Your Employees Are Coming Back To Work... How Can You Show Them How Much You Care?
/If you make money by running your own business, these have no doubt been a turbulent few months for you. Your business has probably had to endure a lot of uncertainty and you have personally had to contend with a great deal of worry, stress, and heartache. The COVID-19 pandemic has decimated many businesses and forced them into a position whereby they had to make a simple choice- adapt or go under.
As such, many businesses have had to send their employees away from their workplaces. Where it’s possible they’ve been able to work from home. Where it’s not, they’ve been placed on furlough. You’ve learned a great deal about yourself and your business from the lockdown and the subsequent pandemic. One thing you’ll have learned for sure is that you can never take your team for granted. They’ve responded to the pandemic with aplomb. They’ve adapted admirably and overcome the productivity hurdles that come with working from home while sharing the house with a worried spouse and understimulated kids. Now, as measures seem to be relaxing and businesses all over the country are preparing to reopen their doors, it’s time to ask yourself…
How will you show your employees how much you care? How will you make them feel valued, respected, and appreciated? Some ideas may include...
Keep them safe
It goes without saying that you wouldn’t want to reopen your doors without a strong infrastructure in place to protect your employees from COVID-19. Employees should be able to do their job comfortably while keeping a safe distance from one another. Make sure that all employees have access to handwashing facilities and hand sanitizer. Ensure that surfaces like door handles and elevator call buttons are cleaned frequently. Better yet, consider installing hands-free door openers. You could also consider investing in the software to track and trace any infections that occur within your workspace and ensure that carriers of the virus are sent home to recuperate.
Let them know that their health is your #1 priority
Of course, your commitment to your employees’ health goes way beyond keeping them safe from the coronavirus. It should encompass every aspect of their health. It should ensure that their workspaces are comfortable and (wherever possible) ergonomically adjustable. If your budget will extend to it, you might want to give them a choice of sitting or standing desks, given the damage that sitting for too long can do to our health.
You may want to ensure that they always have access to healthy food and aren’t reliant on sugary, fatty, or salty snacks to get them through the day. Even things like investing in the best possible vision insurance can show employees that you’re willing to go the extra mile. During these pandemic times, offering corporate onsite COVID testing in Indianapolis and other US cities can help your employees feel confident that you are putting their health first. To show them that you care about their health and well-being, not just the function that they’re able to fulfill for your business.
Invest in their development
Your employees are great at their jobs. But don’t make the mistake of keeping them in that very specific box at the expense of their greater career goals. Nothing shows an employee that you care about them more than investing in their training and development, helping them to achieve their career goals under your roof.
Ideally, employees should have access to regular training. Not just to help them to do their jobs to the best of their abilities, but to imbue them with skills that they’ll take with them through subsequent stages of their careers. Better still, each member of your team should have access to a course of Continuous Professional Development. You should check in with them on an annual basis to see how their progress in work and training ties into their career goals and what more you can do to help them achieve their dreams.
If you don’t give your employees the support that they need in achieving their career goals, you run the risk of losing them to a competitor who will.
And your business will be poorer for it.
High levels of employee turnover can be extremely expensive and prevent you from achieving the consistent quality of service that your customers expect from you.
Develop a formal system of employee recognition
There are lots of ways in which you can recognize the hard work and endeavor that your employees bring every day once they return to your workplace (or even before). However, when you have a formal system of employee recognition, it’s easier to ensure that your employees consistently get the recognition that they deserve.
Taking the time to say a sincere “thank you” in the break room is great, but a more formal system can go so much further. There are lots of employee recognition platforms out there. These look and interface just like social media platforms. In fact, Facebook even has its own platform called Workplace. These can be used to share messages of encouragement to teams or individual employees for all kinds of achievements of all shapes and sizes.
These platforms can also be used to promote peer recognition and help your employees to feel more like a cohesive team. They can even be tied into your incentives scheme to give your employees a feeling of accomplishment as they work their way towards achieving the rewards that matter to them.
Speaking of which...
Rethink your incentives: They shouldn’t be “one size fits all”
Different employees have different motivators. Sure, they all like money. But some employees might value alternative incentives rather than monetary bonuses. For instance, some might value more time to spend with their families than they value another hundred dollars in the bank. They may value the chance to work more flexibly so that they can drop their kids off at school on time without needing to drive to work in a state of panic. Or they may simply want the autonomy that comes with working from home some of the time.
There should be no “one size fits all” solutions. Your team members should have a say in shaping their own incentive programs.
Keep your door open
Finally, one of the most effective things you can do for your team is to keep your door open. Give them a sympathetic ear when they need it, reassurance when they want it, and a guiding hand when they’re plagued by uncertainty.
Invest in your team and they’ll continue to astonish you long after the coronavirus is a distant memory.
About Money & Mimosas: Money & Mimosas was started as a passion project by Danetha. A former NFL cheerleader turned entrepreneur, she started blogging as a way to combine all of her passions into a career. Money & Mimosas is now enjoyed by readers in over fifty countries with the same dream of achieving financial freedom without living frugally.
