It's a known fact that the efficiency of any organization is concretely linked with the work satisfaction index of the employees. You can hire good people by tough hiring criteria, you can ensure their attendance by installing time-in and time-out devices; you can ensure their availability on their desk by close monitoring through IP cameras etc however you cannot guarantee or enhance their creativity index, their efficiency and their loyalty factor by all these policing techniques. While most of the entrepreneurs want their teams to be the most effective ones and even they want them to move from effectiveness to greatness (as Stephen Covey tells in his book 'The 8th Habit') but least of them take the real effective actions in order to achieve the same.
In order to have highly collaborative and creative teams there should be an environment where teams should love what they are doing. Every morning if an employee while coming to office is enthusiastic and charged about the day, then he will make things happen. However if he is coming to office with sad heart or negative attitude then you have already half lost the project. So the point is that a culture of friendliness and trust needs to be ensured. Encouragement and consistent gratitude needs to be in place since it acts as a fuel and empowers the acceleration of the teams and the project tasks. Below are some of the points you must consider for the sake of monitoring the happiness and satisfaction index of your organization:
1- When was the last time you did an anonymous company-wise survey to seek feedback from each of the employee? What was the score?
2- One of the known questions from Gallup® is that "Do you have a best friend at work?" Being in-charge of your organization when did you noticed last time about any employees who don't have their best friends at work? If yes, what have you done with your empathic skills to judgethis and then took any action to nourish the culture of friendliness?
3- Do you have a rewarding culture in your company? Do you give spot awards, appreciation certificates, monetary rewards, free coupons or professional trainings?
4- Your employees are like batteries, do you measure their 'charge level'. Remember your mobile battery icon becomes yellow and red when charge level is 25% and 10%? Same is the case with employees. You need to have close observatory and emotional intelligence and analytical skills to monitor such things.
5- Do you ensure that your employees have a great work-life balance? Are they stress free(work related stress) on weekends? Are they over loaded or under loaded or rightly loaded? Are your managers and team leads capable of assigning the right task to the right person?
6- Do you have family like environment where employees share their emotions, concerns and jokes? Do they laugh/smile while working (not applicable for customer facing employees)? Did you plan any family level or team level get together or any other team building activities?
I believe with the above recommendations you can observe, analyze and eradicate the most common causes of disengaged employees and eventually increase the productivity of the organization.
A final comment is that you should not treat your employee only as a physical human being, instead treat him as a compound of body, heart, mind and soul. Stephen R Covey recommends that once you start behaving according to this philosophy, employees start generating great results for the organization. If you would like to explore more on this, "The 8th Habit" book is the rich source of knowledge and wisdom; Google it to learn more.
