Increase your Bottom Line by Building a Great Place to Work

When you care for people as individuals — not just as employees — you end up with a happier, more engaged workforce. In fact, when employees feel their employer cares about their well-being, they’re 38 % more engaged. It starts with acknowledging all areas of employee well-being. One of the ways you demonstrate your commitment is to invest in engagement tools and resources.

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1. Give employees a voice

Your employees have great ideas – so show them you care by listening to them, involving them in decisions and soliciting their opinions. This means creating feedback mechanisms -informal or formal, qualitative or quantitative (optimally it’s a combo of all four). Take a pulse on your workforce through tools and forums that give employees a voice — but most importantly, you need to take action on what they say.

Taking action on feedback increase employee engagement by 23%. Send weekly pulse surveys to capture anonymous feedback from its employees. Employees can respond to the questions asked, send kudos to co-workers and share virtual suggestions.

2. Value the manager – employee relationship

Managers play a huge role in employee wellbeing and engagement, which we know are two drivers in becoming a great place to work.Here’s what research tells us about manager support and influence:

• Employees rate their relationships with direct supervisors as more important than benefits when it comes to job satisfaction.
• A strong manager relationship leads to more productive, efficient and loyal employees who create less conflict.
• Employees supervised by a highly engaged manager are 59 % more likely to be engaged.

Give your leaders tools and the flexibility to promote well-being to employees. Here are a few suggestions to share with managers:

• Have frequent 1:1 meetings with your employees.
• Communicate openly, honestly and consistently.
• Assume positive intent from your employees.
• Don’t avoid difficult conversations.
• Help them overcome fears and be optimistic

3. Actively support growth and learning

To feel engaged, employees need to develop and grow. This means organizations should create opportunities for learning new skills, understanding career aspirations and providing feedback.

Employees who don’t see opportunities for career growth in their companies will leave.

This is especially true for millennials: 75 % say they’d consider looking for a new job if they didn’t see any opportunities for growth with their current employer. But on the flip side, those who have access to professional development are much more likely to stay.

Try some of these at your workplace:

• Offer job shadowing or training opportunities.
• Share new positions internally before rolling out to the public.
• Partner with employees to create learning and development plans that reflect their unique interests and goal.

4. Provide regular feedback

It’s great to give learning opportunities, but giving feedback is just as important. Employees need to understand their personal areas for improvement.

Establishing a meaningful “norm” for giving feedback helps them see a clear path toward their own professional development.

Most employees don’t like traditional performance reviews — they take too much time, miss important information and often happen too late to do any good. Employees want feedback to be fast, objective and frequent. Especially millennials, with 74 % feeling in the dark about their performance, yet 61 % saying they need specific directions to do their best work.

Performance reviews shouldn’t be a scary, once-a-year thing — instead they should be an easy on-going discussion with your manager.

Here are some tips on how to start these conversations:

• Encourage employees to create an agenda item about goals/performance.
• Designate one of your 1:1s as a monthly goal-oriented meeting.

5.Enable and encourage peer recognition

Employees rely on and support their co-workers every day. In fact, peers – not money – are the top reason employees go the extra mile at work. So it’s extremely motivating to get recognition from them.

Co-workers often notice accomplishments that supervisors might miss, so peer recognition helps you get a better picture of all the great work your employees do.

Some ways to help employees show thanks to one another include:

• Ask peers to nominate and vote for employees of the month.
• Publish an appreciation column in your employee newsletter.
• Leave kudos notes or thank-you cards on employees’ desks.
• Invest in a recognition tool.

A great place to work never stops investing in its people — so keep the momentum going. Thrive Change Management and FiveFriday have partnered to help you amplify your organization’s commitment to happy, engaged employees every step of the way.

FiveFriday’s easy to use applications now enable honest workplace communication and clarity, as well as peer recognition capabilities, encouraging staff to live out your organisation’s values.

For more information or a demonstration, contact us or email: jake@thrive-cm.com.