Part 4: Being Mindful of Employee Needs
Beyond the normal competencies that every business seeks to improve year-over-year – such as growing sales leads and conversions, increasing efficiency, reducing costs and minimizing waste – forward-thinking companies should focus on the up-and-coming core values of today’s marketplace. Those include being more trustworthy, transparent, ethical, collaborative and mindful of its employee needs. Companies that improve these are destined to be more successful in 2014.
However, of those five goals, being mindful of employee needs is the one that is least likely to be addressed in any real, tangible way by most companies. While being mindful of employees’ needs is an honorable goal in theory, it is a tall order. What does it mean to be ‘mindful of employee needs? What does that look like in practice? How does that translate into actual HR rules and practices? It can mean many a different things to business owners and leaders, and even more to the employees themselves. That makes it hard to qualify or quantify, and even harder to achieve. But make no mistake that being mindful of employee needs does impact the bottom line. A company is only as good as its people. For businesses, keeping teams moving forward together in harmony is the difference between succeeding and failing. The most successful businesses are the ones that work the hardest to please their employees. So what should companies that want to be mindful of their employees do?
The first step in being mindful of employee needs is to make that a company goal. If everyone in leadership understands that being mindful of employee needs is a priority from the uppermost levels of management, then that filters down to executive and mid-level managers. It’s up to managers to make sure they’re giving their staffs what they need to the best of their abilities.
What does that look like in reality? While it varies from workplace to workplace, there are some key employee needs that are universal. Employees need:
1. Purpose
Top to bottom, most employees want to understand their work. People want to know how their work fits into the bigger picture and that what they do on a daily basis has some purpose. Employees want the chance to matter and make a difference to the organization, its customers or the world. They also gain a sense of purpose from having an impact on the organization. Having ideas heard and occasionally implemented generates a deep sense of purpose and delivers a boost to self esteem that is just as important as compensation.
2. Direction
Employees need clear, understandable and achievable goals — defined on a regular basis — in order to get a sense of purpose. Managers should review and re-align department goals quarterly. The goals have to be measurable and reachable. Once goals are in place, it should be up to each team to decide how to achieve them.
3. Trust / Autonomy
One of the hardest parts of being a manager is delegating because delegation requires trust. Employees crave trust. Managers need to be able to hand over work and then trust that those who are qualified to do the work will do it best. Second-guessing direction and micromanaging work product communicates distrust. Let people figure out the best paths to the goal, rather than breathe down their necks all the time.
4. Flexibility
Employees also appreciate having some say over when they work. Flexibility is a key benefit that draws top talent. Flexible vacation time. Telecommuting. Flexible office hours. Some people will even take a significant pay cut to work for a company that affords greater flexibility such as the ability to arrive early and leave early to avoid traffic, or work from home on days when a repair person is coming or the employee’s child is home sick. The younger the employee, the more flexibility is desired and expected. Generation Y is looking for balance between personal and professional life. This is an employee need that costs a company nothing and can generate a great deal of employee loyalty. Employee loyalty reduces turnover, which can be a huge savings to the bottom line.
5. Connection
Though employees want autonomy and trust to do their work, they also need guidance and feedback to ensure that they are on target. Managers should check with staff periodically to get a feel for how things are going with work and with the employee. It is wholly unfair to give an employee little or no feedback – positive or negative — until the traditional annual performance review. And it is even more unfair to never give any feedback and skip reviews altogether.
6. Open-mindedness
Allow employees to make suggestions and be open to new ideas and ways of doing things. The more an employee gets shot down by an authority figure, the less likely he or she will be to make suggestions in the future. There is often more than one right way to accomplish a goal, and managers who insist that their way is the only right way will alienate and ultimately lose staff. A manager may know what’s best for a business and what’s not, and there is no need to accept every idea, but it is important to listen and consider every idea on its merits. Sometimes it is better to allow an employee to try a new idea and take a chance at failing than to shoot down the idea from the start.
7. Transparency / Communication
Transparency is not just valued by customers. It is also important to employees. Business leaders have a clearer perspective on the bigger picture than do employees. Things that managers consider common knowledge — about how things are going or what challenges are down the road or what new products are coming — are often ‘news’ to most employees. It is important to take the time to share such information with employees. While it’s not necessary to publish the company’s full financial information, sharing key information about the company’s status and financial health contributes to a sense of job stability.
8. Compensation
It would be disingenuous to write about being mindful of employee needs and not mention compensation. No one works for the fun of it, even if some people truly do love what they do. Employees work because they need to provide for themselves and their families. Thus, salaries, bonuses and benefits are vitally important. Companies that consistently underpay and are reluctant to give raises ultimately increase their turnover and pay well more in the cost of hiring and training new staff. The higher the position of the person being replaced, then the greater the cost to the company to replace that person. Companies that continue to milk the economy as the reason to not give even cost of living adjustments will ultimately lose top employees, and possibly to competitors.
9. Sense of Ownership
When company personnel feel responsible for what the customer is buying or the service the customer is receiving, that inspires staff to want to deliver the best product or service possible… if they are allowed to improve the product/service.
10. Challenges
Few people want to do one specific task over and over again until they quit, retire or die. New or different responsibilities allows for growth and inspires self-confidence. Being assigned challenging work also makes each employee feel more valuable to the organization. Challenge prevents burnout.
These are just some of the most common and universal employee needs. Forward-thinking companies take their employees’ needs seriously. They create new ways to meet employee needs while meeting their own.
Case in point. Jeff Gunther, CEO of Meddius, a Charlottesville, VA-based software company, changed the way the company’s staff worked by instituting a Results-Only Working Environment or ROWE for short. What did that mean? Meddius employees could work any time from any place in any way, as long as their work got done. Meddius found that by giving employees the trust and autonomy needed, they were actually more productive and loyal to the company.
Of course, that would not work for businesses that service customers or manufacturing companies, but many organizations have at least some portion of their employees that can do some of what they do from anywhere as long as they have a phone, computer, and internet access. It’s not for every company, but it is an example of the lengths to which a company will go in being mindful of their employees’ needs. Those companies reap the rewards of lower turnover, greater loyalty, fewer mistakes, better service and more creativity from their staff. All those things help improve the bottom line. What more could any company want in 2014?
Quote of the Week
“Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person – not just an employee – are more productive, more satisfied, more fulfilled. Satisfied employees mean satisfied customers, which leads to profitability.”
Anne M. Mulcahy
© 2014, Keren Peters-Atkinson. All rights reserved.
