Creating a Safe, Healthy and Happy Workplace

Creating a safe, healthy and happy workplace will ensure that your employees feel at home and stay with your organization for a very long time. 

Open Book Management Style
Sharing information about contracts, sales, new clients, management objectives, company policies, employee personal data etc. ensures that the employees are as enthusiastic about the business as the management. Through this open book process you can gradually create a culture of participative management and ignite the creative endeavor of your work force. It involves making people an interested party to your strategic decisions, thus aligning them to your business objectives. Be as open as you can. It helps in building trust & motivates employees. Employee self-service portals are the tools available today to the management to practice this style.

Performance Linked Bonuses
Paying out bonuses or having any kind of variable compensation plan can be both an incentive and disillusionment, based on how it is administered and communicated. Bonus must be designed in such a way that people understand that there is no payout unless the company hits a certain level of profitability. Additional criteria could be the team's success and the individual's performance. Never pay out bonus without measuring performance, unless it is a statutory obligation.

360-Degree Performance Management Feedback System
This system, which solicits feedback from seniors (including the boss), peers and subordinates has been increasingly embraced as the best of all available methods for collecting performance feedback. Gone are the days of working hard to impress only one person, now the opinions of all matter, especially if you are in a leadership role (at any level). Every person in the team is responsible for giving relevant, positive and constructive feedback. Such systems also help in identifying leaders for higher-level positions in the organization. Senior managers could use this feed back for self-development.

Fair Evaluation System for Employees
Develop an evaluation system that clearly links individual performance to corporate business goals and priorities. Each employee should have well defined reporting relationships. Self-rating as a part of evaluation process empowers employees. Evaluation becomes fairer if it is based on the records of periodic counseling & achievements of the employee, tracked over the year. For higher objectivity, besides the immediate boss, each employee should be screened by the next higher-level (often called a Reviewer). Cross - functional feedback, if obtained by the immediate boss from another manager (for whom this employee's work is also important), will add to the fairness of the system. Relative ratings of all subordinates reporting to the same manager is another tool for fairness of evaluation. Normalization of evaluation is yet another dimension of improving fairness.

Knowledge Sharing
Adopt a systematic approach to ensure that knowledge management supports strategy. Store knowledge in databases to provide greater access to information posted either by the company or the employees on the knowledge portals of the company. When an employee returns after attending any competencies or skills development program, sharing essential knowledge with others could be made mandatory. Innovative ideas (implemented at the work place) are good to be posted on these knowledge sharing platforms. However, what to store & how to maintain a knowledge base requires deep thinking to avoid clutter.

Highlight Performers
Create profiles of top performers and make these visible though company intranet, display boards etc. It will encourage others to put in their best, thereby creating a competitive environment within the company. If a systems approach is followed to shortlist high performers, you can surely avoid disgruntlements.

Open House Discussions and Feedback Mechanism
Great organizations recognize, nurture and execute great ideas. Employees are the biggest source of ideas. The only thing that can stop great ideas flooding your organization is the lack of an appropriate mechanism to capture ideas. Open house discussions, employee-management meets, suggestion boxes and ideas capture tools such as Critical Incidents diaries are the building blocks that can help the Managers to identify & develop talent.

Reward Ceremonies
Merely recognizing talent does not work, you need to couple it with ceremonies where recognition is broadcast. Looking at the Dollar Check is often less significant than listening to the thunderous applause by colleagues in a public forum.

Delight Employees with the Unexpected
The last but not least way is to occasionally delight your employees with unexpected things that may come in the form of a reward, a gift or a well-done certificate. Reward not only the top performers but also a few others who are in need of motivation to exhibit their potential.

Does your company have innovate ways to master the "Happy Workplace"? We would love to hear from you.

Improve Employee Relations - Strengthen the Team

For the organization to perform better it is important that the employees are comfortable with each other, share a good rapport and work in close coordination towards a common objective. People feel responsible and motivated to do good work and enjoy their work rather than taking it as a burden.

It is important that the management promotes healthy employee relations at workplace to extract the best out of each individual. Competition is essential but it should not promote negativity or any kind of enmity among the employees.

To follow are some strategies for a healthy employee relationship in the organization.

Involve your team members: They should feel important and indispensable for the organization. An individual must be assigned responsibilities according to their interests and responsibilities. Don’t impose work on them. Let them willingly accept challenges. They must enjoy whatever they do otherwise they would end up fighting with their superiors and fellow workers.

Encourage individuals to share their work with each other: This way people tend to talk with each other more, discuss things among themselves and thus the comfort level increases. Let them work together and take decisions on their own. A team leader should intervene only in extreme cases of conflicts and severe misunderstandings.

Assign them targets and ask all your team members to contribute equally and achieve the target within the desired time frame. Motivate them to work in groups. This way employees have no other choice than to trust their fellow workers and take each other’s help as well. An employee must have the liberty to express his ideas and all of them should sit together to decide on something which would be beneficial to all.

One should try his level best that all the employees must have their lunch together at the same time. Half an hour to forty-five minutes must be dedicated to lunch and one should not discuss work during lunch time. There are other topics as well. Discuss movies, sports, shopping or any other thing under the sun. There will be no harm if the employees go out together once in a while for get-togethers, picnics or shopping. Ask them to bring their family members as well.

