Your Employees Are Reviewing You Like a Yelp Page

August 17, 2026•2 min read

Your Employees Are Reviewing You Like a Yelp Page

You rate your Uber driver without thinking twice. Bad ride, three stars, move on with your day. Great ride, five stars, you request them by name next time.

Your team is running that exact calculation about you. They just don't hand you a star rating at the end of the shift. They hand you their notice. Or, more quietly and more expensively, they hand you their disengagement, and stay anyway.

Here's where courage comes in, because this is the part nobody wants to hear: managing a calendar is not the same thing as leading a team. A calendar tells you where to be. Courage tells you what to do once you're there.

Courage looks like telling your CEO the thing they don't want to hear in the budget meeting. It looks like owning your mistake out loud in front of the people who report to you, instead of quietly hoping nobody noticed. It looks like fixing the broken process everyone complains about privately but nobody wants to be the one to escalate.

I think about this through a story I tell often: a new hire who showed up on day one with no desk assigned, no system access, and a manager who was "in back-to-back meetings all day." She sat in a break room for six hours, introduced herself to the same three people twice, and went home. She didn't come back for day two.

Everyone in that building blamed "the new generation." Nobody blamed the six hours in the break room.

The employee experience doesn't start on day one. It starts the moment someone accepts your offer, and it's shaped every single day after by the courage, or the absence of it, in how they're led.

So here's the ask this week: pick one place where courage is currently missing on your team, and go be the leader who shows up anyway.

What's the worst first-day story you've ever seen or lived? Send it to me. I collect these, and they're always worse than mine.

Cheers,

Reanette

Reanette Etzler, The Strategic HR Coach

Reanette knows what it's like to stand in front of skeptical executives who think HR is just about birthday cakes and paperwork—talk about giving everyone a serious case of the HR Hangover. She's been the voice that speaks up when others stay quiet, asking the tough questions that make people squirm. Sure, she wasn't always the most popular person in those boardroom meetings, but her willingness to tell the truth became her greatest asset. Her superpower? She's the HR Hangover cure. Reanette transforms HR professionals from order-takers to strategic powerhouses who drive real business results through keynote presentations, workshops and planning sessions. She doesn't just talk about moving from transactional to transformational—she's the coach on that journey, complete with war stories and a roadmap that works. From the Southwest HR Conference to countless SHRM Chapter events and Office Dynamics Administrative Professionals Conference, Reanette has shared her straight talk as a keynote speaker across the country. When she's not on stage, you'll find her serving on boards for two SHRM Chapters and her local housing authority commission—because changing the employee experience isn't a solo sport. Reanette is on a mission to help HR professionals step into their strategic power and become the business partners their organizations are desperately waiting for. She's here to transform HR's image from hall monitor to strategic champion—the captain of the business success squad, not the fun police.

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