Given the current global scenario, most organizations are frantically trying to figure out how to hold and uplift employee engagement. Now that almost everything has gone virtual, working remotely while being cooped up at home is not a very pleasant experience for most employees. As a result, many have been losing motivation, dropping in engagement levels and conflicted on the edge of frustration and burnout. As an employer, how many times have you thought about your employees’ happiness and actually did something to make them happy?
You can say that you have had employee engagement activities and conducted employee satisfaction surveys to ensure employee happiness. But do you think these initiatives are enough to help your employees tackle a situation they have never faced before? No, its not. To top this, different people have different perceptions of happiness as well.
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Employee happiness is not just feeling happy all the time. It is feeling positive about work, being willing to fix problems rather than complaining, and accepting constructive criticism and constantly trying to improve oneself without feeling pressured. According to Sonja Lyubomirsky’s ‘The How Of Happiness’, 50% of happiness is genetically predetermined, while 10% is because of circumstances in life (Family, health etc.) and 40% is the result of your outlook.
As an employer, you cannot do anything about the first two but the last 40% of happiness is something you can help your employees with. Analyzing what makes employees happy is quite difficult, but changing the structure of your daily work pattern and prioritising employee happiness is more difficult.
We all know that improving employee satisfaction leads to a better work atmosphere and makes teamwork effortless. But it is not easy for an employer to suddenly change their perspective and work towards individual employee happiness. So instead, here’s a list of things that you can do easily with the help of an employee engagement software and drive employee happiness and productivity.
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Be open to listening
Even before COVID-19, many employees struggled to be heard. Now that the world has gone virtual, most employees feel dissatisfied with their jobs because their opinions are often not valued. This behaviour leads to the disengagement of employees, eventually leading to dissatisfaction with work. Give your employees a chance to express what they feel and allow them to contribute their ideas at work.
Using employee engagement software allows employees to bring out their ideas and express their feelings on a common platform easily. This drives engagement and improves productivity in turn.
Recognize their efforts
Appreciation is the key to keeping employees motivated and engaged, especially when they are not getting the opportunity to be present in an office environment. They are losing out on many impromptu chances at receiving verbal recognition. Recognize the efforts of your employees and reward them. Reward doesn’t always mean money, because money is a short-term motivator. Many other things can be used as rewards to recognize good work.
Using an employee engagement software like Engagedly, which allows you to add features like employee recognition and rewards, allows users to recognize and reward their employees for their accomplishments.
Continuous learning
Training employees and providing them with the necessary resources makes them feel that their company is invested in them. The employees who receive training are usually better satisfied and are motivated than their counterparts who do not receive frequent training.
Continuous training or learning directly affects the organizational growth because of the changing economy. There are many employee engagement software which also include learning and development for employee benefit. Engagedly’s learning management system allows you to create, assign and take courses in various formats and reward them accordingly.
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Consistent priorities
Employees need to have direction and consistency when they are working. Does the line “drop everything and do this right now” sound familiar? Bad managers use it very often and it is quite annoying for their employees to understand why the task is so important that it disrupts their daily work pattern. If you want employees to prioritize certain tasks over others, then you need to communicate why. It is easier to disrupt your routine or shift priorities when you know why exactly you need to do so.
Having an effective employee engagement system for monitoring and prioritizing works could be a solution. With Engagedly’s OKRs and Ongoing Check-ins, it is easier to understand your employee priorities and assign them work accordingly.
Seamless communication system
We all know how the pandemic has affected our level of communication. When managers cannot communicate with their staff, it leads to a whole host of problems. Imagine an employer not being able to communicate company goals with their employees properly. The first ones to be affected by this behaviour are the employees. Employees feel happy and motivated to work only if their goals and responsibilities are clearly communicated to them. And this is just a small example. A lack of communication can seriously affect engagement, and productivity, and kill morale.
Communication does not always come easy. But it is something that becomes easier to do, over time. All managers need to do is start the conversation. Using employee engagement software allows employees to smoothly and easily engage in conversations with their colleagues and managers.
It is important to remember, that at the end of the day, managers cannot magically make employees happy. Happiness is a very individual concept and managers cannot fix all problems. Managers can try to make employees happy and lead the way, but ultimately, it is not the responsibility of the manager and the entire burden of employee happiness should not rest on their shoulders.
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