An engaged team is a crucial factor for a company to achieve sustainable growth. That’s why employee engagement directly impacts business outcomes, which is the main goal for every team leader. Unfortunately, according to Gallup report, 85% of people hate their jobs. How is it possible to create a healthy and engaged culture in a company when the majority of people don’t like their jobs? In this article, we take a look at the main reasons why people don’t enjoy their work and how to engage your employees.
Why employees hate their jobs?
There are many reasons why people don’t enjoy their jobs which impact on the final outcome. We consider three leading causes for teams where employees lose their motivation over time. However, there are lots of other core reasons why people don’t like their jobs. For example, an employee hasn’t found himself yet and isn’t an appropriate fit for the current position. Or perhaps a new worker doesn’t have the vital experience needed. We can also consider cases where employees work well in the early stages, but then they lose their motivation. Let’s try to figure out what’s going wrong.
Reason 1: They don’t know company goals
The first reason is about the company’s goals, particularly the employee’s understanding of them. I see many times when only a few employees in the company know the businesses goals. Research concludes that the majority of employees don’t understand them; in fact, they don’t understand why they do their job. Vital understanding of how goals impact on the business, what is of value and whats is not. How the worker can best align with company goals? They don’t know the answers to these questions.
So often, founders think that each employee clearly understands the company’s goals. A team leader can quickly communicate this through a 1:1 conversation with employees. Just ask people what the company goals are. It helps you to get the real status of employees’ vision.
To be specific why it matters, employees who doesn’t understand the company’s goals generally consider themselves as a small part of the system. In many cases, it impacts their level of motivation. It’s easy for anyone to lose a desire to work if he or she doesn’t understand their contribution and impact on the total results.
Reason 2: Employees don’t get recognition
If you’ve had some recognition issues, you should know that it influences the whole team mood. Value of material motivation goes down by the time; in contrast, non-financial motivation means a lot for people. But managers often forget to give recognition to their employees.
Most articles and presentations about motivation focus on large things like a motivation program or corporate culture. It makes sense, but I want to underline that simple, basic things like recognition and qualitative feedback work pretty well. Yeah, it’s simple and gives superior outcomes, but often managers don’t do it. They have so many meetings and routines that they forget to provide feedback for their employees or colleagues.
Recommendations or some magical exercises don’t fix this situation because each manager knows what should he or she do. The only right decision in this area is implementing a feedback system every week. That is why we created Focus, which assists you in making employee recognition as simple and effective as possible. It allows team managers to be better leaders and helps employees receive consistent and well deserved feedback.
Reason 3: Absence of employee development system
Employee development is an essential process for improving motivation for long-standing team members. Routine jobs absorb many engaged team members. Each day repetitive tasks lead people to unmotivated behavior and drudgery. People generally don’t like it because it’s so boring. But we can’t replace people with robots for these routines jobs in many areas. Not yet.
That’s why it’s crucial to implement employee development. It improves people’s engagement and loyalty to the company. And I’m talking not only about training, but about constant practices for personal development every week. Managers should do a 1:1 meeting with employees to discuss their job and performance. 1:1 sessions help you improve employee engagement, not to mention, the opportunity to give quality feedback. Though weekly catchups you will know what’s important for your employees and what’s on their minds.
At Focus, we believe that people are the top priority for any company. Employees, clients, profit. These are vital factors for any business. And I believe that employees must come first because focus on your team helps to build a sustainable and long-term company. Focus on employees not only increases efficiency but also makes a great workplace for everyone in the company. It gives you as a manager superior outcomes in all cases.
How to increase employee engagement?
There are a lot of recommendations on how to improve employee engagement on the web like ‘how provide a beautiful environment, encourage flexibility, always be authentic’, and so on. It makes sense because it matters for people in all cases. But I want to talk about practical examples of what you could implement today.
Step 1: Measure current employee engagement
You should measure employee engagement regularly. It helps you investigate what’re your employees thinking about your company. And it’s an essential step for increasing engagement because if you can’t measure it how can you understand the outcomes of your improvements. One of the most reliable ways to do it is through Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), which is a survey to measure employee satisfaction.
eNPS is built around Net Promoter Score and has similar mechanics. You can find out different templates on the web or use eNPS module in Focus, which helps you understand what are employees thinking about your company. We provide anonymous eNPS survey to get honest feedback for improvements.
Step 2: Start doing daily and weekly standups
Unclear goals are one of the reasons why people lost their motivation. Create a workflow where everyone will be aligned with the company’s and colleagues’ goals. Simplify your teamwork without meetings, which often take a lot of time and distract productive employees. It doesn’t mean that meetings are a terrible habit for employees productivity, but it’s better to use modern tools and mechanics for team synchronization. For example, you can set daily and weekly updates in several minutes in Focus. Each event takes from one to five minutes per day for the employee, let alone that everyone will know what’s going on in the company.
Step 3: Improve employee development
To improve employee development, you should create the next two things:
- individual development plans,
- implement performance management.
Individual development plans give your employees roadmap with measurable goals and a timeframe for achieving these goals. People must have a clear vision of what should they do and what you, as a manager or founder, expect to see as outcomes of their work. Take time to discuss people goals and their development, which directly impacts on company success. Understanding performance metrics will help your employees to be more productive.
Another essential mechanic that every manager should do is one-on-one meetings with employees. Managers often don’t know what’s going on in an employee’s life. 1:1 session will help you to build reliable connections with employees and improve their engagement. It’s a profound topic of how to implement 1:1 meeting in the company, how to provide it with the best results, and which questions use in the meetings. We will consider this theme soon with more details.
Recap
Let’s recap some of the essential concepts to improve employee engagement.
1. Measure employee engagement
There’s only one thing that you need to benchmark your employee engagement against your own. If you can measure improvements to employees engagement over time, then you know you are working on it. To do that, we recommend providing eNPS survey at least one time in 6 months. How to provide eNPS survey? You could find a 3rd-party agency or use special software like Focus or an alternative. Check methodology and provider’s results, to be sure that it’s the best-suited option for you.
2. Set concrete performance goals
We recommend creating individual development plans and implementing performance management in your company. Also, managers should implement 1:1 meetings with employees weekly for improving performance in the company.
3. Start doing daily and weekly updates
Daily and weekly updates help your team stay in sync without meetings. It allows employees to understand their impact on total outcomes and keeps the whole team up to date with current projects. Remote employees are also able to stay in the loop easily and boosts feelings of inclusivity.
It’s hard to build a strong culture in a company, especially when the company begins to growth. It’s crucial for managers to use modern tools to organize their work and create a better work environment for employees. You can trial Focus for 14 days completely free to find out firsthand how effective project management software is for you and your team. At Focus, we help companies stay in sync without meetings and built a high performing culture.