Encourage effective communication among the team members. It has been observed that poor communication leads to confusions and misunderstandings. The communication has to be precise and relevant. One should not play with words and be very specific about his expectations from his fellow workers as well as the organization. If you are not very happy with your colleague’s proposal, don’t keep things to yourself. Voice your opinion and do express your displeasure. It will definitely prevent a conflict among employees later and improve the relations among them. Be straightforward. Don’t pretend things just to please your boss. If you find anything unacceptable, discuss with your superior but in a polite way.

Written modes of communication must be promoted among the employees for better transparency. Verbal communication is not as reliable as written communication. The agendas, minutes of the meeting, important issues must be circulated among all through emails. Make sure that all the related employees are in the loop. Don’t communicate individually with any of the employees as the other one might feel neglected and left out.

Morning meetings is another effective way to improve the relation among the employees. Let everyone come together on a common platform and discuss whatever issues they have. The meetings must not be too formal. Allow the team members to bring their cups of coffee. Start your day with a positive mind. Greet everyone with a warm smile. Exchange greetings and compliments. If any of your team member is not in a pleasant mood, do take the initiative and ask what is wrong with him. Try your level best to provide him a solution.

Organize birthday parties, Christmas parties, New Year parties etc. at the workplace. These small initiatives actually go a long way in strengthening the bond among the employees. Ask all of them to decorate the office, their work stations and make all the necessary arrangements themselves. You will actually be surprised to find out that everyone would be ready with something or the other. Employees would actually take the initiative and organize things on their own. Let them enjoy with each other and have fun.

Praise the individual if he has done something exceptionally well. Reward him suitably. The names of the top performers must be displayed on the notice boards for others to draw inspiration from them. Encourage everyone to perform well to live up to the expectations of the superiors as well as the management.

A healthy relation among employees promotes a positive ambience at the work place and employees feel happy and satisfied at work. They look forward to going to office daily and also work hard to realize their team’s as well as organization’s goals. 

What are some things you do to build a better bond and increase productivity in your workplace? Let us know below.

How Do You Engage With, Retain and Motivate Employees?

Engagement is big in the HR consultancy market, yet there is a dearth of academic research in this area. We believe that engagement is more than a passing fad – it brings clear business benefits. Raising engagement levels, and maintaining them, takes time, effort, commitment and investment – it is not for the half-hearted.

What is engagement?

A clear view of the behaviors demonstrated by the engaged employee are:

• belief in the organization
• desire to work to make things better
• understanding of business context and the "bigger picture"
• respectful of, and helpful to, colleagues
• willingness to "go the extra mile"
• keeping up to date with developments in the field.

Engagement has clear overlaps with the more exhaustively researched concepts of commitment and organizational citizenship behavior, but there are also differences. In particular, engagement is two-way: organizations must work to engage the employee, who in turn has a choice about the level of engagement to offer the employer.

Engagement is defined as:

A positive attitude held by the employee towards the organization and its values. An engaged employee is aware of business context, and works with colleagues to improve performance within the job for the benefit of the organization. The organization must work to develop and nurture engagement, which requires a two-way relationship between employer and employee.

Measuring engagement:

Below are some sure signs of an engaged employee.

• a positive attitude towards, and pride in, the organization
• belief in the organization’s products/services
• a perception that the organization enables the employee to perform well
• a willingness to behave altruistically and be a good team player
• an understanding of the bigger picture and a willingness to go beyond the requirements of the job.

Engagement challenges

Levels can vary, in association with a variety of personal and job characteristics and with experiences at work. Some key observances are:

• engagement levels decline as employees get older – until they reach the oldest group (60 plus), where levels suddenly rise, and show this oldest group to be the most engaged of all
• minority ethnic respondents have higher engagement levels than their white colleagues
• managers and professionals tend to have higher engagement levels than their colleagues in supporting roles, although people in the latter group appear to owe greater loyalty to their profession than to the organization in which they practice their craft
• engagement levels decline as length of service increases
• having an accident or an injury at work, or experiencing harassment (particularly if the manager is the source of the harassment) both have a big negative impact on engagement
• employees who have a personal development plan, and who have received a formal performance appraisal within the past year, have significantly higher engagement levels than those who have not.

The above statements demonstrate that you need to work hard to prevent, and minimize the impact of, bad experiences. Companies also need to ensure that employees’ development needs (including the special needs of professionals) are taken seriously; paid attention to, and value the roles of, support staff; and to maintain the interest of longer-serving employees. The relatively high levels of engagement of the oldest employees, and of minority ethnic staff, suggest sources of untapped potential within some organizations.

What drives engagement?

Committed employees perform better. If we accept that engagement, as many believe, is "one step up" from commitment, it is clearly in the organization’s interests to understand the drivers of engagement. Many aspects of working life are strongly correlated with engagement levels. However, the strongest driver of all is a sense of feeling valued and involved. This has several key components:

• involvement in decision-making
• the extent to which employees feel able to voice their ideas, and managers listen to these views, and value employees’ contributions
• the opportunities employees have to develop their jobs
• the extent to which the organization is concerned for employees’ health and well-being.

In summary, it is critical to realize and support the importance of the "engaged" employee-manager relationship.

How do you engage your employees? We would love to hear what has been successful for you. Please respond below.