Saajan Sharma January 11, 2021 Employee happiness is integral to every company. But, this whole year, due to the pandemic and remote or distributed work model it has become a fairly tough task to keep employees happy. In fact, if we look at the stats then there are many employees who have had stress-triggered in their careers due to salary cuts or firing. 70% of the employees have mentioned in a survey that this COVID-19 time has been the most stressful for them, more than 9/11 or great recession. Data has also revealed that the employees are now expected to log in for an extra of 60 hours in a month just because they are working from home.
One other side and the reason for stress is that employees now are expected to be available on voice and video calls, meetings and messages 24×7. This has made them feel like they are living at work or homing at work. Digital connectivity has helped significantly in working in silos from home and still being able to brainstorm together but on the flip side, the constant pressure to be available has taken a toll.
Now, as we have started realising the cons, and how it is depleting employee happiness drastically, we must take certain simple steps in which we as businesses can take care of the same. In this blog, below, we share a few simple tips to increase it. Take a look!
- Promote work-life balance-
Work-life balance can be attained when there is a schedule. Follow fixed work hours and keep them flexible only when required. Make sure you keep the communication limited to professional apps only like zoom, Gmail, don’t barge in with a workgroup on WhatsApp. Otherwise, it will turn into a habit to discuss work day in and day out. You can also encourage the employees to have a routine and work on a priority basis by making two buckets- important and urgent. This will bring in more clarity and productivity in their work. - Training and development- Employees would love it if you will get a relevant online course or webinar for them to attend. But make sure that you don’t ask them to take the training as an additional task. Give them time to do the same, reduce the workload or keep it doable from the start so that they have time for the training. HRMS software can help you in organising and tracking everything related to the training and development of the employees.
- Thrive the culture of appreciation-
It is quite easy to forget appreciating and recognising the efforts of your employees. Instead of forgetting or recognising them over a call, you should use HRMS software to give a badge or reward to the employees. There must be some employees who have become more productive, who have taken additional responsibilities, or who have upskilled or reskilled themselves, done a certain urgent task before time or on time perfectly- Recognise them. Otherwise, this can demotivate them.
- Keep ambiguity at bay- Because none of us is used to do take briefs and brainstorm online, it took time to be comfortable there. One additional suggestion to improve this though is that you should make sure you share the parent document and the other files related to the task you have assigned as and when you are in the call. Otherwise, the brief no matter how rightly given would still require a lot of time to get the task completed. Also, make sure you keep every work in a shared folder in the drive so that the collaboration becomes easier.
- Don’t forget to reward them- Appreciating them is good, it boosts their morale but when some employee is performing exceptionally well, you must reward them monetarily. So, for instance, you should start identifying who deserves just appreciation and who deserves some bonus for the extra efforts. It can be anything, either you send the amount with their salaries and surprise them or share with them some passes or coupon for food movie, online shopping etc. This will not only motivate them but also others in the team to put the best of their efforts so that they can also get those rewards. You can also use HRMS software for this. You can keep giving the reward points which can then be redeemed anytime by the employee online for anything they want to purchase. If your software doesn’t have this feature, you should consider changing it.
All in all, HRMS software can prove to be a great catalyst in keeping your employees happy even when you don’t get to see them in person. So, make sure the managers of every team follow the aforementioned steps and keep the employees happy.
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