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A healthy work environment starts with the
business philosophy of the top leaders.
The reason why many businesses have such a
poor work environment has to do with the way they think people need to be
managed. This is often through a top-down style where strategies, plans,
processes, and problems are dealt with at the top and then disseminated.
To ensure that the employees give their
fullest, they set individual goals and evaluate and rank the employees once a
year. The employees are thus reduced to human resources, just like machine
resources or capital resources.
This creates a distance between the employees
and the company. It creates fear of ranking too low and potentially losing your
job.
How to create
a healthy work environment?
You start with a totally different mindset and
philosophy. With a few exceptions, everyone would like to contribute and be
engaged. So how do you get people engaged?
Remove all those factors that instill fear and
that create learned helplessness. You start with sharing your vision of a
healthy workplace where employees have no fear and where cooperation and
support are the norms. Get an Adjustable Computer Desk for better ergonomics
here.
You tell the employees that whoever cooperates
towards that vision will not be made redundant, even when their current
role/work might no longer be needed. A different position will be found,
especially since you know that once this vision becomes reality, a lot of
problems will disappear and the lead times will be reduced, leading to faster
delivery and lower cost, which in turn leads to a better market position and
increased sales.
You train the employees and management on how
to do root cause analysis in a structured way. To never blame anyone, but to
always blame the processes for not catching the problem beforehand.
You stop giving employees or departments
individual goals, as this would lead to point improvements. Point improvements
seldom improve the overall company performance and often lead to poorer overall
performance.
You closely coach each employee at least once
a month, but preferably more often. In these one-on-one meetings, you ask them
how things are going, what they are struggling with and together you work
towards a solution by improving the workflow, processes, and
procedures. Training can be part of that, but more often than not, training is
just covering problems in the workflow, processes, and procedures.
Even strategic problems are brought down to
the employees, as they have the knowledge skills, and experience to work out
how the strategy could be implemented and enhanced. They know what skills and
knowledge might be missing and can start anticipating. You treat people with
dignity and respect and instead of seeing them as the unwilling who needs to be
pushed, you see them as the solution to the problems.