Keeping your employees safe and satisfied is key to creating a friendly and supportive atmosphere at work.
Sometimes those basic rules can be neglected due to burning deadlines or an enormous amount of work. It is essential to understand that continuous violation of working conditions and employees’ labor rights may lead to staff turnover or even a workers strike.
Employees who know their value sometimes feel the need to join unions seeking help, support, and fair treatment or compensation. There are some core fundamentals you can establish to ensure a smooth workflow and avoid strike action.
Work Environment
Creating a positive work environment will allow your employees to stay engaged in the working processes. To do so, you need to eliminate any technical issues that can appear during their work and provide them with all the necessary tools and information to perform their tasks. It will help to minimize distractions, keep them focused and motivated. With the absence of small irritations and daily problems, these improved working conditions will lift the mood of the the whole team!
The next important thing is to keep your workers motivated and interested in the company’s goals. Provide them with ongoing specialized courses, training, and workshops, and invest in their development. It will show them that you value them as professionals, want them to grow and gain new skills, and give them an opportunity to do so.
Make sure your employees know how much you appreciate them. Taking their professional successes for granted is not the best tactic to encourage them to keep evolving. Allocate time to celebrate a team’s success and all its members, emphasizing their changes and development. You can either take some time to do it personally or acknowledge them via the company’s internal newsletter once in a few weeks.
Communication
Establishing open and even communication basics that exclude vertical relationships is crucial because it allows your workers to seek advice or help directly from you rather than from other sources such as unions. As it may not be possible in larger companies, it is still vital to develop communication chains to connect workers’ opinions and management decisions.
There are multiple ways to let your workers share their opinions, visions on the company’s development, or general thoughts about what can be done to improve their workplace. For example, you can introduce team leaders’ meetings once a week, asking them to prepare weekly reports, let them take the initiative and show you what ideas they have!
Another great tool is to conduct regular surveys in order to evaluate workers’ spirit and satisfaction and ask them open questions (people tend to open up more when there is an option to answer anonymously). From the very first survey you will already be able to see the overall atmosphere at work clearly, and what issues need to be fixed in the first place.
Respond to Feedback
When you ask workers for feedback, the most important thing is to be consistent and implement actual changes according to the results you’ve got. It is not enough to ask people for their opinion to make them heard. Only the response reaction will satisfy their needs and show them that their actions matter.
Employers must take seriously the feelings of employees as the possibility to eliminate a strike depends on it. If there are already some irritations or labor disputes in your company, you do not want to create an illusion of interest – it will only make things worse.
Prepare a list of changes your workers expect from you, examine it, and deal with the primary ones right away. Next, you can prepare your response to the demands and discuss them with your employees to find a solution that will satisfy everyone. The aim is not to do anything employees come up with but start a conversation that will only affect your company in a good way.
Conclusion
Your employees’ satisfaction is your company’s primary engine if you want it to develop and be successful. Maintaining the workplace atmosphere as positive, supportive, and healthy will allow you to avoid strikes or repeated staff turnover. You will also increase the overall productivity and engagement at work.
To do so, you need to establish open communication in your workplace, give your employees the autonomy to perform their work, and implement new initiatives. Provide your workers with appropriate working conditions that include having all the necessary information and tools and asking them for feedback regularly to learn what they need.
The best thing you can do is invest in your employees. And investing means not only buying additional courses or introducing beneficial programs but your time and effort in the first place. Ensure that your workers feel visible and heard, appreciated, and valued, and have the opportunity to grow as professionals within your company.
