Maintaining a healthy company culture and happy employees will always matter—even while millions are on unemployment and the power lies with employers. The economy has employers and employees alike feeling a bit trapped. Even if you find yourself with employees who feel they aren’t in a position to leave their job, you should still want them to be engaged and productive while they’re with you.
What happens to companies that have unhappy, disengaged employees? They fail. As your employees are responsible for generating the company's success, you need them to be positively contributing to the organization. Now more than ever, you need employees to feel dedicated to their roles and your company as a whole.
Here are a few ways to build up both your employees and the company simultaneously.
Professional development
Offering opportunities to develop and improve skills isn’t just something employees want—it also helps deepen your company’s assets, at a fairly low cost. Companies like Skillshare, Lynda.com, and edx.com, all offer reasonably priced online courses for professional development in subjects ranging from marketing to project management to graphic design.
Take advantage of these easy-to-access tools, offering your employees a chance to learn and grow. Through this training, you’ll be developing stronger relationships with your team, maximizing talent, and preparing employees to flourish within your company.
Hiring from within
While many companies struggle to effectively hire from their pool of existing talent, doing so is not only cost-effective and saves time but helps foster an environment of dedication and growth.
Train your managers so they can recognize when an employee has the potential for something different, and also allow the managers the authority to take action. It can be challenging for managers to allow for this growth when they have highly functioning employees who do their jobs well. The managers have little incentive to take a person out of their role, even if they would be a great fit elsewhere in the company.
Make sure you’re training your managers to train their teams with the goal of growth. And to plan for the eventuality that they will move on to other roles.
Compensation matters
While employers understand that compensation is often a defining reason for turnover, its importance can’t be stressed enough. Employees are working to make money. Above all other perks and benefits, it’s what they need the most. Money is high on the list of factors that play into an employee choosing to stay or leave their position.
Compensation doesn’t just say something about how your company views the role an employee has. It also puts a numerical value on exactly how much an individual employee matters to the organization. Compensation also has a direct effect on how an employee views themselves within the company and factors into their satisfaction, dedication, and loyalty.
What you need to do is simple: make sure you are paying your employees what they’re worth, or they’ll leave for a job that will.
In this together
Whether or not the economy is struggling, you and your employees are in it together. By carefully strategizing, you can make decisions that have a positive impact on your business and the individual lives working within your organization. The talent of your company—what makes people want to work with you and buy from you—comes directly out of the talent working for you.
Lean into that talent. Boost it up and recognize it. Give it a platform to grow, and you’ll create an enriching work environment that mobilizes your company growth and pushes you towards success.
Content provided by Q4intelligence
Photo by Anton Yankovyi
