Employee satisfaction & retaining your best assets

Finding and hiring skilled, dedicated and passionate employees is an extremely difficult task. If you are lucky enough to find a group of employees with that caliber, you need to make sure they stick around. The best way to achieve this is by ensuring employee satisfaction.

There are many reasons why employees choose to walk. Amongst those reasons are poor communication, lack of adequate compensation, below par leadership, feeling undervalued and getting tangled up in office politics.

So how can you as a leader retain your best employees and keep them engaged? What can you do to make sure they don’t leave you to look for another job? To learn the answers to these very important questions, I urge you to continue reading this light and valuable post.

Ensuring employee satisfaction 101:

Making sure that your employees are satisfied at the workplace is not rocket science. However, it does require time, effort and good leadership. Here is how you, as a leader, can create a supportive and nourishing environment and give their work meaning and value.

• Set clear goals

The first step towards employee satisfaction is setting clear goals. When you set short-term and long-term goals for your team, you give everyone direction and hold them accountable for their progress. Moreover, give your employees a chance to ask questions and fully understand the project and tasks at hand. This will help them achieve goals more effectively and efficiently as well.

• Build autonomy

Many managers, CEOs and leaders in general expect employees to work in a certain structure or environment that might not best match their talents. However, most talented and creative people can not perform their best in such environments. So try to give employees the freedom to do their work in a way that can best suit their talents. Moreover, avoid micromanaging your employees as it is a recipe for stifling creativity and making your employees unhappy.

See Also: How to Handle Passive Aggressive People at the Workplace

• Meet employee needs

If you want your employees to perform their jobs the best they can, you need to give them what they need to do so. If your employees lack training, resources or proper incentives, the outcome of their work will probably be mediocre or unsatisfactory. In fact, providing resources and training shows your team that you care which in turn will positively reflect on their productivity and overall demeanor at the workplace.

• Set reasonable deadlines

It is important to give your employees deadlines for delivering tasks. However, it is equally important that you set reasonable deadlines in order to avoid discouraging your team and preventing them from doing their best. Your job as a leader is to be the middle ground between giving your employees too much time and not enough.

See Also: How Can A Big Ego Affect Business Success?

• Be involved

One of the blunders of employee satisfaction is lazy or absent leaders. Although you don’t need to be in the trenches and on the front lines every day, you still need to get involved and roll up your sleeves every now and then. Moreover, you need to make time to help your team, brainstorm with them and step in when you are needed. This kind of support will help your employees feel supported and get them more motivated to do their best. 

• Embrace failure

Avoiding failure at all costs is a surefire way to keep your team from taking risks and innovating. As a leader, you need to make sure that your company culture embraces failure and does not frown upon it. When you do this, your employees will be more willing to step out of their comfort zones and achieve great breakthroughs.

• Empower your employees

Empower your employees to speak their minds and share their ideas and opinions freely, at all times. Listening to your own voice and muting theirs can lead to problems and can cause employees to feel undervalued and unwanted.

• Show respect

One of the main pillars of employee satisfaction is respect. You need to set the example of how your employees treat each other. Moroever, you need to listen to their concerns even when you don’t agree with them or feel that their problems are trivial. Give your employees space to grow and show them the respect you want them to show you.

• Offer emotional support

You are not a therapist however it is important that you take the time to listen to your employees and offer emotional support when needed. Furthermore, you need to recognize that people have bad days and that an employee’s mood can easily affect the team as well as productivity.

• Create a bond between team members

Opposite to what many managers believe, creating a bond between your team members is important to business growth and success. So make it a point to find ways for your employees to trust and appreciate one another. Give them opportunities to socialize and build memories as a team. In turn, this will create a more fun and pleasant working environment where employees do their best and do it with love.

Finally, remember this: small acts can have a great impact on how your employees view their jobs. Don’t skimp on support and don’t underestimate the value of a better employee experience for your company and its growth.

Let us hear your thoughts and insights on this topic in the comment section below!

The post How to Ensure Employee Satisfaction at the Workplace appeared first on The Global Now.