8 Ways To Make Your Employees Love You

Most of your employees want to divorce you. A recent Right Management survey revealed that 84% of employees either strongly or somewhat agree with the statement, “Sometimes I feel trapped in my current job and want to find a new position elsewhere.”

As a team leader or business owner, you can’t afford to neglect your greatest asset: your people.

How do you show them you care, engage them and entice them to stay?

We know that people don’t leave bad companies; they leave their manager or current situation. So as the team leader, you have the power to engage and retain staff.

In addition, the members of your team can be your greatest promoters when they believe that you are working to make them more successful.

Here are 8 ways to make your employees adore you.

1. Know what makes them groan.

We all have tolerations – those things we put up with even though they drain our energy. Often our tolerations are specific, affecting us individually and making us feel as if our personal values are being violated—such as a policy that makes it hard to spend time with family. In organizations, some tolerations are universally experienced by the majority of team members. It could be the cumbersome travel-booking system or the challenge in finding a conference room. As a leader, know what your team’s most irksome issues are and do what you can to eliminate or diminish them – or at least let your team know you are working on them.

2. Try performance elevation, not evaluation.  

 I can tell when it’s performance evaluation time for my clients. They are frustrated, feel a sense of dread and overwhelm, and they complain – all of them. Rather than treating the evaluation as an opportunity to acknowledge, support, and strengthen an employee’s skills, many managers treat the process as tedious busywork. If you can’t get out of administering them, do everything you can to make them more palatable—to yourself as well as the employee. Turn them into quarterly systems with easy reporting templates. Use them to celebrate the employee’s accomplishments and talents. No matter how you choose to reinvent them, let your team members spread the work out, and do everything you can to make the evaluation less painful.

3. Make meetings merry.

Do people look forward to team meetings, or do their stomachs turn when they see “team meeting” in their calendar? According to a recent study conducted by Young Gin Choi, Junehee Kwon, and Wansoo Kim, workplace fun is a significant factor in job satisfaction. If “fun” sounds frivolous, think of the bottom line: losing your talent is expensive. Get creative to make your meetings the ones people look forward to. I have a client who starts every meeting with a funny video she found on YouTube. The members of her team like it so much, they never show up late for a team powwow.

4. Focus on family.

The distinction between work time and free time is quickly fading. More and more, corporate culture only rewards those employees who are available 24/7. As a leader, you need to acknowledge this trend, but you’ll earn your employees’ loyalty if you try to understand their family situations. When appropriate, involve family members in your team’s activities. It’s equally important to avoid exploiting the team members who are single and/or don’t have kids. They may have fewer family activities on their calendars, but this doesn’t make it OK to tap their time off. Before you send a text to a team member after hours or ask them to work overtime, make sure it’s really necessary to interrupt their personal lives.

5. Boost personal awareness.

Get to know your employees and help them get them to know themselves and each other. Take time to do this in meetings and in informal settings – like at the water cooler. Use tools like StrengthsFinder 2.0 to uncover and learn about each others’ strengths or Myers Briggs to learn about each others’ personality styles. By making it personal, you’ll strengthen connections at all levels.

6. Encourage encouragement. 

Make it known to the members of your team that praise, acknowledgment, and appreciation have no upper limit. Build a culture of appreciation and be the role model by publicly acknowledging great work and accomplishments. Expressing gratitude is powerful for the giver and recipient. Ensure it’s authentic – your people can see through false praise.

7. Seek feedback and use it.

The best performance evaluations cover 360 degrees. Create frequent, easy and regular opportunities to get the feedback of your employees. Then let them know what you learned from the feedback and how you are going to use it. Incorporate feedback into meetings and have a feedback wall where employees can share their thoughts publicly. Don’t get defensive, and don’t forget to look for positive feedback too: it’s important to know what’s working.

8. Make them stars.

Take every opportunity to publicize the value created by your team members. Make their achievements visible internally and externally. If someone has posted an article on the web, share it with the members of your network. If they did something to mentor or coach a colleague, make sure the leaders in HR know. If they volunteered to solve a problem in another part of the company although it was not a part of their job, make it public. Don’t try to take the credit for these achievements. If you let your stars shine, you and your team will create a constellation that upper-management can’t ignore.

These 8 tips reflect the reality that retention—not endless recruitment—is the best way to invest in human resources.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/williamarruda/2014/07/15/8-ways-to-make-your-employees-love-you