Recognizing Employee Value Is Everything For Your Business

If you’ve found yourself lost in countless searches, lists, and articles on how to keep your employees’ zest for their work fresh, then you’ve also been inundated with hundreds of conflicting or unreasonable ideas of what that solution looks like.

Large corporations have newsworthy solutions that intrigue even the most dedicated workers. Google introduced nap pods and recharge rooms. Facebook has an arcade and a bike repair shop. Azavea started hosting yoga and meditation classes.

But while these ideas certainly are innovative, they’re costly, unrealistic, and only have the intended effect on those employees who have the motivation and willpower to limit their use. An employee who hates their work has no incentive to leave the arcade. These lofty suggestions are too whimsical for the average employer, but they’re the forefront suggestions for those who are truly lost in keeping their employees happy.

After all, a happy employee is a productive employee. They wake up without dread. They prepare themselves for their day. They show up with their best face forward and produce their highest quality effort when they don’t hate where they are spending most of their day. Truthfully, this isn’t nearly as hard to accomplish as one might think, and it doesn’t require candy bribes or a nap pod with custom lights.

A Recent Study Has the Answer

The number one question you can ask an employee is, “Do you feel valued?”

In a recent McKinsey study of 13,000 respondents across various industries and job levels and of varying demographics, researchers explored what motivates employees to perform at their best and revealed several key insights about employee motivation, satisfaction, and performance. 

The results could be simplified into three key factors. Is your employee…

Feeling a sense of belonging in your organization? An inclusive culture and an environment where all employees feel welcome and respected is a great place to start. Great ideas can come from all walks of life, but a hostile or even just an unpleasantly-charged atmosphere can dim the spark in even the brightest people. 

Fostering strong relationships between team members and increasing team cohesion can create a professionally caring environment where problems are more solvable (and preventable) and creativity thrives. Employees should feel that there is substance behind your company values, making them more connected to your organization’s mission or goals.

Achieving a reasonable work-life balance? Before they are workers, they are people! If the pandemic taught us anything, it was that employees have more respect for working hours when their work has respect for their personal hours. Encouraging boundaries between work and life outside of work can help employees keep an upbeat tune about coming in (or logging on).

In the last few years following the pandemic, employees worldwide have changed their perspective on what makes a job worth their time. Having a break from their burnout during lockdown caused many to rethink what they were willing to do upon return to work. For some, this was a remote or hybrid schedule. For others, it was a career change entirely. But as a whole, the workforce has reconsidered and restructured its goals and boundaries. Staying relevant as an employer in this environment means staying modern and competitive with these boundaries.

In fact, another study conducted by Harvard post-lockdown but before the back-to-work boom showed that remote employees and hybrid-schedule employees were more productive, took fewer days off, and were more joyful about their tasks.

Even if these models don’t work for your business (ever tried getting a remote haircut?) there are ways to achieve a balance for your employees’ two separate lives that don’t hurt your business or their ability to accomplish personal goals outside the office.

Seeing the potential for advancement or recognition? There actually doesn’t have to be anything wrong in your organization to lose brilliant employees. Sometimes, great opportunities come by– more money, more interesting work, etc.– and charm your best workers right out of their chairs.

If an employee isn’t going to go up, then they are going to go out.

But it’s not unheard of for someone to pass on an external offer with more money or benefits or a yearly cruise because they feel their efforts are recognized by their current organization. If you can give them raises and promotions when they earn new titles and show off new skills or grant bonuses on hard quotas well-met, you could save yourself the worry of them looking elsewhere for that same satisfaction.

The recognition of potential isn’t only limited to monetary gain, though. There is pride in working, and if you set a regular check-in schedule where employees can talk about their progress, you can express your gratitude for them, and together you can come up with a plan to let them try new things within your organization.

Other ways of appreciating your employees are through small gestures like a company outing, a piece of cake celebrating a project, leaving early on a Friday afternoon, and team-building exercises that feel more like rewards.

But we’ll boil it down further to that simple question we asked earlier:

Does your employee feel valued?

All of the above and combinations thereof are ways of showing that you value your hard workers! Showing that you are just as invested in their personal successes as they are in the success of your company keeps the balance of give-and-take between you and them.

The value-feeling can differ from person to person, so it’s important to touch base with your staff on a regular basis (not one-and-done!) to keep up with what they want to see, what they want to be able to learn or achieve, and how those specific goals can make your organization stronger, better, more capable, and more enthusiastic. At any level, make sure that you and your managers are all approachable, open to reasonable critique, and excited to see the work your employees do and the ideas they have for the future.
You hired them because you saw their drive. Don’t let a lack of value drive them elsewhere.

If you need help on leadership training for your management or on talent acquisition, we’d love to partner with you to bring the best and brightest to your company… and then make sure they stay! Let’s connect.