Get Your Employees To Love You (Even If You’re A Scary Boss)
The statistics on the number of employees who want to quit their jobs are not pretty.
According to data from Forbes, 84 percent of employees agree with the statement that they “sometimes feel trapped and want to find a new post in a different organization.” That’s not good!
It is not just employees moaning for the sake of it either. When people in your business aren’t happy, they do less work, take more time off sick, and generally bring the morale of your team down.
Your role as a business leader, therefore, is to find ways to make your employees love you. Or if you’re the type of person who nobody could love, then at least find you bearable enough to stay!
Learn Their “Groan” Points
You’ve heard of consumer “pain points.” Now prepare yourself for a new concept that applies to your staff: “groan points.”
If you’ve ever worked in a regular job, you’ll know exactly what these are. It’s the moment your manager came to you at your old retail job and told you that it was time to do a stocktake.
Groan points, however, are mostly unnecessary. Much of the time, you can implement some technical or organizational solution that eliminates them, helping improve the quality of life for your workers.
Use The Concept Of Performance “Elevation,” Not Evaluation
Employees nearly universally hate evaluations. It creates a sense of dread and overwhelm and adds to an already-busy schedule.
Performance elevation is a different concept. Instead of looking for ways your employees haven’t lived up to the standards that you expect in your organization, you give them the tools that they need to do better work. Celebrate successes and provide support during failures. A little leg-up is all many workers need.
Improve Your HR
Employees want flexible working, to receive the correct pay, and be able to make complaints confidentially about working conditions. But if your HR department is bogged down in the minutiae of payroll and recruiting, then they don’t usually have time to serve your existing colleagues.
Recruiting and payroll software can improve the performance of your HR team enormously by cutting down on rote tasks. With automation, your human resources professionals can dedicate more of their time to high-value-added activities, like training and dealing with employee complaints.
Make Encouragement Part Of The Culture
Employees who feel like slaves for their corporate masters will always be unhappy. It isn’t natural for humans to live out their lives under the whip of others.
Changing the culture at your firm can radically adjust worker perceptions. Instead of motivating from the top-down, try to create a culture of encouragement in your organization. Get your middle managers to offer employees the occasional word of affirmation, telling them that they’re doing a good job. The more gratitude that you can convey, the more you’ll encourage colleagues to reciprocate.
Getting your employees to love you is a challenge. People always want more from their lives, including their careers, and so it should come as no surprise that dissatisfaction is rife. With that said, these strategies will help you convince them that the grass is rarely greener on the other side.
