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The workplace is constantly changing. Gone are the days when employees would stick it out at dead-end jobs and places they felt undervalued just to maintain job security. Today’s workforce wants to feel their employer values their work and them as human beings.
In fact, research shows that about 61% of employees — especially millennials — would choose to work in a place where they feel appreciated rather than where they are paid more. Research also shows companies that create and sustain a culture where employees thrive perform better than those that do not.
But what exactly can an organization do to make its employees feel valued? In this article, we will discuss humanizing employee experience and how to do it so that your workers feel appreciated.
The first step toward humanizing the workplace is recognizing and acknowledging that each employee is their own person with unique feelings and emotions. The office environment should not be a mechanical space where people are expected to complete mundane tasks and be accountable for them. In today’s workspace, employees want to feel heard and understood. They want to feel that the company is invested in them the same way they are invested in the organization’s mission and success.
After all, people spend most of their waking hours in an office. They go through major life experiences during their employment phase, be it marriage, buying their first home, the birth of their children, etc. Humanizing employee experience means providing an environment where employees can experience all life motions and thrive while still performing their duties.
Every human being wants to be heard, and this is especially true in the workforce. Therefore, creating an environment that encourages open communication, collaboration, and interaction across demographic groups and job functions gives your employees a sense of belonging.
Additionally, a company should encourage employees to build support networks, mentorships, and friendships with people around them. And having people who can open up significantly can increase engagement and productivity among your employees.
Inclusion can also be as simple as offering your employees alternative payment methods to choose what works best for them. For example, should consider using crypto to pay out bonuses. If they choose this method, companies should ensure that employees have secure crypto wallets for receiving and storing payments.
Your company’s responsibility is to empower employees to act in their roles. A recent study by Work Institute found that one of the key reasons employees quit companies was a lack of empowerment and career development. In fact, less than 1% of employees confessed to leaving their jobs for pay reasons.
Therefore, every company needs to invest in their employees’ empowerment from a growth and advancement standpoint to ensure they retain more employees in the long run.
Most companies profile employees based on competency and skill set. And there is nothing wrong with that. But we should also realize that people are unique in their own way.
In addition to skills and competency, acknowledging each employee’s personality can pave the way to understand better their needs and preferences and what makes them more productive. This way, you can better understand the whole employee journey – from headhunting to candidate experience and everyday work in the office.
Companies should also try to understand and appreciate their employees’ diversity. Employees will feel valued in an organization that tries to understand who they are as individuals. For instance, learning basic phrases in Korean or other represented languages such as Swahili or Mandarin and taking the time to write short birthday notes to employees in their native language will make them feel much more appreciated.
How often do you include your employees in the process of creating the vision of an optimal work experience?
Including all employees from across demographic groups and job functions in developing company goals allow them to contribute to the thought process, making them feel like they are an important part of your business. Typically, employees are more likely to be enthusiastic about the work they have helped to plan.
Data on business processes consume most business owners and company executives. The main focus is for every employee to do their best to achieve their maximum potential. In many cases, this tends to crowd awareness of the core of employees’ needs that support productivity.
Therefore, empathy is key for every leader to understand how each employee experiences the work environment. When business leaders empathize with their employees, they design a work environment that helps them stay engaged. When empathy is woven into the fabric of daily life, people relate with their heads and hearts, and their minds become receptive to new ways of working.
This seems obvious, but when organizations focus too much on business objectives, it’s easy to forget that employees are not machines but people with human needs. When those needs are satisfied, productivity increases, and the business thrives. Humanizing the employment experience helps design a work environment where the company and the employees think as one.
Ask them to learn what others desire and feel using surveys and sentiment analysis techniques. By letting employees answer simple questions in their own words, these tools allow firms of all sizes to measure how employees feel about their positions. Managers can better understand how important the work is, how well employees cooperate with their team, and whether they feel like they’re growing at the company.
