Rate your employer, speak your mind ...

For anyone going through a job or career crisis, often the one thing they want to do when they meet up with their friends (or with their career development specialist for that matter) is to vent.

In fact usually the first 10 - 15 minutes of any meeting I have with a new client is me listening very patiently to what can often be a fairly emotive purge culminating in their justification for either wanting to leave their current job, or the reasons for why they just left an organisation.

Then when I ask them why they took the job in the first place, or if I get them to talk about the good times, they will quickly calm down and speak passionately about what it was like when they really enjoyed their job.

It's only then that we can really start to work on a strategy ...

About a year ago now I helped Dave through a pretty hectic roller coaster of a ride ... two redundancies in a row (both due to companies having to close their doors). Fortunately he's now really happy in his new position.

I was checking in with him the other day to see how things are going and he couldn't stop raving about his role and also his employer. What a change from 12 months earlier when unfortunately he couldn't think of anything nice to say about either his jobs or his employers.

I must have said something in passing along the lines of "wouldn't it be great if there was somewhere employees could anonymously vent about their employer or have a chance to say something really nice about them ..."

And before I could say anything else, Dave said, "But there is Paul. You should check out Grindstone".

Grindstone ... I checked it out immediately.

I had a good look at the site ... giving individual employees the opportunity to anonymously "rate your employer and speak your mind".

Now whenever I stumble across something that really impresses me I need to investigate it, so I tracked down Grindstone's co-Founders and I asked them what their motive was behind launching the website.

Brett Tait explained how "it's all about employees reviewing employers and generally making work places better places". While Tova Wilshansky continued to describe how "not only does the site allow employees to comment about a particular workplace, but people considering joining a particular organisation will eventually be able to see how that organisation has been rated in the past".

"The circle [of feedback] has to start somewhere", Brett Tait said.

I then started to think more about their objective.

Once employers start to see how their staff (either present or past) are describing them, then in order to keep their staff (both present and future) happy, they will be able to use all the feedback (real feedback from an independent source) to make some positive changes.

So go ahead ... rate your employer and speak your mind.

Image courtesy of: TomStock.us