Designing an Employee Friendly Workplace

There is little doubt that the long-term success and growth of any business depends to a great extent on employee satisfaction and retention. Making your company an attractive place to work and creating a positive and progressive working environment is important to ensuring job satisfaction, developing talent and inspiring loyalty. Below are some essential tips to help ensure business success as well as employee satisfaction.

 

 

Offering professional development opportunities is crucial to ensuring employee growth as well as job satisfaction. The more equipped and confident employees feel to perform their role the better the results. 

Keeping your workers stimulated and challenged will ensure that no one feels as if they are stagnating which overtime can lead to disengagement, this can help inspire loyalty as well as make the business a more attractive place to work long-term. Offering a variety of training programmes and learning opportunities will show employees that the business is committed towards their professional development.

 

 

In order for employees to feel motivated and incentivised they need a clear idea of the steps that they will need to take to advance their careers and develop the skills and expertise needed to make progress and achieve their objectives. 

Understanding exactly how their talents and input will be put to use in order to ensure their own professional development as well as the current growth and future of the business is key to ensuring that each employee is positively engaged in their work and can fulfil their potential.

 

 

The key to ensuring a smooth transition on this front is to initiate the planning process early, starting with open and honest communication on the matter between senior employees and management. 

 

The lines have started to blur in recent years around retirement, which is no longer a clearly defined issue. Many older people nowadays may wish to continue working beyond retirement, particularly those that have been loyal to a company for a long time and enjoy their roles as well as the social aspect. For some individuals it may be a question of reducing their hours, so they can still enjoy the benefits of working while also increasing their leisure time. 

 

 

The best way to manage succession planning in this current climate is to open a dialogue early with your senior employees and find out their wishes so you can plan accordingly. The alternative is that senior employees may worry that they have no future in their companies beyond retirement, or feel as if they are being pushed out the door in the favour of fresh new talent, and there is no doubt that companies benefit from having senior talent and expertise around for as long as possible.

 

 

Having the flexibility to adapt to different employee needs in order to ensure that each and every employee in your business has a healthy work/life balance has a very important role to play in employee retention. In the case of employees with disabilities, or as discussed above, employees that may be approaching retirement and wish to reduce their hours, viable alternatives might need to be considered. Some examples include job sharing, working from home and flexibility with working hours.