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The psychological contract is defined as a set of reciprocal expectations between an employee and their employer. A strong psychological contract is a key driver of employee behavior and improved organizational performance. As a manager, your actions and behaviors have a crucial role to play in maintaining healthy psychological contracts within your team. These tips will help you to do precisely this.
Make Expectations Clear During Recruitment
The terms of an employee’s psychological contract are initially formed during their recruitment. Their early experience with your organization shapes their future expectations and perceptions. Begin the relationship on a strong footing by ensuring that good candidate care forms a core aspect of your recruitment processes. You can do this by keeping candidates updated on the progress of their application and communicating decisions promptly throughout the process.
As a hiring manager, it is important that you make it clear to new recruits what they can expect from the role, as well as what it is like to work in your team and organization. Although it might be tempting to overstate things in order to encourage prospective candidates to join your team, take care not to over-promise on opportunities for growth, development and challenge.
Ensure Effective Induction
A new employee’s induction period has a strong influence upon the positive development of their psychological contract. For example, did they feel valued and treated with respect throughout the process? Help to make their induction as effective as possible by ensuring that new starts quickly get to grips with what is expected of them and understand ‘the way things are done’ in your team and organization.
A thorough, tailored induction will help your new team member settle in quickly and get up to speed in their role. You might also consider asking an experienced member of your team to be an informal buddy, acting as the first port of call should your new team member have any questions.
Be Clear About Performance Standards
To help build a strong psychological contract, line managers need to be clear about their expectations of individual performance. For this to happen, team members need to have a clear understanding of their role, but also of the function they perform within the wider team. Help your team members understand what you expect from them by setting clear objectives.
You may wish to follow the S.M.A.R.T formula when setting individual performance objectives with your team. [1] You should also ensure that performance review or appraisal meetings are conducted regularly, and that they are based on objective rather than subjective assessments of each employee’s performance.
Treat People With Respect
As a manager, you have a powerful influence over the working culture of your team. Remember that each individual’s psychological contract is different depending on their personal value system and experiences within your team and the wider organization. It is important that you take time to understand what motivates each member of your team, and use this to strengthen their psychological contract, e.g. by tailoring your management style and approach to suit different preferences.
Remember that a positive working atmosphere goes a long way towards building loyalty and engagement within your team. The psychological contract can gradually become eroded where people feel that they are not valued by their manager. It is often the little things that count, such as forgetting to say ‘good morning’ to your team when you come in, showing a lack of interest in someone’s life outside of the workplace, or failing to notice when someone needs some extra support.
Ensure Fairness Throughout the Team
Your team can quickly become de-motivated if they see that people are treated in different ways. As the team’s manager, it is important that you are seen to treat people equitably. In practice, this means not having ‘favorite’ members of the team, and ensuring that everyone receives similar access to things like training and career development opportunities, work flexibility, if appropriate (e.g. access to working from home and flexible work patterns) and variation of job content (e.g. interesting or challenging work projects).
Give Regular Feedback and Praise
The psychological contract can often be broken when peoples’ efforts go unnoticed, particularly where they have been asked to take on extra responsibilities. Giving informal feedback and praise to your team members should be a regular feature of your line management role. For example, you might give feedback face-to-face as part of your performance appraisal process or informal catch-up meetings with team members.
Don’t forget that an email or word of thanks for a job well done can go a long way towards boosting morale and protecting the psychological contracts of your team members.
Be Aware of Your Organization’s Reputation and Image
The psychological contract of your existing team can become weakened by a negative organizational reputation and poor public image. So, if your organization gets bad publicity, don’t ignore it. Although you may not be able to do anything about the specific problem, you can support your team by talking through the issues with them and acknowledging their concerns.
Take Care When Going Through Change
One of the most common ways in which the psychological contract of employees can be broken is during organizational change. Poor management of change can result in people feeling disillusioned and distrustful of their employer. You can help to protect the psychological contract and maintain trust during a period of change by:
- Regularly communicating with your team about the benefits of the forthcoming changes and how these changes will affect them.
- Consulting your team on the proposed changes, and taking their views, opinions and feedback about them on board.
- Treating people with empathy and respect throughout the change process, particularly if redundancies are being made. If people feel that their colleagues have been treated poorly, the psychological contract can be significantly weakened in redundancy survivors.
References[1] SMART objectives are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time Bound.
