Why consider Smart Partnering with Employees?

Picture Credit : JohnCalnan

Happy Employees = Profitable Organization + Productive Workforce

It is normal to change jobs every few years. Individuals are looking for jobs that offer empowerment, growth opportunities, flexible work arrangement and work life balance.  In the current landscape where retaining employees is very difficult, it is critical for employers to develop long lasting relationships with their employees.

 To develop long lasting relationship, employee motivation plays a big role.  Employee motivation happens at 2 levels: Monetary Compensation and Purposeful goals. 

For an employee, monetary compensation and benefits fulfill their basic needs. It is about getting paid for the commitments they made to an employer.  True satisfaction in the job is achieved when employers collaborate with their employees to create purposeful goals and provide growth opportunities. That’s when employees feel engaged and empowered to achieve higher results at workplace. 
To achieve great results, employers need to partner smartly with their employees because it helps to achieve greater profitability and productivity in workforce.   Here are my tips to do smart partnering with employees: 

• Define Purposeful Goals: It is all about knowing what needs to be done to achieve success. You have to work together to define vision, mission, strategies and tactics to help your employee connect and engage at an emotional and psychological level.  It needs to be clear, concise and compelling for them to engage.
• Create Performance Tracker. Creating a performance tracker helps you to communicate and measure their ongoing performance. This process removes most of the surprises. Most of the time, I take initiative to build a draft copy of the performance tracker and then work with my team to perfect it. At the end of the day, they need to own it and track it. What it does is it provides a language for you to have a great dialog with them.
• Implement a Scorecard: Scorecard helps employer and employees to focus on goals. Everyone understands their impact on the business. If you create a crisp and clear scorecard, it helps your team and extended teams to align to the goals. I track my success in 5 categories: Revenue, Satisfaction, Efficiency, Utilization and Engagement to make sure all dimensions are covered.
• Reward and Recognize: Everyone feels great when rewarded and recognized. It applies to your workforce too. Ensure individuals or teams are rewarded and recognized when they make a difference. Celebrating small victories also helps to motivate employees and keep them engaged.
• Active participation in their career growth: Know them personally,  learn about their career path and understand clear what they want to become.  You have to become a catalyst to accelerate their growth. Helping and growing their skills must be a number #1 priority. Take atmost care to grow them.

The steps are simple. Investing your time and efforts to build long lasting relationships with your employees is a great journey. Smart partnering starts when your employee can trust you and open to engage.   Lead your organization by example and partner smartly with them.

 How do you partner your employees? Share your ideas. 

Related Resources:

• Linking Employee Satisfaction with Productivity,Performance, and Customer Satisfaction
• Partnering with Employees
• The 21st century employer-employee partnership – Professionally Speaking
• Enterprise 2.0, employees & profits
• Optimizing the Profitable Link Between Employees and Customer Loyalty Behavior