How to Get the Most Out of Your Employees
Employers today aren’t just facing the daunting task of hiring the best people for the entry level jobs – and higher- that they have to offer; they’re also challenged to retain their employees and get the most out of them. To get the most out of their teams, employers must come up with ways to keep them happy and engaged. That doesn’t mean spending money, say Cathy L. Greenberg and Barrett S. Avigdor in their article, 3 Ways to Maximize Your Workers’ Happiness – and Performance.
Happy employees, say Greenberg and Avigdor, are “highly engaged, flourishing and have achieved an acceptable work-life balance.” They cite a study that showed a significant decrease in unplanned attrition and significant increases in employee productivity and customer satisfaction in companies with highly engaged workforces.
Beyond engagement, say Greenberg and Avigdor, employers need to also create workplaces where employees can flourish. Their three steps to creating such a workplace are:
1. Create a positive environment. A positive work environment is created
- by giving employees lots of positive feedback,
- by having zero tolerance for ridicule and gossip
- by letting employees know that they won’t be punished for making “well-intentioned” mistakes.
2. Manage based on expanding strengths. “A strengths-based approach to management can unleash tremendous productivity, creativity and enthusiasm in a workforce,” say Greenberg and Avigdor. It’s a form of management that encourages an employee to evaluate his strengths and weaknesses, discuss them with his coworkers and his manager, then work together with them to create a workload that contains more tasks that “energize” him (meaning they’re related to his strengths) and fewer tasks that “drain” him (meaning they’re related to his weaknesses).
3. Be flexible wherever you can. Employees who work for employers who are willing to be flexible about the time they spend in the office tend to be more loyal than those who work for more strict, task-master employers. Flex time is particularly important to employees with very young or school-age children.
The job market is tough and employers have the luxury to be highly selective about who they hire for entry level jobs in their companies. But it’s also important for them to remember that in order to retain their best employees, requires finding ways to make them feel comfortable in the workplace and engaged by the workload.
