A business exists to make money, which means it needs to keep its customers happy. Too often, employees are forgotten in this equation. While no business should make catering to the whim of every employee its main focus, there are a number of reasons that it’s a good idea to work toward keeping your best workers happy. Happier employees are more productive. They are also more loyal and they stick around longer. Hiring and training new staff is expensive, and if you’ve got a revolving door of workers, this is almost certainly a sign of some deeper dysfunction in your business that you need to address. To put it bluntly, happy employees actually equal greater profits. With this in mind, the tips below can help you keep your staff satisfied.
Perks and Pay
Some of the best advice is often the simplest: pay your staff well and give them good benefits. Too often, companies try to get the best workers without offering the best pay and conditions. The benefits and pay you offer should at minimum match industry standards, and if you want to attract top talent, you may need to go above and beyond. It may be worthwhile to periodically do an employee survey to measure satisfaction with benefits and find out which ones they value and whether there are any they wish they had. This can help you avoid spending money on perks that aren’t increasing employee motivation.
The Tools They Need
An extremely frustrating experience for an employee is being expected to perform a task to a certain standard without being given the tools to do it. This is not the same as a challenging situation that the employee has to make the best of, which can be out of anyone’s control. Instead, it’s a case of knowing the tools are out there but not being given access to them. If your company has a fleet and the manager is expected to keep costs down, keep drivers safe and comply with regulations, they need the right equipment to accomplish that. AI Dash Cams offer real-time incident detection and preventative in-cab coaching. This helps keep drivers safer and costs low. Find out what your employees need to do their job, and give it to them.
Give Them Autonomy
As a supervisor or business owner, you want things done right. This can make you feel like you need to closely supervise everything your staff is doing and tell them how to do things in order to maximize efficiency. While this might work if your business were staffed by robots, humans simply do not tend to work like this. If you’ve hired the right people, you are actually much more likely to get the best performance from people that you empower to work independently and make their own decisions.
As an example, perhaps you are supervising a customer service team. You don’t want your customer service representatives giving away too much for free or making it easy for people to scam the company, so you run a pretty tight ship, limiting the solutions your staff can offer and making sure that anything of consequence is kicked up to you first. Although your approach may seem reasonable, for no reason you can fathom, your best workers don’t seem to stick around. To figure out why to put yourself in both their shoes and the shoes of the customer.
You’ve probably experienced the latter yourself, calling a company to get help and finding yourself up against a brick wall in which the person you were talking to really couldn’t do anything to help. Do you remember how frustrating that was? As for your employees, what your rules have essentially done is indicate to them that they can’t be trusted. They are in a high-stress position with very little autonomy. You would be much better off training them effectively and giving them more solutions to offer customers. If you do end up with a worker who you feel is irresponsible in solving customer issues, you can deal with that on a case-by-case basis. Of course, you also do need to offer constructive feedback on a regular basis, but you shouldn’t confuse this with micromanaging.
Create a Positive Culture
All of the concrete steps above are important. However, a less explicitly definable but equally important step is creating a positive workplace culture. Employees need tools to handle work pressure and the elements of your corporate culture can facilitate it. This can be tricky because it can mean different things to different people. Not everyone wants to be friends with their coworkers or have regular social outings with them, for example. However, what you can do is work toward creating an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect and a sense that you are all working toward a common goal. Try to offer rewards if the business itself is thriving. This does not necessarily have to come in the form of bonuses. You could offer public recognition, small gifts, lunches or other perks.