Years of research conducted by renowned psychologists and organizational leaders reveal that a positive workplace culture is one of the most important driving factors of business success. It leads to higher productivity, better employee engagement, and higher returns. Therefore, it is imperative to create a culture that supports employees’ growth and values them for their efforts.
Continue reading “How to Create a Positive Organizational Culture for Your Employees?”
Are you struggling to drive employee engagement in your organization? If you answered yes, there could be a variable that you are ignoring – the workplace environment. Ideally, employee engagement is the level of emotional and mental connection an employee feels towards his or her work, the team, and the organization. The workplace environment has an important role in determining the amount of dedication and enthusiasm employees show towards their jobs, who they work with, and the organization in general. Understanding the importance of the workplace environment in driving employee engagement can help you make the necessary adjustments for better results.
So, how does the workplace environment affect employee engagement? To comprehend this better, it is important to start by helping you understand the meaning of the workplace environment.
The workplace environment is a combination of all factors that affect employees’ work in terms of where, how, and when they work. Aspects of the workplace environment include:
This entails the size and layout of the workplace, furnishings, and equipment. Do your employees have enough space to get their work done efficiently? Does the office layout promote collaboration and support privacy when required? Are the chairs provided ergonomic? Do workers have the necessary equipment – computers, printers, technology, etc. to complete their tasks?
In addition, the physical environment also encompasses the facilities offered such as breakout areas, gyms, and green spaces. It also takes into account light, temperature, slippery floors, and exposure to noise and harmful chemicals.
This element is related to the terms under which employees have been hired. This includes the salary rate, working hours, and the contract of employment. It can also go further to include factors that affect employee health such as recreational activities, psychological safety, safe use and maintenance of equipment, and balanced meals among others.
This refers to how an organization and its employees operate. It can be defined by employee relationships, leadership approach, company values and goals, approach to work, internal communication, and more.
Also Read: 10 Actionable Tips to Boost Workplace Satisfaction
Now that you understand what makes a workplace environment, let’s look at the role it plays in driving employee engagement. To make this simple, we are going to look at different factors that affect employee engagement and how the workplace environment contributes to each one of them.
Job satisfaction can be defined as the measure of contentment an employee feels with his or her job. It is majorly based on how employees feel about their roles in the organization. However, while happy and satisfied employees don’t necessarily translate to engaged employees, employee happiness and job satisfaction are essential for employee engagement. When employees like the work they do and are happy with the organization, their connection with the company and their jobs are likely to go a notch higher. So, how can HR and business leaders improve the workplace environment to ensure job satisfaction?
Most people are more conscious about their health and general wellness today than ever before. A workplace environment that promotes employee health and wellness is likely to resonate well with the employees. Moreover, when they know that the employer prioritizes their well-being, they are likely to commit to their tasks for the success of the company. How can the workplace environment promote employee health and wellness? You can do this by focusing on these areas:
There are several ways that your workplace environment helps improve employees’ physical health and enhance safety while carrying out their tasks. They include:
Also Read: The Complete Guide To Employee Health And Wellbeing Strategy
In the height of mental health issues happening all around us, HR and business owners need to prioritize mental wellness in the workplace. Employees will value your efforts in taking care of their mental health and are likely to compensate accordingly. Here are some workplace environment improvements that you can do:
Promoting employee health and safety in the workplace can entail making changes in the workplace that can be costly. If you don’t have the budget, you can consider moving to a coworking space. You can find shared office spaces in Manhattan, New York, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Tampa, Florida, Seattle, Washington, and San Diego, California among other cities in the United States. Shared office spaces are designed with productivity in mind. It is easy to find one with features that align with your employee wellness goals, eliminating the stress of building one from scratch.
People who find a purpose and meaning in their work are likely to be more interested and connected with what they do. This is because living a meaningful and purposeful life leads to a happy and quality life. If you can attach meaning to the work that your employees do, you will be giving them a reason to feel content with their roles and motivating them to keep giving their all for the success of the organization. You can help your employees find meaning and purpose in their work by showing them how their individual roles fit and contribute to the bigger picture in the organization. Which areas of the workplace environment can you improve in this aspect?
Driving employee engagement is one of the most daunting tasks for HR, leaders, and business owners. Yet, it is crucial in driving performance and productivity, which impacts the bottom line and company growth. From what we have seen above, focusing more on the workplace environment to improve areas that lead to job satisfaction, improve employee well-being, and add meaning to employee work can yield better results.
A positive work environment provides job satisfaction and employee well-being. Let’s see how a positive workplace environment drives employee engagement.
Ans. Some of the factors that help in creating a positive environment at the workplace include:
Ans. Employee well-being is important because it:
Ans. Air quality, lighting, and temperature in the workplace are some major factors that affect the productivity of employees. Also, facilities offered by companies such as breakout areas, gyms, and green spaces play important role in improving employee experience.
This article is written by Rachel Eleza.
Rachel Eleza is a marketing director and a writer for different websites. She loves reading and traveling. She is an ambitious woman and a hard-worker. When she’s not writing, she’s usually baking up a storm or trying to find new ways to get inspired.
Deloitte research cites culture and engagement as the top challenges for 87 percent of organizations, particularly for measuring culture and engagement effectively. Measurement of both factors, culture, and engagement, is necessary as they yield major benefits. For developing a high-performance culture fueled by engaged employees, decouple the two – culture and engagement – and see each as an individual entity with its own set of contributions.
