According to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, three million employees quit their job every month. While there are many reasons as to why your retention rates are at an all-time low such as a poor onboarding process or a lack of succession planning, the reasons why employees quit generally point to one reason. A lack of happiness.
Unhappy employees are not only going to want to seek employment elsewhere but they are also, unmotivated, uninspired, unproductive, and bring a significant decrease in company morale. So with happiness being such a huge factor in a company’s success, how do you drive “happiness rates” up?
While perks like great benefits, on-site gym, free lunch, and daycare are all excellent things to consider implementing within the company; employee development and engagement are perhaps two of the most important perks to promote employee happiness.
Employee Development
In Findcourses 2018 Learning and Development Report, Companies without staff engaged in learning are twice as likely to lose staff before three years. 76% of employees who were involved in learning activities were more satisfied with their roles in the company and more highly engaged overall in their organizations.
Have employee development plans
Developing a strong employee development plan is crucial to helping employee satisfaction. An employee development plan provides employees with an idea of where they are in the company, how they can sharpen their talents in order to achieve their goals.
In addition, by creating an employee development plan, you are showing employees that you value their talents and are willing to invest time and expenses into them to help advance in the company.
When creating an employee development plan, you need to first take a look at the company’s goals. After, sit down with individual employees to see what their goals are within the company, whether or not they are meeting/exceeding expectations. Assist with setting attainable milestones. Be sure to follow up on these goals consistently.
Mentorship Programs
Pairing employees with senior coworkers or managers to provide mentorship and training is a great way to encourage learning and development within your company. Workers will be able to assist with tasks and support each other on projects. It’s also a great way for team-building and company unity.
Use your company’s succession planning to determine what the best matchups should be. Ideally, you will have employees learn from the people who they will eventually replace when they are promoted. This is a great chance to start cross-training and gain experience for future roles within the company.
Mentors will have the opportunity to develop leadership skills and improve their management capabilities. It’s a win-win for both sides!
Online Learning programs
Provide online learning programs for your employee development can improve employee satisfaction, and have great benefits for your company as well. Technology allows employees to access a variety of useful courses to learn and improve their skills that they use for their jobs.
Online learning often costs less than normal training and provides a large range of courses. Workers can pick programs that interest them from a list of recommended subjects that you provide. These courses may differ depending on their learning style, job responsibilities, and company needs.
Another advantage of online learning is that it can be done on the employees’ own time and at their own pace. You can set aside some time during the workday for employees to learn, or give some incentives for them to work on courses on their personal time. Flexibility to complete learning on their own time is highly desired by employees and will improve their happiness.
Employee Engagement
It should come as no surprise that happy employees are engaged employees! Research shows that engaged employees are more productive, innovative, profitable, and less likely to leave the company. There are a couple of easy things that companies can do to tweak their culture to be more engaging:
Provide Employee Autonomy
Allowing employees to have the freedom and space to showcase and explore their talents is an excellent way to build employee engagement. Just like influencers understand their audience and push out the right content to keep them engaged, companies must put their employees on the right projects.
Corporate giants such as Google, are a prime example of a successful company with excellent employee engagement. The huge success of the company is based a lot on the happiness of the employees. They have created a workplace where employees want to be at and are passionate about.
Google encourages employees to pitch their projects, and the time to work on them. By giving employees that free rein, they are showing them that they trust and value their ideas and work. This encourages employees to be passionate about their work.
Employers should give their employees the option to match their technical skills, interpersonal skills, and even hobbies to the right projects or jobs. By having the ability to choose projects that match their talents and hobbies, employees’ are able to bring their passion to work and develop excellent results.
In regards to teams, let them have creative freedom and avoid micromanaging. If you create a culture filled with trust, respect, and honesty, you will see teamwork in abundance. Keep in mind that when working with teams be sure to set deadlines, and provide the adequate tools employees will need to get the job done.
Improve Communication
One of the most important ways to strengthen employee engagement is through proper communication. Through proper communication, you can express the goals of the company, and how everyone and everything fits into the scheme of things. By establishing a vision for the company, and having employees understand their role within the company, and how it impacts the success of the company; employees will feel valued and not just another “pawn” in the scheme of things.
There are various different tools that can assist employers on how to have proper communication with their employees. For example, Asana is an excellent program in which leadership can communicate with employees and likewise. They offer the ability to communicate with each other through content by; posting status updates, sharing team-wide announcements, making individual comments through tasks items, and the ability to collaborate on tasks.
Managers and team leaders should be prompted to regularly ask certain questions and gauge the mood of the employees on the projects or tasks they are working on. By utilizing such a tool, both leadership and employees can open up a strong line of communication.
Strong Company culture
Creating a strong culture, where everyone works well together is extremely vital to building employee engagement. The best way to ensure that good values are spread throughout the company starts with leadership. Encourage trust, integrity, teamwork and a passion for their work from leadership. By having leaders that are relatable and have an open communication, employees will feel more at ease.
A great example of people in leadership roles who communicates with employees is David Grow, COO of Lucid. Lucid is a company that values teamwork, initiative, and innovation. They believe in everyone contributing to an idea, no matter the position they hold. Not even their founders have closed offices.
When everyone is contributing, they contribute to a diverse range of ideas. In turn, this fosters an amazing end product that might not have happened with just one or two brains.
Consider holding team building activities by having group projects where everyone can share different ideas. Keep in mind, team building activities don’t equate to perks or nerf guns in the office. The goal is to get employees to improve teamwork and in turn promote a productive culture. A great way to utilize teamwork is by setting company goals, and both personal and team goals. Be clear on what the company’s yearly, monthly, quarterly goals are.
Author of this post is Isabella Ang. Isabella is a content marketing specialist at ProSky, a company that gives you the ability to innovatively evaluate candidates and develop employees through succession pathways, so you can recruit, hire, and retain the best diverse talent & culture fit.
When she’s not working on her next or ongoing projects for ProSky; she spends her days’ rock climbing, practicing yoga, completing her degree in Computer Science, and tutoring writing skills.
Sources used in this post:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t04.htm
https://www.findcourses.com/prof-dev/read-us-ld-report-2018-13558
https://prosky.co/talkingtalent/articles/5-quick-steps-on-writing-a-killer-employee-development-plan
https://workplace-happiness.com/2018/05/28/succession-planning-and-workplace-happiness/
https://prosky.co/talkingtalent/articles/reasons-to-utilize-online-learning-in-your-workplace
Workplace Happiness 