I think you already heard the frequently repeated: “Happy employee, ..happy customer” domino effect. Many research papers prove that once your staff is happy, so will you be, with regards to your performance and profitability. So the question is: Do you take care of your people? Would they recommend your company to a friend or become a customer themselves?
As mentioned in the Essential Trio, getting the right people is crucial here, being the step number one. But the second step is to treat your people well and, make sure your people treat each other well also (if in a peer to peer or leader to team capacity).
Interested to know what some of the Best Employers do today to make their employees happy, inspired and fulfilled in order to retain and attract talent?
Ready? Steady?…Let’s look at some of the best practices, within different categories!
Ultimate Goal
- Make your employees to own their work, aligning everybody’s work to the company purpose, emphasizing the impact they make, even for those not being in direct customer-facing roles (e.g. finance, IT or utility staff members).
- Build strong relationships and loyalty with the employees and within the employees based on trust, transparency and integrity, to build a strong collaborative community.
Strategy & Structure
- Switch from short-term focus on profit or KPIs and silo thinking to long-term profitability achieved as one team, with the company vision as the main target.
- Remove some of the old-school hierarchy and bureaucracy, connecting the top with the bottom of the organization, giving employees more ownership and responsibility.
- Set self-organizing and autonomously working teams with high level of autonomy.
- Turn your employees into your customers, brand ambassadors or even investors – giving them special employee discounts and offering them employee stock ownership programs.
Hiring & HR Practices
- Hire people based on their purpose and passion-for-product/service fit over a set years of experience or education accomplishments, favoring Emotional Intelligence over IQ.
- Hire for diversity and promote inclusion, equality and treating people with respect, valuing differences.
- Promote people from within, giving them the opportunity to grow and progress in their career.
Job Description & Responsibility
- Reduce the number of mandatory meetings, or even make them optional.
- Making vacations mandatory, in order to allow employees to switch completely off and recharge batteries, not allowing people not taking a break or having their vacation turn into extra pay.
- Create a safe environment to take risks and fail, encouraging innovation and creativity.
- Crowdsource ideas from inhouse, allowing any employee to be an active contributor.
- Give staff flexibility over where, when and how they work, being able to design their own work-schedule and work-place, following the “one size doesn’t fit all”.
Working Environment
- Provide employees with services as: dining, childcare, health insurance, dry-cleaning or wellness center access integrating their home, professional and recreational life.
- Create a designated space for relaxation, meditation or craftmanship.
- Encourage playfulness and success celebration, incorporating fun into work and emphasize peer recognition and awards.
Learning & Development
- Offer a great portfolio of L&D opportunities, allowing each employee to choose from variety of topic and learning formats (E.g. intranet platform, Virtual sessions, F2F workshops, webinars, corporate universities).
- Encourage intra-company mutual learning and knowledge transfer between peers and within teams, if via official mentoring or succession planning programs or by creating a culture where setting other for success and growing oneself and others is key.
Reflection time:
What does your company do currently in regards to taking care for its employees? Which practice do you see as most powerful in your view or experience?
