4Cs Blog: Happy Employees = Happy Customers

 Before you accept the job offer

When I read stories about people dying at their desks , Sweden’s move to adopt a 6 hour work week seems like an impossible yet hugely desirable dream. Working insane hours for many of us is often the result of unreasonable expectations and it really is killing us. To keep our jobs we are often under pressure to work longer and longer hours to prove ourselves. We no longer work for our families, we work for companies that don’t seem to care about their employees. The experiences of former Apple and Amazon employees make us wonder where senior management is learning how to treat people and why this behavior is tolerated.

Since 6 hour workdays are a long, long way off perhaps the best we can for now is be extremely careful about accepting job offers in the first place. Instead of accepting the first job offer to come along we need to look closer at potential employers and watch for warning signs that tell us we should say thanks but no thanks.

Sure, a good work ethic and strong ambition are keys to success, which drives increased professional and financial opportunities. But our culture also suffers from the glorification of busy. If you're not overwhelmed — merely surviving — at home, and especially at work, then you're not doing it right. Longer hours, late-night emails and weekend check-ins are believed to be badges of honor and equate to status. The associated stress is just par for the course.

High levels of stress impede health and wellness, from sedentary lifestyles to lack of sleep. Second to money, work accounts for 60 percent of stress, according to the Stress in America survey by the American Psychological Association. Not only can stress take a toll on health, but it can negatively affect relationships as well. The APA

reports that 41 percent of adults who are married or living with a partner said they've yelled at their spouse because of work stress and 18 percent said they were short with a co-worker. To help combat the glorification (and suffering) of busyness and stress, employers can make cultivating a low-stress work environment a priority. Emphasize the importance of breaks, work-life balance and open communication to discuss any frustrations.

The following 10 tactics can also help create a productive and efficient environment where employees can relieve and manage stress.

How to be out of sight but not out of mind!

A stroll through the office can give you a pretty good sense of the mood at your work place. You can tell if it’s humming or if it feels broken, tired and pathetic. But what insight do you have when you work from home? No one can see you so they have no clue what your mood is. As more and more people choose to work from home, how can you tell if they are engaged if you can’t see them? And how, if you are the person working from home, do you feel connected to your company when you are alone at your house?

Work gets a lot more challenging when you are at home because you have to shift the way you approach your work and how you actually get it done. In terms of employee engagement, which is still very much a part of the remote experience, you have to realize you need to shift how you manage your own engagement and you have to own it. There is nobody around who can sense what you are experiencing, get signals from you or have a grasp on your level of happiness and satisfaction. Your engagement is all up to you.

4 key areas that help you to own it are as follows:

The most typical motivation plan is to reward top performers and ignore everyone else. It is common knowledge that if you want something done at work, offer a bonus!
The problem is that this commonly used technique for motivating employees does not work! Senior management may be notorious for offering cash incentives in an effort to encourage (or manipulate) us to do more but, it turns out, we are not as manipulable as some bosses think we are.

Dan H. Pink, a leader in motivation, work and management, explains that the way we think about cash bonuses is backwards from what we would expect. Interestingly, studies show bonuses actually de-motivate workers instead of encouraging them. In a clever RSA video Pink explains how rewarding top performers causes worse performance and that when employees are paid enough money, it is possible to incentivize them using other, far more successful, techniques that result in increased engagement and loyalty.

In his video, Pink lists three things that actually do lead to better performance:

Autonomy: the desire we all share to direct our own lives. There is proof that the more autonomous we feel at work the higher the levels of employee engagement will be.

Mastery: We all want to get better at something. This is why some of us use our free time to learn how to play the guitar or study photography; we aspire to learn a new skill or craft for the pleasure and satisfaction.

Purpose: we all want to feel like we are making a contribution. If money and profits matter without a sense of purpose bad things happen. Service becomes lame, products are bad and work becomes uninspiring.

A good benefits package can make the difference between winning over a talented and in-demand employee or losing him or her to an established competitor in your industry. But the costs of benefits grows every year and can leave you pinching pennies elsewhere just to keep the doors open. Benefits can make up a large portion of an employer's costs. In fact, a recent report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that private industry employers spent an average of $31.39 per hour worked on employee compensation, and that the cost of benefits made up an average 30.5 percent of these costs. Bearing this in mind, here's a look at how you can maintain a good benefits package while cutting costs.

Tailored Benefits

Your current benefits package may not be appropriate for your employees, as there is no one-size-fits all package. Some benefits providers base their packages on demographical information for your company, while others compile packages based on the group experiences of companies in your industry. If you are a small company, your benefits provider may be calculating the individual health risks of your employees rather than aggregating your data with that of other companies in your industry. If this is the case, you can save money by choosing a new benefits partner that takes into account the industry average costs rather than your company's individual risk.

 Is it dead?

Absolutely not!

Employee surveys are not only a valuable weapon for getting financial support from senior management to fix employee engagement problems, they are also the only way to measure progress and benchmark success. Besides, how else would you know what your employees think unless you ask them?

Make it work for you and make it count with these essential tips:

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