How to Build a Better Workplace

For any employee in any industry, their workplace is revisited over five days a week for more than 8 hours a day, making it as close to a second home. When you find your employee dreading to come to work, rushing to leave early and underperforming from the expectations you’ve set – you haven’t provided a nurturing and safe environment for them.

A home is desirable and employers today need to be aware of what makes their employees desire to stay and work for them. In doing so, you set yourself on the path to retain your employees. By providing them a place of comfort, they open up, allowing you to understand them on a personal level. You make them realise their potential and reward them to drive performance. As a result, there is satisfaction experienced for both parties including a greater capacity to sustain a competitive advantage over your competitors. With all great ideas that lead to greater results, it begins with an initial step and that is to create a better workplace.

Creating a better workplace involves narrowing down pivotal components that encompass both achieving organisational goals and meeting the desires of employees. We explore each aspect to provide you a framework to follow to achieve greater outcomes.

1. Understanding what employee engagement is

Greater and precise understanding of employee engagement is an important aspect that should be undertaken first. Different leaders within an organisation have different perceptions of what employee engagement should involve. The difference in perspectives is illustrated with inconsistent employee performance outcomes. With these inconsistencies, you’ll begin to notice when your organisation does well and when it doesn’t.

What’s important and should be clearly established are goals to be achieved, the methods used to coach your team and continuous ways to manage them meaningfully and positively. They should be done without being too prescriptive, letting your employees have some autonomy. This three step approach followed carefully will build a two way street between consistent performance in both your employees and organisation to create tangible results.

2. Providing a high performance culture

Following on from clearly defining what employee engagement is and putting the framework into action, you’ll develop a culture of consistent high performance. Why this is necessary is to act as a motivating tool for your employee. They say “those you surround yourself with will influence what you will do”.

You want to foster an environment that strives on motivation or else nothing can be achieved. You’ll be able to boost morale and see this driven spark inside your employees. There is nothing wrong with a little bit of competition as that’s what truthfully drives the majority of people. As a result, you notice how determined your employees are to return to work thirsty to achieve more.

3. Fostering for innovation

You, as a manager, want to steer clear from setting a superior aura against your employees, undermining their ideas. This will just plant in their heads a perception of being a mouse in the company. Most employees desire to be on par with you in an organisation, and the best way to foster for that is allowing them to contribute ideas.

Any new idea is an innovation. Innovation strikes the ability to have an idea, in turn contributing to the organisation’s growth. It can be used as a brainstorming tool to draft potentials for gaining ground over your competitors. Two brains are better than one – so what could be even better than having the brains of your whole team of employees on board to drive your organisation?

4. The overall employee experience

At the end of the day, experience is what matters most to your employees. This is what will make or break the expectations they’ve set for themselves. Your employees are essentially your customers – in a sense, they do serve you and your organisation’s wellbeing. You want to satisfy their experience at work the same way a customer wants to experience satisfactory customer service.

If you put it into perspective, as a customer you’d want to experience that five-star rating service in a restaurant. If the service does not meet your expectations, you wouldn’t think twice about returning would you? The same goes for your employees, they wouldn’t want to return to work if their journey so far in your organisation has been a terrible experience.

Have your employees wanting to come back for more by developing this enriching and addictive experience. Feed positive energy, nourish their personal growth and provide the resources to let them aspire to be greater. Doing just those activities and you’ll see your employees coming back for more.

The workforce environment is inevitably competitive. To keep up with the changes and sustain organisational growth you need the best people to back you up. To keep them being your allies fighting to feel almost close to home. You need to start to create a better workplace.