Companies with high-performing cultures are innovative and customer-focused and meet their strategic objectives under their values. In the same way, employees who are engaged are more productive and far less likely to leave the company. Both are important and closely related, but they differ in nature, and hence, measuring a company’s culture and employee engagement requires specific metrics. Unfortunately, companies often employ the same tool to measure both. For example, when employee surveys are conducted, there is no specific questionnaire for measuring the culture and understanding level of employee engagement. Your cultural change and employee engagement programs will fail if you aren’t clear on what you are measuring.
Although many managers believe that employee engagement surveys alone can boost productivity, it is not so. Improving the organization’s overall culture with a higher level of employee engagement is a far better way to boost business productivity and drive growth. To simply put, employee engagement is inextricably related to the strength of the company culture.
An employee’s engagement has to do with how employees feel about their workplace and work culture. The healthier a company’s culture is, the easier it becomes for the employees to grasp their roles and responsibilities. Engagement leads to happier, more motivated, and more committed employees.
Engaged employees are more likely to be:
Engaged employees add a multitude of benefits to an organization, which include increased productivity, stronger customer relationships, and decreased turnover, to name a few.
Interestingly, looking at certain stats, it is undeniable that employee engagement is closely related to a company’s high-performing and healthy culture.
Simply put, company culture refers to the employees’ norms, practices, and behaviour that influence how and why certain events or actions happen in an organization.
Company cultures that excel can have a positive impact on all areas of an organization. Engaged employees, increased productivity, achievement of goals and increased retention are all hallmarks of high-performance work cultures. A company with a strong culture, for example, has a 14 per cent employee turnover rate when compared with a company with a subpar culture, which has a 48 per cent turnover rate.
A high-performance culture focuses on following effective and workable practices and norms to drive superior employee performance in an organization.
To elaborate, it’s a culture that allows a performance-driven organization to achieve superior financial and non-financial results, with values such as better service, high employee engagement; improved client satisfaction; increased productivity, and employee retention, over a long period.
To differentiate between the two, think of employee engagement as focusing on an employee (or ‘I’ factor) and culture as emphasizing the whole (‘or ‘we’ factor). Therefore, the employee engagement factor has to do with how employees feel about their employer and their workplace work.
An engagement survey can make a good predictor of employee retention, as it can measure loyalty and productivity. Managerial actions or other factors can severely affect employee engagement or even hurt it quickly.
Culture, on the other hand, focuses on intrinsic company values, which are often unquantifiable and difficult to assess. An organization’s culture is, essentially, ‘the way we do things.’ Changing culture takes time and effort because it’s often deeply ingrained. Hence, to influence a company’s culture, you must engage in a long-term reform program, or you must experience a significant external change, like an acquisition or merger.
Thus, employee engagement focuses on keeping employees motivated and happy while company culture lies deeply buried within an organization based on certain values, practices, norms, and a set of beliefs. To understand each of them better, it is necessary to understand how to measure your company culture and engagement.
Measuring culture and employee engagement is crucial since engaged employees are directly linked to employee retention, performance, and a company’s profitability. Importantly, the measurement of company culture and employee engagement helps to understand whether employees’ engagement and commitment align with a company’s expectations and strategic objectives or not.
Most organizations adopt certain metrics to measure company culture and employee engagement. To start with any form of quantifiable measurement, understand and know where the culture stands now and what steps you have taken to create a high-performing culture.
Unlike employee engagement, culture focuses on an organization’s core values and vision, and hence, any type of off-the-shelf survey will not be effective.
Culture and engagement are not only measured for different reasons, they must also be evaluated differently. For instance, you can find out how engaged your employees are based on the scores of your employee engagement survey. Using this data, you can then determine what improvements can be made. You can compare employees’ performance to that of previous years or similar organizations to get clarity on employee engagement and performance.
On the other hand, when it comes to culture, there is no right or wrong way to respond. Based on its goals and business objectives, an organization must identify what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Viewpoints on culture differ greatly from one organization to the next. For example, the culture of a bank will differ greatly from that of a start-up.
High-performance company culture is directly related to employee engagement, as the culture clearly defines healthy and supportive values and behaviors. In such a culture, employees know what’s expected of them and how their environment positively influences their performance. They feel connected, involved, and supported. Owing to all these factors which build up a conducive culture, they tend to be engaged. To enhance employee engagement, begin by strengthening your company culture, and here are several methods to do so:
Culture forms the heart and soul of your organization, and thus, you need a strong culture to foster strong employee engagement. To get started, the leadership team should outline:
Regularly assess your organization’s culture. By doing so, you’ll:
When you decide to engage employees’ feedback, the payoff will be immense. The employees will sense that they are helping to shape the company culture, and their engagement will increase. Communicate the actions you plan to implement based on their feedback. Hold focus groups to discuss your action plan. Encourage employees to participate in brainstorming sessions to generate ideas.
Creating a strong culture for employee engagement has its own set of challenges – more like an ebb and flow, as it is not a one-time task. For long-term value, your culture needs to be nurtured regularly and for the same, measuring culture and employee engagement is crucial. In the process, you shall understand how satisfied and committed an employee is to her job.
By offering training regular sessions, managerial encouragement, and keeping an open mind about effective workplace practices, companies can meet the expectations of employees to create a high-performance culture.
In a nutshell, employee engagement is an ongoing process and is inextricably related to company culture. Over time, you need to focus on employee needs, and then use that information to create a strong company culture.
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