You might be tempted to think that your product or service is the essential backbone of your business. However, you could be missing a critical factor in creating a better culture of success. And that factor is your employees! Without the right people working for you in the right way, the rest of your business can very quickly start to lose meaning and financial solubility.
Several factors come to mind right away. How good is your employee turnover rate? Are your workers generally happy and satisfied with their jobs? What’s the workplace energy feel like on a daily basis? And, are there open feedback lines for employees to talk about the good and bad aspects of their workdays?
Employee Turnover
Dealing with employee turnover can be very harsh reality in the business world. If you don’t have good low-level managers, and employees feel like they aren’t paid enough or are being treated well, they can just split and head to another job.
If you have talented employees that are leaving because they feel like better opportunities are somewhere else, then you should take a long hard look at your business practices.
General Happiness and Satisfaction
It’s not an unknown what makes employees happy and satisfied at work. As an employer or manager, you should go through each of these concepts as a theory and as a practical matter, and try to work these factors in a positive direction. No one likes seeing unhappy workers in an office, and that sort of dissatisfaction is what can lead to the employee turnover mentioned above.
It’s very easy to get lost in the details of productivity and forget that human beings are working at all of the essential stages of your business model.
Workplace Energy
When you walk through your business, what is the essential energy like? Has anyone ever had a problem with sexual harassment in the workplace? Are there groups of employees that bully other workers?
Personalities and situations are different inside every company infrastructure, but awareness is key to making sure nothing gets out of control. Any kind of a toxic workplace means that profits are lost because of negative energy affecting workflow.
Feedback Lines
Do employees have a valid way of talking with managers and owners about potential issues in the workplace? Do they feel like if they say something, their voices are going to be heard? If not, then it would probably benefit everyone to have some sort of feedback option possible.
Perhaps it would be an anonymous tip box. Maybe there should be a way for people to email management in a format that will be archived to show that consistent improvement is a continuous goal.
No matter what the method, the idea is that employees need to be able to express their concerns up the food chain.
