Earn the respect you ask for

In all relationships, people are more likely to give respect in a situation where they feel like they are already respected. Employee loyalty is a form of respect. If you structure your company culture around excessive demands, arbitrary decisions, confusing plans and unresponsive leadership, would you really blame employees for wondering if their loyalty is valued? Good management at the C-Level is the source of so much else going right or wrong in the firm. If you run your company in a way that communicates respect for your employees, you’re that much more likely to inspire it in them

Employee Engagement Matters

As we at Kazi have talked about in previous posts, and as we believe firmly, employee engagement is really crucial to creating the right atmosphere and relationship with your staff. Building best practices around dealing with employee feedback, input and participation helps create a workplace centered on making sure employees understand that their insights and dedication are valued by their employers.

According to Forbes, better employee engagement also establishes a system that helps employees interact with the workplace in ways beyond just performing their day-to-day tasks.

Don’t micromanage

Loyalty is a corollary of respect. And you know what the best way to show employees you don’t respect them is? Micromanagement! As Inc explains in one of their pieces, a lack of trust is often the reason why managers micromanage.

When employees know their bosses are looming over their every move, they know that their own decision capabilities and ideas aren’t valued. This creates a corporate environment in which employees don’t feel comfortable expressing their opinions.

At Kazi, we work extensively on creating ways for employers to understand better their employees’ ideas and approaches. We can help you develop and implement procedures to get useful and respectful feedback from your employees on how they view and understand the work environment, and how to structure it and management behavior.

Be mindful about employee rewards

Bonuses are great, of course. Who doesn’t love more cash? But just equating employee value with more money diminishes the significance of the company culture. What about extra days off? Or equity? How and when rewards are given out, to whom, and why are all very important. And making sure that company signalling around them is clear and reinforced by management behavior is likewise crucial in creating a performance environment in which employees know that their efforts will be rewarded in a transparent and respectful way.  

In all human relationships, we value respect. That’s what commands loyalty. Work is the same. Cultivate and maintain a work environment that demonstrates to your employees that you respect them, and they will be loyal to you. At Kazi, we spend our time thinking about fit between employer and employee, and the point that comes up again and again by employees is making sure that they have a place that their contributions are valued and taken seriously. It might sometimes be a quick solution to push your people to do something they don’t want to do, but it doesn’t last.

Respect is the only thing that ensures loyalty. We can help you build it. If you’re dealing with an HR issue, Kazi can help you out! Drop us a line and we’d be happy to set up a consultation today!

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Put the Emphasis on “Bottom Up” rather than “Top Down”

The most durable strategies and processes are the ones that are the most organic. When you try to force a change on people from above, they always resent it, and oftentimes will resist it. In this kind of situation, no matter how good your strategy might be in principle, it will fail in practice because people won’t be comfortable with it, and won’t want to adopt it. Consider instead starting your employee engagement strategy from the employees themselves. Rather than company-wide directives, maybe start with a few pilot projects at smaller scale, and include space and incentive for employees to participate in surveys and discussions with the company. Integrate the concept of employee engagement from the interest of the employees themselves. You’ll be surprised how quickly word of a good thing will travel within your company. Soon enough, other employees will want in on the same thing.

Get Clear about Your Data Targets

Everyone knows that you can’t get useful measurements if you’re not clear to yourself about what you’re measuring. No employee engagement strategy will be able to help you if you don’t know what kind of information you need to gather from the engagement. Prepare your strategy long in advance, and think through the kinds of issues you need to get addressed from employee engagement. A lot of people think questionnaires and interviews are as a simple as just asking a few questions. Well, they’re not. At Kazi, we’ve spent thousands of man-hours perfecting our expectations scan, so we know a thing or two about surveys and data collection. And you can’t underestimate the importance of question design. Take the time you need in advance of rolling out employee engagement to make sure you’re gathering the right data, and in a way that you will be able to use at the end. You’ll thank us later!

Make sure to acknowledge high performance

In any employee engagement process, you’re going to find out things about your staff that you might not have known before. And some of it – hopefully! – is going to be really encouraging and positive stuff. And that’s a good thing for you and your employees, as it gives an opportunity for them to have their hard work recognized. But in order for this not to be a lost opportunity, you’re going to need to be ready to acknowledge it and even provide bonuses and rewards that show the employees you see what they’ve done and you are encouraging. Don’t downplay the value of even a small gesture of support. It’s not only the right thing to do, it’ll pay dividends many times over in employee trust, enthusiasm, and loyalty!

