Ever wonder how it feels to be in your employees’ position? As an HR manager, it may answer your question on how to improve the workplace and overall levels of employee engagement.
One potential source of ideas comes from a recent report by TINYhr’s. Titled, The New Year Employee Report, this survey clearly spells out what employees would change – if only they had the power.
According to the survey, which asked participants what was the one thing they’d like to change about their managers, the top five answers were:
Certainly, it shouldn’t be a surprise that communication concerns top the list. Further research by Clear Company HRM says that “86% of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures.”
When communication fails, extra work is required, whether because employees must rework projects that were initially completed incorrectly due to miscommunications or because multiple employees mistakenly work on the same tasks as the result of unclear instructions.
That said, the story gets even more interesting when TINYhr’s team turned the tables and asked employees what the first thing they’d change if they were the boss. The top five responses, in addition to the percentage of respondents prioritizing each response, are below:
What does it say about an organisation when employees want to fire their colleagues? According to David Niu, founder and CEO of TINYhr, “It goes back to an organisation’s culture and the impact colleagues have on culture and workplace satisfaction.Our data has shown that peers are the biggest influence on colleagues going the extra mile, and this further supports that point.”
Is your organisational culture up to par? Or would your own employees report the concerns listed above? Even if you believe that your employees are satisfied with your workplace communication, consider the following tips to further enhance your company’s culture.
The Columbia University study found that job turnover at companies with a rich internal culture averages about 13.9%, while those that don’t focus on employee fit experience turnover rates as high as 48.4%.
When we consider how costly turnover can be, that’s a pretty major loss! But that isn’t the only way company culture affects profitability. According to statistics provided by the New Century Financial Corporation, happy, actively-engaged employees produce better results than their unhappy peers.
In an example cited in their research, banking account managers who were disengaged from their work produced 28% less revenue than their happier coworkers.
There’s a reason happier employees yield better business results. Employees that are satisfied with their work environment are more likely to complete their projects on time, to a higher degree of satisfaction, than those who don’t care about their work.
They’re less likely to procrastinate and more likely to go out of their way to solve difficult problems — traits that all managers want to see in their employees. A happy and satisfied employee is a productive employee, that contributes to a productive workplace environment when taken in aggregate.
Clearly, there are legitimate business reasons to improve organisational culture. But while there are changes you can make to improve the relationships between your existing managers and employees, a far better approach is to take corporate culture into consideration from the beginning.
By making “fit” a part of the hiring process, you’ll minimize your chances of encountering profit-diminishing conflicts down the road. Employees need to hire for job fit and organisational fit.
When it comes to considering job candidate fit, the easiest way to incorporate this technique is to get representatives from all levels of your staff involved in the hiring process. Once you’ve identified a few top choices for your open positions, invite candidates out for lunch with a team of your current employees or invite them all to some other social activity where guards will be let down.
You don’t need to make your decisions on your staff’s feedback exclusively, as job skills and other characteristics are just as important, but you should take their opinions into consideration. After all, they’re the ones that will be working closest with your new hires, and it’s their productivity that will suffer if candidates are a poor fit for your organisational culture.
Every organisation has its issues, and fixing them isn’t going to happen overnight. If you’re a business owner or manager, think about different ways to strengthen your organisation’s culture and then put your ideas into action.
By creating guidelines and setting expectations from the beginning of their tenure, as well as filtering personnel through the hiring process early on, you’ll cultivate the kind of atmosphere that attracts, retains and satisfies high-performing employees.
See: Happy Employees, But Not Costly
The original article first appeared on Entrepreneur
