As humans, it’s our nature to want to feel loved, cared about, accepted and supported. Employees normally seek these kinds of values during office hours. But valuing employees in the workplace isn’t just about only verbal communication. Employers can add move values to employees’ life by offering certain things like fair base pay, performance pay, benefits, work-life balance, job security, and career advancement opportunities.
How to Make Employees Feel Valued at Work
These five strategies will give the feeling to your employees that they are valued. Furthermore, these strategies help your organisation to build a strong foundation for employee experience.
1. Develop a Compensation Strategy
If your compensation is lagging compared to your competitors, then your employees will feel undervalued and dissatisfied. Your organisation needs to understand where your company fits in with the job market and where employees land on the compensation scale for their positions. You shout decide whether you want to lag behind the market, match the market or lead the market when it comes to compensation. Make sure you have a general idea about the pros and cons of each approach. Then you have to find that if you can pay what the employee asking for and your organisation can truly afford it. Furthermore, you can reshape your compensation strategy and identify what kind of behaviors you are rewarding. For example, if you pay compensation based on the designation of the employee, then they will be more motivated to stay longer with you.
2. Communicate Compensation and Benefits
After you make a better compensation strategy the next thing you need to do is communication because your employees don’t know they are paid fairly, they usually won’t make that assumption themselves. PayScale conducted a survey a few years ago and they found that most of the employees are don’t know if they paid fairly or not. That report indicated that 64% of the people who were paid at market rate and 35% of people who are paid above market rate believed that they were underpaid. The once who were paid under the market rate, 82% of them still satisfied with their job if their employer communicated effectively the reasons for lower compensation.
This means along with your compensation strategy your communication method also important. If your employees are aware of why they are paid the way they are paid, that release the stress of guessing, wondering and assuming the worst.
3. Provide Growth and Learning Opportunities
This is a good way to help employees to feel valued at work. Investing in their development doesn’t need to be expensive. The organisation can think of basic ideas like peer learning groups, project groups, dedicated learning time, career plaining and internal hiring. You can encourage your manager to have regular one-on-one meetings and identifying each employee’s goals. This knowledge will help them to identify what kind of learning and development opportunities your employees are expecting.
4. Align Employee Performance and Compensation
When employees grow and develop, they will become more skilled, efficient and more knowledgeable and better at their work. They are not the same people your first hired. According to their growth, compensation should reflect. That’s why your compensation strategy must align with your employee performance. In that way, employees will realize that their future at the organisation linked to their performance and growth as individuals.
5. Provide Meaningful Work
In this scenario, you need to find the perfect employer to do the task, because of not everyone capable of doing everything. Each employee got their specialised area and the manager needs to identify it before allocating tasks to their employees.
Gallup found that only 44 percent of US employees strongly agree they can see the connection between their role and the organization’s big picture. When managers help employees understand how their work contributes to organizational goals, employees are 3.5 times more likely to be engaged. Also, that study found that employees perform better when they see that what they are doing is matters. Furthermore, they are expecting appreciation.
Making employees feel appreciated and valued at work can’t be done at a glance. It should be an ongoing attitude of your organisation and always need to be managed in a meaningful way. By following the above steps you can achieve it step by step.
