Ever experienced a nightmare where your best employee resigns from your organization? Or worse.
All your best-performing employees resign together. Sounds scary, right?
After all, these employees are the pillars of your business’s efficiency. Losing them will mean losing business strength. But that is not even the worst part.
Chances are this nightmare can soon take the shape of reality if you take employees for granted.
There is a significant percentage of the global workforce that leaves organizations due to poor job satisfaction.
A whopping 76%
of employees don’t feel appreciated enough in their current job. This makes engagement such a critical factor in employee retention.
This is exactly what we are going to cover in this post. In the following section, we will demystify the top five strategies that you can deploy to show your employees that you care.
5 Ways to boost empathy in your employees to make a high-performing team
Here is the thing.
There is no one size fits all strategy that can alleviate your employee engagement.
Just like your end customers, your employees have different personalities. Their inspirations and needs are different. This makes understanding your employees a core need.
From here you can navigate your way into small acts of kindness and empathy.
It will only help you foster a positive and productive culture in your workspace.
But that is not all.
Chances are you will come across opportunities to optimize your business operation structures that can alleviate your employees to perform even better.
The following section dives deep into the top-performing strategies that can create significant improvement in employee perception of the brand and their subsequent retention.
1. Establish an employee wellbeing program
One of the biggest challenges that your business can face in employee management is keeping making sure that they keep up with the workspace pressure.
Fail to do it right, you need to get ready to experience a series of unproductive employees.
More sick leaves, less daily production, and higher employee insurance costs are bound to happen.
This is why employee well-being programs are so crucial. It helps your employees to glide with the tide. It helps to show them that you care.
An effective employee well-being program can be many things.
There is so much that you can do here. From upskilling perks, fun Fridays to team parties, the list goes on.
If you are still confused about what to do and what not, here is a massive employee wellbeing guide that can give you better ideas of how to deploy the perfect employee well-being program.
Here is a word of caution.
Your employee wellness programs need to be an extension of your company. It will reinforce the ethos that you have as an organization.
Following are a few well-being initiatives that you should consider today.
a) Start with personal growth
When you are interested in your employee’s personal growth, not only do you benefit from experiencing higher productivity but retain them for a longer period.
There are multiple ways to deploy this.
From upskilling opportunities like sponsoring higher studies or creating programs like leave without pay for higher study opportunities, you can test all.
You can even diversify this investment by developing their mindset and lifestyle habits for a healthy comprehensive life. You can try using some software, there are great platforms to help you achieve this goal.
b) Prioritize their health
Irrespective of the health discipline and fitness of your employees, health challenges are bound to happen. Investing in health insurance comes in handy here. It keeps your employees stress-free from medical expenses. But you need to ensure you get comprehensive here.
Thinking of medical insurance, it is not only for your employees. It should cover their families too. If there is one thing that your employees care about more than themselves, it is them.
That being said, if your resources are low, you don’t need to go deep. However, just covering their basic medical facilities shows that you care.
2. Donation matching
Your corporate social responsibility program can become more impactful when you create an inclusive philanthropic venture.
In such a case, donation matching is just the program that you should look for. Here not only do you involve your company resource but your employee’s resource to drive a social change.
This gives your employees an opportunity to create a social impact at a higher level. Think of it like a partnered venture.
There is so much that you can do here. From employee in-kind matching donations, financial matching, team grants there is always more ways. However, if you have to get a deeper look at the mechanism of how these strategies work, you can learn more here.
But here’s a thing.
Donation matching not only creates an opportunity to drive social change but also creates brand value at the same time. This makes this program as strategic as it is from empathy.
While choosing your non-profit donation portfolio, ensure that you select to partner up with the non-profits that interest your employees the most.
3. Establish a mental wellness program
Mental health has long taken a back seat in the priority list of employers while planning your employee well-being program. But, can you really afford to take your employee’s cognitive wellness for granted anymore?
Post pandemic, your remote employees are inflicted with multi-level stress and anxiety. If zoom fatigue was not enough, your employees experience some levels of depression due to restricted human interaction.
As an employer, there is so much that you can do to alleviate this.
To start with, you need to create a mental health discipline that can curb the impact of any mental health issue, when it occurs. Use this detailed employee mental health guide to help you navigate better. From there, you can utilize a number of strategies.
Deploy a counseling program.
Be it work pressure or personal issues you never know when your employees need help.
Promote your employees the habit of journaling. It is a great tool to channel repressed emotions. Just don’t forget to get creative.
4. Deploy employee recognition programs
According to Gallup’s research, 67 percent of employees who receive positive feedback from their employers are extremely engaged at work.
This makes employee recognition critical.
The best part? Creating an employee recognition program might be easier than you think.
All you need to do is empathize with your employees and understand what they will appreciate the most.
Here are some ideas though.
Ask them to take a break. Incentivize them for their year-long hard work. Sponsor a small family trip for them.
Who does not love a fun holiday after all? If your budget is even lower, sponsor a restaurant trip for them. You can opt for adding a performance bonus too. But ensure that you do it the right way.
Here is a systematic guide that gives you a framework to give bonuses to employees. But you can do more to keep your employees at the top of their game.
Programs like employee of the month, cross-department hackathons are great initiatives too.
5. Foster a healthy work-life balance
Creating a healthy work-life balance might not look like the best act of kindness for your employees. But look harder.
It is in fact the most sustainable empathetic action that you can give your employees any day. Here is the thing.
Irrespective of your employee’s skill, staying at peak performance all the time is impossible, especially when your business floor is vulnerable to pressure. In such cases, burnout is inevitable.
The worst part is that too much pressure might cost you your best employees. They may end up leaving your organization after a few years. Here is what you can do to stop that.
Deploy a system to track your employee’s office hours to ensure that your employees are not overbooked into work.
Rescuetime is a powerful time tracking tool that you can deploy here.
Fostering a ‘work and play’ culture in your office is something that your employees are going to appreciate in the long term. But that is not all.
You need to make sure you understand why burnout is happening. In most cases, the number of tasks is not the only factor. It is the toxic office culture.
Fix the issue, and balance will be restored. Here is a detailed guide on how to handle a toxic work environment.
Once you do that, you can deploy schedule optimization processes. This will create the right expectations and set them to do more. Take a few things off their plate. Deploy automation tools, This will only improve efficiency in the long run.
Conclusion
While you must have got a comprehensive idea of how to manage your employee’s emotional engagement with your brand, this is not the end. You must keep on reiterating your ideas and get creative about it.
Here is some parting advice to keep you in the right direction about it.
Remember, your employees are human first and employees later. So, never forget to make your workplace human.
Go one step more to ensure they can give their best.
A few extra conversations can get you to know much more about your employees.
Be their cheerleaders.
Support them on their lows.
You will be amazed at what wonders these small acts of empathy can act in transforming your workspace.
