4 types of employee complaining - and how to respond

Types of Complaining

Productive Complaining

• made with the intention of bringing to light and improving an undesirable situation.
• can result in valuable feedback that’s necessary to change practices or behaviors that are harming the organization and to improve processes, products, and services.

Venting

• an emotional form of complaining where the individual — often vigorously — expresses their dissatisfaction about someone or something to others.
• intent is to release bottled-up stress or frustration, or to seek allies.

Chronic Complaining

• chronic complainers often have a more pessimistic or critical view of their role, their work, and the world around them.
• chronic complaining reflects a mindset and attitude — not necessarily an objective problem. The social costs of this behavior are high. New grievances replace old ones.
• one upside to chronic complainers is that these “trouble-finders” can help surface potential red flags before they become widespread.

Malicious Complaining

• a destructive form of complaining that’s used to undermine colleagues or gain an unfair advantage.
• some kind of gain, rather than dissatisfaction with an organizational issue, lies at the heart of this behavior.
• malicious complaints serve the self at the expense of others.

How to Handle Complaining at Work

• develop a strategy to listen to and act on complaints, harness their benefits, and mitigate their destructive potential.
• when employees believe their manager doesn’t care about, minimizes, or ignores valid concerns, it can increase stress, decrease engagement, and ignite turnover.
• being dismissive of complaints can also damage the manager’s or organization’s reputation
• managers who are receptive to employee complaints foster trust and psychological safety 
• unregulated, workplace complaining can give rise to negative consequences, such as “complaint contagion”

Start with Interest and Curiosity

• be grateful to the messenger for showing trust in you to do something about it. That they’re coming to you gives you the chance to identify the problem in the first place.
• adopt a mindset of curiosity. Beware the false consensus bias, which can influence the attitude of “If I don’t personally experience it, it must not be true” or “If it’s not a big deal to me, it shouldn’t be to them either.”
• when an employee complains about a particular topic, consider the intention.
• is the complaint intended to harm, or to fix a problem? Does it offer an opportunity or spark an idea for positive change? Is it a red flag for a future issue? Is it something that several employees have mentioned? Is the person just trying to be heard in venting about a situation that isn’t particularly solvable?
• if you’re not able to decipher the intent behind the complaint, you might even directly ask the person, “What do you hope to achieve with your feedback, and how might I help you?”

Encourage and Help Facilitate Constructive Complaints

 - encourage perspective-taking and solution-oriented, productive complaining.  - For example, you might create opportunities at regular intervals for employees to provide feedback and ideas for improvement in constructive ways.  - installing a time buffer — a short pause to reflect on the grievance, its impact, and potential solutions before having a conversation about it — can allow the complainer to articulate concerns with less negative emotion and thus more effectively.  - to help employees take on more active, solution-oriented mindsets, recognize “helpful” complaints that provide pathways and improvement opportunities.

Tackle Destructive Complaints

• it’s critical to address the negative forms of complaints that can quickly undermine culture and teamwork.
• if you find an employee often complains about someone without any intention or desire to solve the problem, address the relationship, potentially through mediation or a constructive conversation
• employees aren’t always aware of how their tone or negative mindset affects others and impacts culture, so simply addressing the behavior can be a big help in some cases.
• if the chronic complaining about a particular issue persists, especially if the problem isn’t solvable, the complainer may need support to change their mindset and behavior to accept and better cope with the circumstances.