4Cs Blog: Happy Employees = Happy Customers

Practical Team-Building Activities for Office Morale

 An effective offices runs on interdependence, positivity, trust and communication, and a great way to nurture these traits is through team building activities. Some of these activities can also carry over valuable lessons into real life. A successful round of team building requires careful planning. Keep in mind that team exercises should be within the capabilities of all employees, so give careful consideration to any limitations individuals might have. If an exercise involves strenuous activity, some participants may be physically incapable of such exertion, therefore forced to watch others participate, and feeling left out. Here are two low-impact team building exercises with real-life applications that can bring any office team's efficiency and morale.

The Cure For Employee Withdrawal

Having a work addiction might not be good for your health but the same could be said of people suffering from work withdrawal.

What is work withdrawal? In many ways, it is the coming to terms with the fact that your work just didn’t turn out to be as great as you had once hoped. We all start our careers full of hope, confident that with the right attitude and effort will we achieve our goals but for most of us, we get let down, our bubbles are burst and we withdraw. The addiction we hoped we would have with our jobs, that deep connection that would make work worthwhile, is lost.

Meanwhile, as an employer, you are seeing sales declining, profits shrinking, people quitting, customers complaining and going elsewhere. Morale is low and it feels like nobody cares. As an employee research company we see it too. Our Employee Engagement Index is only 67 on a 0-100 scale so there is a lot of room for improvement.

These are all signs that your employees are suffering withdrawal and the clues are probably staring you in the face.

Reach for the Panic Button if You Haven't Done an Employee Engagement Survey

If You Ask What's Wrong Be Prepared To Act or Don't Bother Asking

Or You Could End Up Worse Off Than Before

The worst thing you can do is survey your employees and then do nothing.

It is cruel to ask for people’s opinions and then ignore them. You raise expectations and then let everyone down, which can be interpreted as being demeaning and disrespectful. Hardly the way to get behind a commitment to employee engagement and a sure-fire way to alienate your team.

Step back and let’s remind ourselves that the primary reason companies conduct employee survey or feedback surveys in the first place is to achieve better performance. That’s because when employees and managers get together to discuss survey results, their conversations lead to action plans. And successful action plans have a direct and positive impact on engagement, retention, productivity and profits, and they help reduce turnover and costs as well.

50 Shades of Loyalty

Shift Your Complainers into Your Most Loyal Employees 

In our personal lives, loyalty, or lack of loyalty, is often a deal breaker but we know it doesn’t work that way in business and especially in the places where we work. You can be disloyal to your organization and still work there, alongside someone else who is utterly devoted and loyal. In fact, if you assess your employees, you can usually see there is a mix of people who love working for you and people who hate it, along with every feeling in between.
After surveying tens of thousands of employees every year, we have found that there are basically four kinds of employees that exist in nearly all workplaces across North America, ranging from very loyal to not loyal at all. Each group has its own unique characteristics and each group represents a similar proportion of people across organizations. What is very cool about this matrix is that there are some employees who can actually shift from being your loudest complainers into becoming your most truly loyal employees. Imagine what that shift means in terms of retention, morale, employee engagement and productivity.

The Secret To Employee Engagement Is In The Recipe

Do you ever wish employee engagement came with a recipe you could follow for success?

It is frustrating, it is complex and it is not very well understood. We know that the key ingredients include ensuring employees feel that they are recognized and rewarded for their work, that they have opportunities to learn and grow, that their work is respected and that they can make suggestions and be involved in their work and with the organization but how do we get these to connect and create engaged employees?

It has taken us a long time and a lot of experimenting to create a no-fail recipe for employee engagement, and unlike Colonel Sanders, our recipe is not a secret. The employee engagement recipe is really made up of only one single ingredient, people, but how the recipe, or the people will turn out, or how engaged your employees are, is completely dependent on how committed you are to them. Do you treat them fairly, show concern for their well being and do you trust them to do their jobs?

8 Things Bad Bosses do to Make Good Employees Quit...

That are ruining your company!

 Across North America, employees from warehouse floors to hi-rise boardrooms share some fundamental work issues. After conducting thousands of employee surveys, we have found that if people don’t feel they are managed well you might as well be holding the door open as they leave. Some of them you might be better off without but many will be your top talent, the ones you should be keeping. Sadly, you yourself could be the one pushing people out the door and not even realize how you are contributing to the problem.

Making Manic Mondays Your Fun Day

And Conquering those Monday Blues

You might assume because we are an employee research company that we are dedicated to finding new and different ways to write about employee engagement. Well that is true but we also care about the people who work, not just about how they connect to their work. Instead of another article about engaging employees and increasing productivity, we want to focus on you and how you feel about your work. You really do come first, since without you there would be no employees in the first place!

When Do Your Policies Cross The Line

I don’t think that comes as a surprise to anyone. At work, trust is communicated in many ways but office policies are often the first line. When a new hire starts, company policies are the new rules, the guidelines for how everyone is supposed to behave at work. These are the rules managers are expected to enforce and make sure everyone is toeing the line.
It is one thing to have vacation day policies so that everyone is treated fairly, and those are policies most of us accept, but it is a brand new game when employers start keeping track of how often you use the washroom.

How to Cope with Employees Who Hate Each Other

When Work is a Battleground

Trying to work with people who hate each other is damaging to the soul. Their negativity can infiltrate the minds and feelings of everyone they work with and, if left untreated, it could become infectious, spilling over into the lives of other coworkers and breeding an environment of discontent.

Instead of getting their work done effectively and efficiently, everyone gets swept up into the drama and then what?

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