Chances are, you spend significant time and effort determining and communicating what you need from your employees. Do you spend as much time worrying about what they need from you? If you don’t, you could be inadvertently creating an environment that gets in the way of their engagement and productivity. You might even be causing harm to their overall well-being.
Viewing things simplistically, you need your employees to do their jobs, and they need you to pay them wages. But people want more out of their jobs than simply a paycheck. We’re sure you do yourself. And to be fair, you probably want employees to do more than just their jobs: you want them to delight your customers and clients; you want them to promote you as a good organization to their friends and family; you may even want them to be creative and innovate outside the strict confines of their roles, among other things. We know this because when they don’t, folks call it “quiet quitting.”
Well, if you think of your employees as people you have a relationship with, as opposed to people with whom you transact business, whether you’re engaged with their needs makes a big difference. If you have a relationship, then your employees’ happiness and their well-being elevate you. They raise you up as an organization and as leaders. Happy people are engaged. Happy people are productive people. Happiness is contagious, just like unhappiness is.
Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a good way to think about what people require in their lives and in their jobs. Maslow was a mid-20th century American psychologist who proposed tiers of human needs, starting with the fundamental physiological requirements of living, moving up through emotional and social needs, and ending with some experience of transcendence – of connecting to meaning beyond oneself.
We know that if our basic needs aren’t met, we don’t function in ways that allow us to express our best potential. The lesson here for the workplace is that conditions must be met for individuals and teams to thrive. In this blog, we’ll spend the next few months considering each level of needs, starting from the foundation, physiology. Up next time: Who Gets Enough Sleep?
| How can you help your employees be happier? What will truly energize your people? What’s your employee engagement plan? INCITE can help you make it happen. |
About the author: Hi! Allow me to introduce myself as a new face at INCITE. I’m Shannon, and I come with a couple decades’ experience in consulting, facilitating, and analytics. I’m super excited to join my sister Kara and the rest of the team working with you; caring profoundly about behavioral health care runs in our family, given the challenges we saw our brother face in the places where people tried to care for him. Over the last couple of years I’ve devoted a lot of time to thinking and writing about work, balance, and personal fulfillment, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of these ideas with you here, because I know you can make a huge, positive difference in the well-being of your people. Let’s dive in!
