The Importance Of Valuing Employees
If you’ve got happy employees, they’re likely going to be more productive. You as a manager have a very real relationship with them, and like any relationship, when one party isn’t happy, things tend to decline. What makes sense to do here is figure out what things keep employees from being properly satisfied with your business, and eliminate them. You do not want a team who gets up every morning and gets to the office only because they have a debt consolidation to deal with. You want a team of motivated people to stand behind that.
Inc.com lists seven strategies which can help your business facilitate employee happiness. These steps include: ensuring your leadership is supportive, empowering employees, creating an environment that’s positive, encouraging employees to work in teams, recognizing and rewarding behavior that deserves it, eliminating boredom, and curtailing dissatisfaction.
Applying Employee Happiness Strategies
If you want employees to be happy, it’s going to take some work. Firstly, consider your own situation in the job market. There have been times where you have had a supervisor. Which ones did you resonate with; the ones that treated you like a number, or the ones that treated you like a person?
Your workers should additionally be properly empowered toward the completion of whatever tasks they are responsible. This means you’ve got to give them some level of responsibility, the tools for the job, the time to do the job, and the benefit of the doubt until such a thing becomes unprofessional.
All that will require an environment with some level of productivity. Teamwork can additionally combine energies, and will flourish in a positive environment. Plus, successes become easier to recognize and reward. There are a number of different ways you can go about meting out such recognition.
Means Of Recognition
One strategy might be to ceremonially award challenge coins when appropriate; according to Embleholics.com, “…the first challenge coins had a hallowed tradition as critical means of identification of downed pilots. Now, fire departments, police officers, government, nonprofits, and private businesses all make their own coins…”
The modern use of challenge coins can be directly linked back to WWI, when a young pilot landed in German-occupied territory, and was nearly executed by French fighters but for one noticing the insignia emblazoned on a coin the pilot had. When you use some cohesive means of recognition like this, it can extend beyond your business.
Especially if you’ve got a large operation, such a piece of memorabilia for a job well done may come to represent community. In a decade, imagine several former workers who received the coin, but had never encountered one another before, meeting together for the first time. They would immediately know they shared something special, and that as individuals they could get jobs done well enough for recognition.
Giving out recognition trophies like challenge coins has a positive domino effect which can extend far beyond basic operations. So make your business more communal by characterizing it with details that not only set it apart, but set it apart in a positive way which has some gravity to it.
Providing Employees A Forward Career Path
Once you’ve got this aspect of employee happiness facilitation figured out, your next step will be to eliminate boredom. Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop, as the saying goes, and this is especially true in an information age like our own where the web is pernicious and can be damaging to your business.
Bored employees are not satisfied. Sometimes they are just keeping the job because they have a debt to consolidate. They’re just putting in time and “grinding away” in order to make ends meet. To keep employees from being bored and dissatisfied, provide them a career path that will reward them as they work to advance it. You want a high ceiling, not a low one, with your business. And you really need to reward employees who deserve it with positive advancement. This will dispel satisfaction; or at least it will help.
In the end, there are a number of different strategies you can bring to the table as means of expanding your business’s effectiveness in terms of employee maximization. Which methods work best will differ per business. Take some time and examine your organization to determine which steps might be best for you.
