No workplace is perfect, but it is easy to see when there may be some under-performance in some sectors of a business, if you cannot figure out why this may be happening, here are 5 mistakes you may be making with your employees 1) Being unavailable/inaccessible There are endless reasons as to why an employee would need to contact their boss during a workday for things both big and small, how often are you missing these texts or calls? Maybe your employee even heads to your office but gets turned away sine you aren’t currently available. This is a huge mistake you could be making, you may seem unreliable as a leader if your employees are unable to contact you quickly for small things or within good time for bigger issues. How many ways are there for your workers to contact you and how often are you checking them? If you aren’t often readily available to your employees you aren’t being a leader to your team. Betterup states in their guide to becoming an effective leader that “Effective leaders live by strong values that guide their decisions and behaviors. They know right from wrong and are honest in their interactions with others. Creativity. Effective leaders think outside the box to come up with innovative solutions to business problems, and creative ways to reach business goals.” by being unavailable or inaccessible you are losing your ability to guide and problem solve with your team, causing frustration possible distrust, or doubt. 2) Not Taking time to bond Every leader should be well aware of how crucial team building is for all members of a business, if you neglect efforts to bond you’ll be putting your whole team at many disadvantages and you will have created a space with low employee engagement. The bonds you have with your staff are important for your own personal development as well as for the business, it will be well worth your time to implement team building into a monthly or weekly schedule. Bonds between workers are what create the ideal workplace and without them, there will be an increase in boredom, stress, anxiety, and many other similar issues. If you are not taking the time to bond with workers and aren’t allowing time to do so amongst themselves you are neglecting their emotional needs. Every leader must take emotions into account in order for their workers to feel comfortable and heard no matter their role in the workplace. Humans are emotionally driven in all sectors of life and although sometimes work may not be the place for emotions we cannot ignore them, space to express and be listened to will bring great things to your business. 3) Not driving change Change is inevitable, the world is forever changing in many ways so if you sit and stay the same you will fall behind as the rest of the world develops and moves ahead into the future. We shouldn’t fear change, it should be encouraged. Change helps us improve, move on from mistakes and become the best versions of ourselves. No business would improve if they had feared change and stayed exactly as they were when they first started out. Big or small, change is a necessity in life and if you aren’t driving change how can you expect employees to improve and further develop skills and talent that is used in your own workplace. Organisational change provides new insights and advantages, you should be taking suggestions and implementing key changes throughout your team to find what works best, and even the best ideas can be developed and improved upon. 4) No regular feedback A vital factor to employee development is regular feedback on any work being done, if you do not bother with feedback at all you could be leaving staff feeling uncertain or even feeling unaccomplished in their work. Feedback is needed in order to congratulate as well as reinforce the expectations set at the beginning or new expectations. When employees feel well appreciated and gain confidence in their work, you will see improvements in laces such as motivation, employee engagement, and the workplace culture. If you do not give your employees regular feedback you may be misunderstanding motivation. We all enjoy being congratulated when we have done something well and may feel slightly down if we don’t receive the praise we initially expected or hoped for. These factors hinder motivation greatly but even more so, without feedback, it may seem as if you do not care about their work, this could lead to employees becoming lazy and unappreciative of their own work which will lead to many disadvantages. 5) Avoiding conflict In every workplace, there will be conflict no matter what you do to prevent it as people have conflicting personalities, opinions, and ideas quite often, especially in larger groups. Not only in the workplace but in every aspect of life, if we simply ignore the bad things they will never go away. The correct strategy is to face these things head-on, reach the route of the problem and begin to implement new strategies to resolve the issue, and perhaps have a plan in place if there are ever any similar occurrences. On top of avoiding conflict, there is a possibility that you may be managing conflict ineffectively which may be causing worse or more frequent conflicts. In The Emotioneering Podcast, Melissa Curran brushes upon conflict at work in episode 57, where she discusses “How do we handle it? How do we be better at it? Not just the conflict, How do we be helpful, how do we support, how do we encourage people in an emotional environment” These are questions you may want to begin asking yourself in order to better deal with conflict as you need to discuss not only the issue at hand but what other factors contributed to it, what could’ve been handled better for next time, etc. Ridding these mistakes from your workplace will begin to lead you towards a much more engaged and happier environment with motivated employees.
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The Modern Mind Group offers outsourced people (HR) and performance services. Taking a modern approach to business is the answer to increased profits, highly engaged teams and record breaking results. The Modern Mind Group use their own Emotioneering® Business Formula as a framework alongside the Emotioneering® Blueprint Scorecard to measure success with each business that they work with. Offering a personal and unique service. Competent, reliable and approachable consultants.
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