Increasing psychological safety. If employees have started perceiving the workplace as a threat, it becomes hard to build the trust the teams need to work together and innovate. There are three steps to building psychological safety. The first is making your expectations obvious by having clear goals for your employees. The second is making sure everyone feels like their voices are heard and they know that you want to hear them. This can be done by inviting employees to speak up in meetings and having brainstorming sessions instead of just imposing top-down decisions. The third is developing a work environment that is both unthreatening and challenging. Let them know that it is okay to fail. Recognize those thinking outside the box, and ask employees for feedback because it shows you are all in it together.
Building regular break times into their workday
The brain can focus for 90-120 minutes before needing to rest. This is why it is a good idea to ask your employees to step away from their desks every couple of hours and disengage with what they were doing. You can suggest they take a short work (especially after coming out from a long meeting). Remind them regularly to take breaks, and practice mindfulness and you have to lead by example. When you let their mind rest and they move their body, the employees are going to have the mental space needed to perform well consistently.
Encourage them to use private workspaces anytime they need to focus
There are many distractions in an open office, which can increase stress and decrease productivity. There is the expectation on employees that they always have to be there in case of impromptu meetings and discussions because of the office layout. If there are no private workspaces that employees can use to decompress or focus, then use signals like “do not disturb”. Another option is to schedule “quiet hours” where people can work.
Setting boundaries around time outside work
When teams are not in the same location, they might sometimes be forced to work outside the traditional hours. The blurring of work and personal time is going to cause job stress. There was a study that showed that answering emails was the only cause of anxiety in employees – it is also the expectation that they have to be there outside their working hours. To deal with this, it is important to have guidelines that have to be strictly followed. Make calls and send emails after hours if it is an emergency.
Looking into flexible working policies
Creating an adaptable work environment is going to give you a highly adaptive team. Allow employees to work staggered hours to give the employees, and consider their needs when doing it. A good way to understand those needs is to hold one-on-one meetings. This allows you to find alternative arrangements for people struggling with work-life balance.
Building Employee Engagement
There are many benefits of higher employee engagement, or the strength of the emotional and mental connection an employee feels towards the workplace. Some of the benefits include improved health, reduced stress, job satisfaction, job retention, increased productivity, and profitability.
Being transparent
When the team members are confused about how their work serves and connects with the long-term and short-term goals of the company, they tend to feel more stressed and less productive – especially when the company is going through uncertain times. It is part of your job to help your employees and team members see the big picture or the role they have to play to help the company reach its goals. While it might not be possible to share everything with the team, what you can do is provide them with information that is going to help them understand what they can do to contribute to the company’s mission. If they want some information that you can’t share, make sure you are transparent and let them know why. Ambiguity brings stress, reduce that. There was a study done on 2.5 million teams that found that managers that communicated with their teams daily with direct reports saw a three times likeliness of employees being engaged compared to managers who didn’t communicate regularly. 40% of the employees said they knew the strategic goals of the company
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