Why Your Open Door Policy Fails

Okay, so it's your first stuff meeting back, let's say, or maybe you've already had it already this year.

And you say the things, you know, the things we always say, my door's always open.

I really value honest communication, maybe, or I'm here to support you, those kind of things.

And everyone nods.

Nobody really writes anything down.

And when they leave the room, they actually don't know a single thing about you that they didn't really know when they walked in.

Because often these lines, they sound incredibly generous.

They also cost you nothing.

But the trouble with them is that they also give people nothing to act on.

Because just having open communication, well, it doesn't tell that new head of department whether to ring you at 8 p.m. on a Tuesday if there's a Furies parent who's got in touch or to leave it to Monday morning.

That's not clear, is it? So what happens? Well, they guess.

And about half of them are probably going to guess wrong, right? But when they learn how you work by watching how you react, that's where they figure things out.

But if it's just watching your reactions, then it's going to take months and months.

So there's an interesting study on this that I've looked at a few times.

So Dan Cable, Francesca Gino, and Brad Statz, they published this back in 2013.

And they ran a field experiment where they were essentially working with some call centers.

And they had 605 new starters across three different sites.

And everyone was joining in a certain period of time.

and yet this organization were losing somewhere between 50 to 70 percent of its staff every year now if you've ever worked in a call center then you will know that is actually pretty normal for the industry and still a lot of people move on very quickly in this industry but in this study what they did is that they changed something all they changed was what happened on day one and what they did is they did two weeks of voice training So they split people into two groups, and one group got the usual first day, right, which is mostly the job and the company and all those different forms.

And another, they got a version built around pride in the organization.

So a senior leader was talking about the values and why it's an outstanding place to work.

Then maybe a star performer saying the same.

Then new starters reflecting on what they've heard to make them feel really proud to be part of it.

And they even came home in this study with a company, Fleece.

And the third group was about them instead.