Customers or clients may be the lifeblood of your business, but you couldn’t keep them happy without employees. Employers are increasingly looking at ways to build up worker satisfaction because it costs much less to retain good employees than find new ones. Happy employees also tend to be more productive. In addition, any time an employee departs, a certain amount of institutional knowledge goes with them. Below are several ways that you can improve conditions for your workers so that they’ll want to stay around.
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Ask Them
Surprisingly few employers go straight to their staff and ask them what they need. Employers may worry that their employees will ask for something unreasonable, but failing to do this can mean that you end up paying for perks that your staff doesn’t really care about and perhaps not providing them with something that would be easier and more cost-effective to provide. Ask them in confidential surveys as well as face-to-face. Give them choices. Everyone likes free snacks in the break room, but they might opt for more flexible hours if it’s a toss-up between the two.
The Right Tools
Asking your staff what they want, or need is also a good way to find out whether there are tools you could provide them with that will help them do their jobs better. Since you see the big picture and they don’t, not everything they think would improve their workflow is necessarily going to be practical for you to implement. On the other hand, they do have a view of processes that you probably lack, so it’s worth listening to their reasoning.
An example of a device that can substantially improve employee work flow is Electronic Logging Devices if part of your business involves operating a fleet. You can review a complete guide on how ELDs can help your drivers out. This device captures data on the engine and automates an aspect of their work that was previously done on paper.
Managing Workload
If you go to any forum about professional life or just listen to people talk about their jobs, you might be surprised to see how often two complaints come up: people either have too much work to do or not enough. Sometimes they’re both in the same office, and nobody is happy with it, but nobody has the training or authority to do anything about it. As the business owner, it can be all too easy to lose sight of some of the finer details of what your staff is dealing with, and the urge to avoid micromanaging is a good one.
However, ensuring that workloads are distributed in a way that works for everyone is critical. Many people struggle to cope with the stress of daily life and with work being a huge part of people’s every day it does fall on you to an extent to ensure that workloads are not contributing to stress levels.
Good Management
Many of the above issues can be solved if you have the right management. Have you promoted people into management positions because they are good at what they do? Unfortunately, this doesn’t necessarily mean they are good at supervising people. At the very least, require your supervisors to read some books on management or better yet, pay for them to attend trainings and seminars on improving their management skills.
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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