In an increasingly competitive job market, many companies today find it challenging to attract talent, leaving recruiters wondering what makes a candidate choose this employer over that employer. The answer is quite simple. Having a workplace culture that people want to be a part of.
As an employer, once you’ve successfully attracted talent, how do you engage your employees to get the best out of them and, in turn, earn their loyalty? While stimulating, challenging and meaningful work plays a crucial role in employee engagement and workplace culture, again, plays a significant role.
Think of your workplace culture as the foundation for creating employee engagement. Does your company have a culture that is conducive to creating engagement? Creating a culture with the conditions for employees to thrive begins with being transparent, sharing company core values and clear communication.
Here are 4 tips for creating a culture where employees thrive:
1. Create Opportunities for Connection
Starting with the essentials — every employee should, of course, feel safe and welcomed at work. Employers can help cultivate these feelings by creating an open, warm and welcoming work environment where employees can connect with their colleagues.
A Forbes article entitled 5 Ways Social Connections Can Enhance Your Employee Wellness shares, “Work relationships are incredibly important to employee wellbeing. It’s about more than just ‘getting along’ with a co-worker. As humans, we crave contact and connection with other people.”
How do you support and encourage this? By creating a sense of belonging through social opportunities and group interactions.
2. Show Employees the True Value of Their Compensation
Make employees aware of your total investment in them beyond just their salary. In other words, what besides salary do you offer each of your employees? How do you contribute to employee work-life balance?
In Benify’s award-winning employee portal, employees are presented with an illustration showing the value of their employer’s total investment in the form of a Total Reward Statement. This statement gives the individual a monetary breakdown of their salary, pension, insurances, and other benefits paid to them as part of their compensation, providing a clear overview of the components adding up to their total compensation.
By visually demonstrating your full commitment, employees are able to see their true worth. Appreciation goes a long way in creating a positive culture.
3. Ensure Employees Connect with Company Values
Doing meaningful work is important for every employee. Knowing exactly what a company stands for and what its core values help create a feeling of connectedness to the company and its mission. This is especially important to millennials who want to understand how they fit in with the company, their job and their team.
Feeling a sense of connectedness also contributes to employee retention. In fact, according to Gallup, 71% of millennials who strongly agree that they know what their organisation stands for and what makes it different from its competitors say they plan to be with their company for at least one year.
4. Encourage Employees to Practice Company Core Values
Employers should find ways to help their employees understand and practice the company’s core values. One way to do this is to make in part of the employee’s onboarding. During the onboarding process, employees should be given ways to understand the company’s cores values and personalise the values in a way that resonate with them.
A positive workplace with a strong culture leads to increased employee engagement, and a thriving culture, of course, means greater productivity and greater success for your company.
If you want to learn more about how to unlock your employees’ potential, download your free copy of Benify’s eBook Employee Engagement: Unlocking Your Employees’ Potential now!
