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How Can You Support Your Employees?
Employees who don’t feel supported by their employers are much less likely to want to stick around. Nobody wants to be a revolving door employer. Turnover rates are bad for business as well as morale!
If your business has to deal with employees leaving all of the time, it can cost you a lot of unnecessary time and money. By providing the right support, you can make sure that your employees stay and do their best work. Which is a win-win situation. Here are some of the most important things that you can do to support your employees and make sure they stick around.
Allow Open Communication
Employee support can’t exist without good communication between the employer and the employees. Employees need to be able to communicate about a range of issues, both relating to their work and perhaps extending to their health and personal lives. Employees should feel able to speak up if something is wrong.
One of the keys to open communication is the concept of “psychological safety“. This means people feel like they are in a secure and safe environment. They feel they can speak up, speak out, analyze and criticize. Without being targeted for ridicule or retribution.
An employer needs to understand that all people have different ways they like to communicate. Some want one-on-one meetings with their manager or peers. Some want to attend forums, communities of practice, or go to lunch and learns. Listen to people first and always remember that communication must be a two-way street to be effective.
Acknowledge and Reward Achievements
Many employees simply want to feel appreciated when they’re at work. It can be difficult coming to work every day if you feel that no one is acknowledging the effort that you’re putting in. Having a range of techniques to acknowledge and reward good work, both on an individual and group level, gives your employees the recognition that they deserve.
But make sure you are being smart about this. Don’t try to cajole or bribe people with tacky prizes and cash bonuses. Try to understand what people want and what really motivates them. It may surprise you. Many employees would rather be rewarded with spare time to work on a side or pet project than some money in the bank.
This video from multi-best-selling author Dan Pink (who wrote the influential book Drive) explains some fascinating ideas behind motivation and rewards.
It might be worth reading up on the famous Theory X vs Theory Y of motivation. These two competing theories describe the intrinsic and external motivations of people in an organization.
Take a genuine interest
Make sure to take a genuine interest in your employees’ goals. You obviously need to be communicating properly for this to work – you can’t know what they want without listening to them! Try and really understand their work expectations and career aspirations. This will go a long way towards helping them feel listened to and respected.
And make sure to help them build a career path, and follow up with them regularly to see how they are progressing. Don’t be the manager who just listens and nods, then drops everything and never takes action to help make their career goals happen.
Offer Continuous Training
Staff training is an important part of any business, particularly if you want to help your employees develop. Going beyond basic training and offering continual opportunities to learn new skills shows your employees that you support their personal development.
Make sure your training is specific and personalized. Don’t turn your training offerings into a mass-production factory. Listen to people, continuously rate their abilities and interests, and build customized training offerings.
Getting regular and detailed feedback from training is very important to tailoring and improving your training programs.
And remember that learning is not just about training. Keep in mind the famous “70 – 20 – 10” theory. This model argues that 70 percent of learning is gained by doing, 20 percent is learning from other people and only the remaining 10 percent is from courses.
So make sure that in addition to offering training courses, you are enabling and empowering employers by partnering them with mentors, inviting them to communities of practice, and giving them secondment opportunities so they casn learn from doing.
The right software for delivering training is essential, so make sure that choose your learning management system by reviewing ratings and assessments.
eLearning Industry The Best 20 Learning Management Systems based on Customer Experience Infographic 2019 Edition
