Need to know:
- Not all staff are happy about going to work at present, and this lack of enthusiasm is impacting productivity.
- The good news is that it is possible to improve productivity by creating a different culture. The secret is imbuing staff with a sense of purpose, using reward strategy as a vital tool.
- Making sure employees feel their views are heard can transform a workplace’s culture.
Going to work is a joyless event for over half of front-line employees. This grim statistic is, ironically, courtesy of the 2018 Hapi survey, published by employee benefits provider Personal Group in March 2018. Enthusiasm for work has decreased across the workforce since the same survey was conducted in 2017, with 18-29-year-olds the unhappiest at work.
Meanwhile, nearly half (45%) of employees believe their employer does not know how to improve productivity, according to research published in March 2018 by Canada Life Group Insurance. This loss of faith in leadership is damaging workers’ performance in UK businesses.
It is likely that many of the employees surveyed would have been employed by organisations purporting to ‘put people at the heart of what we do’. But what does that really mean?
The good news is that there are ways to improve people’s faith in their organisation and make them feel valued, without blowing the budget. The key is in making an organisation’s values come to life in the benefits on offer, and imbuing staff with a sense of purpose.
People power
Giving staff a sense of purpose is all-important to improving engagement and productivity. Iain Thomson, director of incentive and recognition at Sodexo Engage, says: “The things that make people feel engaged are a sense they are adding value and achieving business goals.”
Aliya Vigor-Robertson, founding partner at Journey HR, adds: “Reward strategy isn’t often linked to a sense of purpose.”
Linking the two does not have to cost a fortune. “It isn’t necessarily about cash in the reward pot,” says Vigor-Robertson. “There are so many ways [employers] can link a reward strategy to an organisational strategy. For example, I met a design agency whose organisational strategy was to be an innovative disruptor. [It is] a team of 17 and it is growing [with] 50% year on year growth, really exciting. It decided that all its staff should work a four-day week. This clearly aligns with its plans to be an innovative disrupter; it is living and breathing it.”
It is vital to make a high-level strategy relevant to every level of an organisation, says Thomson. “A lot of times we will work with [organisations] where they have a great ambition, but it doesn’t always filter down. For example, salespeople might be focused on hitting their sales target, but another important part of the strategy is also about giving quality service to customers.”
It is important to reward staff when they live and breathe both parts of that strategy.
David Wreford, partner at Mercer, says: “Purpose is about engaging employees at an emotional level. If the organisation’s values align with their own, [it has] got them for life.”
Mercer is trialling offering the Action for Happiness initiative to its own staff. The Dalai Lama is patron of the movement, which teaches simple ways to be happier in an eight-week course. One of the modules is around giving back to society, which often has a big impact on happiness and productivity, says Wreford.
Emphasise importance of contributions
Another way to make staff feel more purposeful is to emphasise the importance of their contribution as part of a team, says Wreford. It is also key to have regular conversations and clarity around goals and objectives. “It’s less about an end-of-year review which results in a number between one and five,” he says.
Empowering people to feel they can speak up about areas where their working lives could be better is another way to make them happier, says Thomson. “We went through a brand change last year; there were 16 different brands coming into one, and we were trying to align that. How we approach that is just to be open, honest and as transparent as we possibly can be as a business.
“What we’ve done is say, ‘Here are the good things about our business, these are the areas we need to improve on.’ And then being quite open about them and saying, ‘We need your help to address this.’ People have come forward with some really good ideas and we have really engaged the workforce to address some of the issues.”
