How To Avoid Employee Paranoia In The Workplace

The last thing you need, especially when your business is under pressure from a global pandemic, is your employees worrying about being laid off. This can have a drastic effect on workplace productivity, loyalty and satisfaction. So, avoiding paranoia at all costs is paramount to a successful business. 

There are things you can do to reduce this paranoia, such as making sure employees have access to redundancy advice and reassuring them that they are important to the success of your business. 

The list goes on so, in this post, we’re going to share some of the important things you can do to avoid and reduce employee paranoia in the workplace. Read on to find out more… 

How to avoid employee paranoia in the workplace 

Having a paranoid workforce reduces overall morale, makes employees work slower, causes mistakes, and generally lowers the performance of your business. To avoid this, you need to make your employees feel valued and secure in their positions. 

The following suggestions will help you prove to your employees that they are good at their jobs, worth keeping around, and are key members of the business. 

1. Share positive feedback as often as possible

The easiest way to show employees that you value them, and that they’re jobs aren’t at risk, is to share positive feedback. We’ve all been in situations in the past where we feel underappreciated, or like our work isn’t contributing to the business. 

A message, phone call, thank you card, or even verbal ‘thank you, you did a good job’ can make all the difference to a paranoid employee worried about losing their job. It also means that when you have to give negative feedback it isn’t taken as badly, because they know their work is valued. 

2. Start an MVP or employee recognition scheme

If you’re in charge of a large workforce, or you’re too busy to constantly share positive feedback, create a way for employees to complement each other’s work.  

This is a great way to foster an in-built recognition culture in your business, where people feel secure in their positions without your personal input. Not only that, it means they’re recognised for efforts you may have overlooked. It also helps them build strong relationships with one another. 

3. Give employees a voice

The only thing worse than having employees who are paranoid about being laid off is having them be unable to express their concerns. So, your business should have some way to allow employees to voice their concerns and feel like they’re being listened to. 

Depending on how large your business is, there are various ways to do this. You could have one member of each team collect and provide solutions to these concerns. Alternatively, some companies adopt a ‘wellbeing team’ made up of certain staff members who have been trained to listen and provide solutions to the worries their colleagues. 

Whichever route you take, make those voices heard.  

4. Let them know how difficult it would be to replace them

There’s always the option to take a more blunt approach for those employees who prefer firm guarantees over emotional reassurance. Tell them straight how the cost of replacing them would be more effort than keeping them on.  

When an employee leaves a company, a great deal of personal and tribal knowledge about the company goes out the door. Also, the process of hiring a new employee is difficult due to the time it takes to interview candidates, and the lengthy process of bringing them up to speed. 

You also run the risk of hiring someone who’s poor at the job and having to go back through the hiring process again. This rational ‘it’s too difficult to replace you’ schtick will make certain kinds of employees feel more secure than other types of reassurances.  

5. Invest in your employees’ future development

Investing in the future development of your employees not only makes them better at their jobs, it also makes them feel less dispensable. 

An employee with a suitcase full of skills is much more difficult to replace than one with a fanny pack and the employees know it. Book them into seminars, train them on new software, and make them better trained and less paranoid employees.  

6. Challenge your employees

Similar to the developing their skills, giving your employees hard jobs to do makes them feel less paranoid and more secure in their jobs. 

Every job has its mundane tasks that are below their skill level and could be performed by a machine. If your employees are inundated with these tasks, and never given any that use their specific, individual talents, they’ll feel more dispensable.  

When you assign an employee a difficult task and trust them to see it through, you’re telling them that you trust them and know that they are a valued member of the team who would be difficult to replace.  

7. Always be up front about the success of the business

When your business is going well, your employees should know about it so they can feel secure in their jobs. Equally, when the business isn’t going well your employees should be informed. 

Having monthly meetings to discuss the success of your business lets your employees know that you wouldn’t hide any down periods in the business from them. Without this, they might be paranoid a significant chunk of the time, not knowing whether business is going well or not.  

Being proactive rather than reactive is the name of the game with this one.  

Is this everything you can do to avoid workplace paranoia?

In this post, we’ve shared our main ways to avoid workplace paranoia, but there are many more out there that aren’t on this list. 

You know your business better than anyone, and I’m sure that you can think of some other ways to reduce employee paranoia in your specific workplace, by using these suggestions as a guide.  

Hopefully you’re ready to get out there, speak to your employees, reassure them that their jobs are safe, and fight through the tail end of this pandemic.