Be Ready to make Cultural Changes

Any company that takes employee engagement seriously will eventually have to reckon with the changes to the company culture that this will bring. Both the actual experience of integrating the employee engagement processes into the regular workings of the company, but also the information, revelations, and consequences of what you will learn during your greater regular engagement with your employees. You might find that some people benefit from having more time to work at home, or others can help by moving around from team to team once a year, or even that others create far more problems than they solve. And if you collect and learn this information, and then don’t make the space in your company processes or procedures to do something about it, well, it’s all been a waste. At Kazi, we’ve been working for a long time on how to go from insightful information about your employees to making effective management decisions with your employees. Getting your engagement strategy deployed is going to mean changes are coming. You’re going to have to be ready to make them!

A solid employee engagement strategy is the key to a happy, enthusiastic, loyal staff, and a company that runs smoothly. But like with anything important, the devil is in the details. Make sure you think through the implications of the implementation and consequences of your strategy before rushing headlong into it. At Kazi, we’re specialists in helping our clients through problems just like these. If you’ve got an HR problem, drop us a line today, and we’ll talk!

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Understanding the Difference

The Employee Experience is the broader terms to cover all the parts of an Employee’s life with the firm, from the very first contact until an exit interview. How is the workplace physically and socially structured to improve and foster a robust employee experience? Some firms build an employee experience that’s more lively and vibrant, where other companies choose to create an experience that’s more reflective and focused on individual focus.

Employee Engagement centers on the channels and processes and cultures around how employees interact with the firm, its ideas, its objectives and its people. Just like with Employee Experience, there are multiple ways to do it, but what’s important is that engagement is open and transparent. In order to stay engaged, it’s crucial that employees trust that it will work for them.

The Right Experience for your Company

All companies have distinct, unique cultures, and so the employee experience that comes from them is also distinct. Some international companies, like Facebook, foster active, entrepreneurial, privateering collaboration, summed up in its famous slogan “Move Fast and Break Things.” Other companies choose to have a culture that’s more formal and tailored to quiet, personal work.

For both of these companies, the culture follows from the mission, and the Employee Experience follows from the culture. Employees at your firm should feel that the experience of working there is supportive, comfortable, and consistent with the culture of the company. How are meetings organized? What kind of noise level is the work environment? Is the experience conducive to the kind of work they have to do?

At Kazi, we encourage HR departments to understand how employees navigate the day-to-day work experience and find out if they find it reasonable or helpful for their work life and personal and professional growth. Build an Employee Experience that fits your companies, and inspires your employees.

Engaging People Right

Modern and Contemporary management science has taught us that work life can’t just be a unidirectional process of receiving orders and then performing them. This is dull and uninspiring, and sure to create unengaged employees. Improving performance comes from improving Employee Engagement: how connected do employees feel to the mission and ideas of the company? How valued do they feel as members of a team? If employees feel like their input doesn’t matter, engagement will suffer. According to Gallup, only 15% of white collar employees globally feel “engaged” at work. There’s a lot of room to improve. Managers play a huge role in improving and sustaining employee engagement, through team monitoring, regular conversations, and individual employee attention.

At Kazi, we help managers provide the right employee feedback and recognition to ensure that employees stay engaged and connected to the company’s work, and not left out of processes that matter to them. Engaged employees are happy, productive employees.

The Ideal Combination

When employees have a work environment that is comfortable, responsive, challenging and conducive to personal and professional growth, they return the favor to the employer many times over. But it’s crucial for employers to make sure they have sufficient attention to Employee Experience and Employee Engagement. The most gorgeous office and fun company culture won’t do any good if employees feel ignored. And even the best management practices can suffer if your workforce is stuck in a dispiriting dump.

Survey after survey shows that companies with better employee experience and engagement consistently outperform those without it. So this isn’t just an issue of altruism. Your ability to compete for talent, and compete in your market, depend on it!

Employees: The Most Valuable Resource

In the 21st century, the biggest key to a company’s success won’t be its control of some kind of physical space, or even a patent. It’s going to be the intangible asset of the team itself. Can you attract, train, retain, and grow the best talent on the market? The better your Employee Experience and Employee Engagement is, the better fit you’ll be for some of that talent.

And at Kazi, we know a thing or two about getting the right fit for your employees. If you want to know more about how to improve Experience and Engagement, drop us a line at Kazi, and we would be glad to help you out!

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