Another great article by Rob Wormley!
As the owner of your business, it’s your job to figure out what your employees want and need from you in order to do their best work. You might think that it’s all about promotions, raises, and time off— but those aren’t the only factors keeping your employees around.
In this post, I’ll let you in on six things your employees want and need from you in order to be successful.
Your Employees Want a Mentor
One thing your employees really want (and need) is a mentor. Employees want to feel like they have someone they can confide in, someone they can learn from, someone who encourages them—someone to show them the ropes. It’s an incredibly important part of career development and overall success. According to a national survey of Fortune 500 executives, 96 percent said mentoring is an important developmental tool, and 75 percent said it played a key role in their personal career success.
If it’s not possible for you to mentor all or any of your employees, make sure you connect them with other people in your organization who can mentor them—like a manager, a more-seasoned employee, or the head of a different department. Take the time to develop a formalized mentorship program and use it as a way to not only help the employees already working for you, but also as a way to continue attracting top talent.
Resources to help you become a better mentor to your employees:
Your Employees Want Education
Your employees also want you to provide them with education opportunities while they work for you. Most employees don’t want to feel like they’re in a dead end job that’s going nowhere fast. Instead, they want to feel like they are learning and growing in ways that will help them move up in their career—whether that means a promotion, a raise, or simply more responsibilities.
There a number of ways you can go about educating your team. You can schedule weekly 1-on-1 time with each of your employees, enroll them into free online education courses on sites like Coursera, send them to trade shows and other events, or even go as far as offering to pay for traditional continuing education at local community colleges or universities. When you take the time to invest in the success and growth of your employees, they become more committed to investing in and helping with the success and growth of your business.
Resources you can use for employee education:
- How to Implement a Continuing Education Program
- Why Employee Development Is Important, Neglected And Can Cost You Talent
Your Employees Want Transparency
Transparency is also important to your employees. Employees want to feel like they are “in the know” with everything that is going on with the company they work for—things like whether the goals from last quarter were met, what changes are on the horizon, what new products or services are being worked on, etc. You might not be able to share everything with your employees (or want to), and that’s ok. You can embrace transparency without having to share every little detail with your employees—in fact, I don’t recommend you do so. But you can share some information as a way to let employees know that you are willing to be transparent with them.
The key is to start small. Invite your employees to an all-team meeting where you let them in on a new product that’s on the roadmap. Or talk about progress that has been made or a problem that you are working on fixing. Sharing little bits of information here and there with your employees is a great way to start building trust and loyalty among your team.
Articles on the value and importance of transparency:
Your Employees Want Appreciation
Read the rest of Rob’s article here: http://wheniwork.com/blog/what-employees-want/
Go, Leader, Grow! 