Workers dedicate at least half of their waking hours during the week to their employer. Though some business leaders might be loath to call their office a “big happy family,” only the unhealthiest workplaces actively discourage coworkers from developing personal relationships with one another.
Strong interpersonal connections allow a team to work more effectively together, and they can form the foundation of a productive and powerful workplace culture. Managers also benefit from getting to know their team members on a deeper level, as they can learn what motivates individual employees to work harder and better.
Yet, as much as leaders might gain from getting to know their workforce, few leaders bother to do so in a meaningful way. Fortunately, it is not difficult for business leaders to develop a more effective understanding of their employees, both individually and holistically. Here are a few strategies to help leaders form stronger bonds with their workers to build a more effective workforce.
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Be Visible
The more time you spend away from your staff, the less time you have to understand one another. By walking the halls of your workspace and spending time in work areas, you have more opportunities to engage your employees in conversation, which will provide you with more information about what individual members of your workforce are like.
You should dedicate time to being visible around your workplace every day; reliability will help your workers become accustomed to and feel comfortable with your presence.
If the majority of your workforce is remote, you can still make an effort to be visible. You can make yourself available through instant messaging apps, schedule video calls throughout the work week and plan non-work related virtual social functions. As long as you are making an effort to see and hear your staff, they will open up to you.
Conduct Polls
Anonymous surveys are some of the most reliable ways to get honest information about the employee experience. Polls on employee attitudes, opinions, satisfaction, engagement and more can reveal how your workers are truly feeling, especially if your workplace culture all but prohibits employees from speaking freely in other ways.
You might conduct these kinds of polls in the form of a pulse survey, which will demand less time from your workforce and provide you with more targeted insights about their experience.
Listen to Feedback
Perhaps more important than collecting feedback is properly using the feedback you receive. Because many employees might be nervous about providing their true feelings and opinions, you need to be certain to use the information you gain to improve their experience and to improve the performance of the organization as a whole.
Understanding your employees is useless if you do not act upon that understanding, using both your power and your knowledge for common good.
Talk to Fellow Leaders
Other leaders in your organization should be striving to understand their teams as you are yours. You should meet with your leader colleagues and report on the feedback you have received from your staff.
In some cases, the feedback your teams provide might necessitate some type of organizational change that will require buy-in from other leaders; in other cases, sharing your insights into your workforce might help other leaders guide their teams to success, and other leaders might provide their own insights that can benefit you and your workers.
To that end, you might set up a regular meeting with fellow leaders focused on what you and your colleagues are doing to better understand the workforce and on communicating valuable discoveries.
Audit Communications
A communications audit involves the analysis of the effectiveness or communications within an organization. Communications audits should reveal inefficiencies with your communications systems, which could result in a lack of transparency or miscommunications between leaders and workers.
As communication is so essential to the function of an organization, you need to be certain that your communication methods are functioning as you expect. It is important to audit communications regularly, at least every year, to ensure that information is flowing as intended and that your organization is communicating at peak efficiency.
An organization cannot exist without its employees, but employees will continue to leave an organization if they do not feel seen, heard and understood by their leaders. Fortunately, leaders can take meaningful steps toward understanding their workers individually and as a whole.
