Making Employees Excited to Come to Work

Every employee at every company has their role to play, from handling the essential duties of a Florida personal injury lawyer to doing the paperwork no one else wants to. Despite this, many employees feel unmotivated with their jobs and may be considering quitting altogether.

While increasing employee engagement wouldn’t stop all of these people from leaving, it could make holding on to the rest of your workforce and any new people much easier. Read on to learn just a few things you can do to increase your employee’s engagement and make them excited to come into work.

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Be Flexible

Flexibility is vital for employees to enjoy working with your company, and it comes in two varieties: work location and scheduling.

Obviously some work needs to happen in the office. However, not all of it does, and so you could offer remote-working opportunities to the employees who do these tasks. Even if you don’t want many employees to be working from home very often, offering up the option to do so every now and then will make many employees happier and more relaxed.

Life is full of the unexpected. Sometimes this means you slip and fall and need to take a day or two off of work to recover. Other times, someone in your family may fall suddenly ill or even pass away. Occasionally, your child will simply have a fun after-school activity they want to go to and you need to be ready to pick them up after it’s done.

No matter the reason, employees may occasionally need to ask for a slightly different schedule. Being flexible enough to oblige will make employees feel less stressed and more willing to enjoy life outside of work. Being able to find joy while at home via hobbies or what have you will make them much happier at work as well, which is good for everyone.

Recognize Achievements

Your employees make your company function, so appreciate them more. Recognize and award their achievements. This doesn’t always have to mean you give them a raise (though doing so every now and then would make them feel appreciated as well).

Sometimes, a thank you is all that’s necessary. However, you will have employees who will go above and beyond occasionally. Maybe they spend a lot of overtime to get themselves more organized, they work diligently to make sure an important project is perfect, or some other notable instance if increased effort occurs.

These people may deserve gifts, awards or small events as recognition for a job well done. So long as the employees’ achievements are recognized, the more likely they’ll be to put extra effort into their work because they’ll know it won’t be wasted.

Communicate

In life, a large number of problems could be easily resolved if everyone just communicated effectively. Your company is no exception. Setting clear goals and expectations and being open to answer any questions employees may have are massive steps you can take that will put you ahead of much of your competition. However, communication needs to go both ways.

Think about it this way: your employees are in the trenches, doing the heavy lifting and dealing with the customers all day. They know what policies are helpful, which are harmful and which have little to no impact because they interact with them so often. If you don’t and suddenly make a change, sure, it could be good, but it also could be horrendous.

Discussing the change with your employees before it happens could warn you of the road bumps you’ll encounter and whether the change is even worth it or not. Even when a specific policy shift must be made, simply allowing your employees to raise concerns and ask questions will help them realize that you understand their perspective which will make them more likely to try and make it work. If you understand why a rule is the way it is, you’re more likely to be willing to work around it, after all.

Provide Training Opportunities

Some employees reach a certain rank in your organization and are happy to stay there. Others seek to climb the ladder and see exactly how far up the chain of command they can go.

Whether this is just for personal satisfaction, better pay, benefits and responsibilities, or both, you’ll find these employees much more engaged if there are training opportunities made available to them.

Allowing your people to improve their skills in-house not only makes them more likely to reach their goals, it also makes them more likely to stick around and keep up the culture they benefited so much from.

Training can even be beneficial for the employees who are happy with their positions because it can allow them to get better at what they’re already good at or help them understand a part of the job they struggle with better. Once again, you’d be increasing employee satisfaction and improving their work ethic all in one fell swoop.

Encourage Teamwork

Encouraging your employees to work well as a team isn’t always as hard as it seems. Setting aside time for your employees to get to know one another, for example, is a great way to get them to understand each other which will make any and all group efforts much easier to get through.

Games are a great way to do this because it will encourage your employees to think outside of the box, explain their solutions to their team and then try and actually pull them off. This can simulate difficult projects in a low-stakes environment and therefore prepare them for the future challenges you’ll set for them.

There is more to teamwork than just bonding activities, though. It’s also about learning who can’t work together and who fits in what roles. Some people just aren’t cut out for leadership roles for example, and people with opposite personalities are almost always going to squabble. These hangups need to be taken into consideration when project teams are created.

Essentially, don’t put two people who hate each other on the same team and don’t put someone not fit for a leadership role into one and your team should do just fine. Be prepared, though; a team may need to be shifted around if it isn’t working well, even when you thought it would.