coworkers who stand alongside each other every day. 

Peer recognition can be as simple as highlighting team members in a meeting or posting a message on a kudos wall. An alternative is to use a platform like Nectar, which offers a digital space for employees to exchange shoutouts and redeemable reward points. 

Maintain transparency and communication 

Open communication will keep office gossip and mistruths from being exchanged behind closed doors. Leaders must maintain an environment where everyone feels psychologically safe voicing their opinions and knows who to approach with any concerns. Typically, this means implementing an open-door policy and hosting regular team and roundtable discussions where individuals are encouraged to speak their truth without fear of retribution.  

However, this won’t happen overnight, which is where anonymous feedback can be a valuable tool in uncovering any toxic cultural practices. Employees might use Bob’s Your Voice feature as a safe space to discuss harassment, unsafe or illegal activities, and any workplace misconduct. The tool is encrypted and accessible from both mobile and web, making it easy for your workers to offer honest feedback.

Align individual and organizational goals 

Keen, motivated employees can be a blessing for your company if you can align their personal objectives with your overarching business strategy. Mitch Chailland, President of Canal HR, describes how his company aims to manage this ambition positively, “We empower managers to notice when the team member’s self-motives could be helpful to the organization, for example, when the team member is aspiring to do more work or lead a project.” 

Regular career development conversations are key to this type of streamlining, drawing on performance reviews and providing actionable next steps to progress employees toward their goals. Deel Engage‘s performance management software maps individual and team goals to a company’s overall career development framework. It identifies existing skills gaps and provides targeted training programs to help employees progress from their current positions to their desired roles.

HR’s role in navigating office politics in the workplace 

Organizational politics are entirely normal. They exist everywhere and go hand in hand with managing career-focused employees who want to succeed. The HR team’s role is to be proactive in harnessing this professional enthusiasm for the good of the company rather than letting it negatively impact your other workers. Stay alert to what’s happening, understand where to provide support, and when to redirect damaging behavior into more productive channels. 

The post How to Navigate Office Politics in the Workplace appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

What is continuous performance management?

Continuous performance management is a style of performance management where team leads check in frequently with their direct reports. It’s a cycle made up of three steps: setting objectives, checking in with managers, and getting feedback.

In a continuous performance management cycle, the employee and manager work together to create goals and metrics to measure them. Then they have at least one check-in meeting where a manager can answer questions and address any issues that have arisen. Finally, they have a review meeting where a manager offers more formal feedback. This gives the two of them an opportunity to adjust or set new goals, and the cycle begins again.

Continuous performance management vs. standard review processes

What sets continuous performance management apart from the standard performance review is its frequency. Most traditional performance reviews are conducted annually, while continuous performance management includes opportunities for feedback every few weeks. Frequent feedback ensures clarity on expectations so employees feel more confident in their contributions, and it gives them an opportunity to improve by acting on that feedback.

“89% of HR managers think that continuous performance management is more useful than traditional performance management.” — BetterWorks

Continuous performance management is also different from putting an employee on a performance improvement plan (PIP), since the former is a cadence of feedback for all employees, while the latter is meant to help struggling employees meet their goals. However, the structure of a PIP and a continuous performance management strategy can be very similar, since both of them rely on consistent feedback and 1:1s between manager and direct report. In fact, continuous performance management can serve as a good alternative to using PIPs.

Benefits of continuous performance management

Continuous performance management offers a variety of benefits. It can improve employee performance and engagement, and it helps foster transparency in larger performance reviews.

Improves employee performance

It’s hard to know how to improve without consistent feedback from your manager. If you only get structured feedback once a year, you could have spent the last year learning bad habits and turning in work that didn’t meet expectations without knowing it. On top of that, there’s just not enough time in one meeting to discuss everything that needs to be done.

Continuous performance management gives more opportunities for that feedback. Not only does that direct an employee’s growth, it also provides role clarification. That, alongside consistent, guided goal-setting, ensures that employees are working on the right things that affect the company’s bottom line.

Increases employee engagement

Frequent, meaningful feedback makes you feel like what you do matters. If you’re just submitting work and moving on, it can feel like you’re not contributing to the broader organization. That has an impact, especially on the younger generation of workers; most of Gen Z want to do meaningful work that keeps them engaged. 

“80% of employees who say they have received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged.” — Gallup

In addition to constructive feedback, continuous performance management meetings are a great place to provide recognition for an employee’s good work. Recognition is another element that dramatically affects employee engagement; in a survey by Great Place to Work, 37% of respondents said they’d be motivated to do better work if they received personal recognition.

