Employees Beware of These Warning Signs

We’ve helped hundreds of employees to exit gracefully from difficult workplace situations. Our experience has enabled us to produce a list of the common warning signs that you are being forced out of your job. This is our list of the most common warning signs for employees:

• Managers finding fault with your work – especially if the fault finding is increasing in frequency and pettiness.
• A new manager has been appointed and they start bringing in former colleagues from the place they worked before. It might not be long before they think that they would prefer to replace you as well.
• Unexplained changes in the organisation chart. Sometimes there is a pretence of consultation, sometimes not, but concerning alterations relate to a negative change in reporting structure, status, or responsibility, that affects you. If you raise your concerns, the response may be dismissive. Organisational chart changes are often an early step in the process that will lead to your exit.
• Meetings and communications from which you are excluded, especially when you were included in the past. It could be that they are talking about you, or that they have already emotionally separated you from the workplace.
• Discussions about you behind your back. People who do this think that you don’t know, but most people can sense that something is going on.
• Undermining the chain of command. For example, if you’re the chief executive of a company, the board might start interfering in day to day decision making, undermining your authority and sending a clear signal to the rest of the staff about how they view you. For less senior employees, your direct manager may suddenly start giving instructions directly to someone who reports to you. 
• Someone at the same organisational level is treated more favourably than you. There can be genuine reasons for a temporary disparity in treatment, but if the disparity can’t be explained then it may be a warning sign that you are on your way out.
• Applying work rules unevenly. Take for example, the ban that most workplaces have on using the computer for personal use. Most employee contracts won’t allow you to look up your Facebook page or send personal emails during work time but everyone knows that most people break the rules and that a blind eye is turned. If you are given a warning for this kind of thing, that everyone else is doing, something is wrong. The employer is entitled to apply work rules fairly, but when somebody is singled out there is usually something else going on.

The last warning sign, and the most important one, is: Trust your gut instinct. If you have a feeling that things are not right at work, you’re probably right. Often it’s hard to put a finger on the details, but regardless of the vagueness of your feelings, listen to yourself.

In another blog we will talk about what you can do if things are starting to go wrong at work.

Please comment (below) with your stories, and any other warning signs that you have experienced (comments can be anonymous).