How to Keep Your Employees Happy
During challenging political and economic periods, businesses come under severe pressure to maintain the status quo. They must learn to adapt to the shifting marketplace to meet customer and client’s expectations to ensure that they remain competitive within their industry, but they also need to pay attention to and value their human capital - their greatest assets.
Supporting your employees through uncertain times should be part of your business ethos, but it is needed more than every during challenging times. A happy and content workforce directly influences and impacts on your business's efficiency and productivity, so to ignore the frailties of the human condition is an own goal.
External Stresses
If businesses learn how to support their staff effectively, they will find that the business benefits positively too. There are many homelife issues that can impact negatively on business. There needs to be a culture within the business that enables people to be able to disclose any external stresses without the fear that it will affect their employment.
For example, a survey by Mind in 2013 revealed that 90% of UK employees felt that admitting mental illness could damage their career. With 1 in 4 of UK British adults suffering from a diagnosable mental health problem – that's a quarter of the workforce who are experiencing fear of discrimination daily.
This does not mean that employers should adopt a counsellor mentality, rather they should be able to point employees in the direction of additional services that may help them. Employees may be struggling with poor credit history and need recommending products such as those from Vanquis. By understanding the external stresses that your employees face, you will be able to guide them to resolution.
Work-life balance
Work cultures are increasingly becoming more demanding, and while you may not mind staying late regularly to complete tasks, you must be mindful that your employees have other commitments and competing life roles.
Research has shown that the more hours you spend at work, the more time that you spend worrying about it – so the time committed to an organisation, whether intentional or not, is on the increase and employees often feel that other areas of their life are neglected as a result.
To develop an organisation wide healthy work-life balance for your employees:
- Provide guidance that informs employees what a healthy work-life balance is.
- Provide flexible working initiatives.
- Restrict working hours.
- Encourage staff to take more breaks.
- Ensure workload is reasonable.
- Ensure your expectations are reasonable.
- Encourage healthy behaviours.
By working with employees to identify the stresses in their lives and how work can help alleviate the issues, you are forging a more positive and collaborative work culture which by default will improve efficiency. Not only will your workforce be happier, but they will become more loyal to you, and you will retain the talent that you have. Acknowledging and being proactive with your responses to the external stresses that your employees experience makes absolute business sense.