Fosters transparency

Continuous performance management provides a much more comprehensive record of employee growth and success than traditional performance reviews. Frequent goal-setting and reviewing means managers see the details of everything an employee has attempted and accomplished.

That’s incredibly important when it comes to those end-of-year overall reviews, which are often tied to promotion and compensation cycles. The more accurate record gives employees an opportunity to advocate for themselves and see that their hard work is rewarded with career growth. An employee using continuous performance management can go into an annual review confident that they are meeting the expectations set by their role and contributing to their company’s objectives.

Further reading: Why is Performance Management so Important?

How to implement the continuous performance management process

It’s one thing for a manager to set up a continuous performance management system with their direct reports. If you want to implement this system company-wide, though, HR needs to play a role.

Thankfully, the strategy for setting up continuous performance management isn’t too different from setting up any sort of performance management strategy, at least with regard to the decisions that need to be made.

You’ll need to decide on meeting cadences, create a universal goal-setting system, and make sure your managers are trained on how to provide effective feedback. Then, you’ll need to implement the change carefully, communicating openly, and giving people plenty of time to adjust.

1. Decide on meeting cadences

Meeting frequency is a difficult needle to thread. Too few check-in opportunities, and employees don’t get enough feedback. Too many, though, leaves people drowning in pointless meetings. There’s also the very real concern of Zoom fatigue.

There is plenty of research you can use as your baseline when it comes to determining meeting cadence. For example, according to research by TruQu, 76% of employees want feedback on their work at least once a month.

It might also be wise to allow for some wiggle room for individual managers; if they find that more or fewer meetings work for their team, they shouldn’t be punished for making that adjustment.

2. Create a goal-setting system

It’s important to make sure that your organization is aligned on how to create, set, and measure goals. Implementing a system like SMART goals, OKRs, or KPIs can help ensure consistency across the board.

It’s important to emphasize the scope of goals in a continuous performance management system. Whatever goals managers and direct reports are setting need to be reasonable within the timeframe of a review cycle. Using a goal-setting software like Leapsome or 15Five can be very helpful for keeping goals organized and measurable.

Leapsome’s goal-setting feature allows employees to efficiently manage goals and to stay aligned on key objectives. Source: Leapsome

15Five’s Objectives summary dashboard provides a quick overview of all objectives and statuses. This allows employees to track progress, stay aligned with team goals, and make necessary adjustments. Source: 15Five

3. Train managers to provide effective feedback

Feedback is a learned skill. Anyone can offer their opinion, but it takes practice and training to give feedback that is effective and constructive. Unfortunately, it is a skill that many managers seem to be lacking. According to a report from OfficeVibe, 64% of employees think the feedback they get from their managers could be improved. 

Continuous performance management strategies rely heavily on the quality of a manager’s feedback for each employee’s success. As such, it’s important to make sure that those managers are well-trained before making the transition to any such system.

For tips on creating a training program that works, check out How to Create a Training Program for Effective Employees.

4. Communicate the process clearly

When making any major change to a company’s operational structure, it’s important to roll out the change slowly and with transparency. Simply dropping the plan on your managers’ laps and expecting them to implement it will only cause confusion. Communication and pacing are both key to rolling out continuous performance management.

When communicating this change, be clear about the steps and timeline of implementation. Explain the benefits of continuous performance management, and provide space to answer anyone’s questions or concerns.

Your communication strategy can’t end once the system is in place, either. Take time to gather feedback from managers and employees during the whole process, and make changes if necessary. 

Further reading: Rethinking the Performance Appraisal: 4 Ideas for Improving Consistency Across Your Company

The role of continuous performance management software

The first and arguably most important use of performance management software is that it connects and organizes data. Software is a great resource to make sure employee goals are in line with organizational objectives and paint a fuller picture of an employee’s impact. Such systems of connecting data also help keep the consistency and alignment across the whole business.

Software also takes some of the administrative labor off of HR, giving them time to work on performance management strategy. Moreover, many apps can schedule review and 1:1 cadences, send reminders, and provide templates of review documents. These tools also keep track of employee compensation and job title changes over time.

Finally, many performance management apps have AI tools that assist in your strategy. Some AI tools provide insights and suggested action plans based on performance data. Others prevent bias by checking feedback language used by managers and monitoring equity and fairness in growth and compensation to meet DEI goals.

Every performance management software is different, and some might suit your needs better than others. Check out our handy Performance Management Software Guide to help determine which software is best for your business.

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