4 Top Tips to Help You Understand Employee Needs

Understanding the needs of your employees is essential to building trust in your workforce, being an ethical and caring manager and ensuring that your team works hard for you.

Any business owner or manager who is having issues understanding why satisfaction is below par, why productivity is low or why they seem unpopular among their staff should follow these four top tips for getting in touch with employee needs. What one must first realize is that business is about more than facts and figures – it is about people and emotions, too.

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence can be labelled as people skills or social skills but, at its core, it is exactly what it says it is – the ability to be clever and savvy about emotions and human beings. This is what is needed for good business management.

A large part of having good emotional intelligence is the ability to be empathetic – to put yourself in others’ shoes. This goes a huge way to understanding your employee needs, but you should remember to not simply imagine what you would want if you were in their position, but what you would want if you were actually them. This is because different people and different workers think in different ways, need additional incentives or perks and respond to various treatments differently.

Having a high level of emotional intelligence will serve you well as a manager and should aid you in building stronger workplace relationships.

Use Multiple Surveys

An easy way of getting to the centre of your employees’ needs is to ask them. Using an employee engagement platform, such as a survey will target both the emotional and professional requirements of your staff, allowing you to paint a picture of how they feel and what they need.

By using multiple surveys to gain comprehensive feedback, you will be able to respond to staff demands more accurately. As research in the UK has shown, employee desires go much further than simply getting a raise or a promotion, and being able to analyze and evaluate these needs will make you a well-liked, successful leader.

Personal Conversations

Making sure staff feel comfortable speaking to you about sensitive subjects is key. Allowing staff the time and space to have personal conversations will make issues such as mental health much less of a taboo subject in the office and promote a caring and healthy workplace environment.

For those uncomfortable talking face to face, you could have a private message box for confidential matters or consider hiring an on-sight mental health expert.

Increase Engagement

Finally, it is an engagement that truly stimulates employees.

Bored staff members who are disconnected or disengaged from your business are less likely to talk openly with you about their needs or their wishes and be more likely to hide personal issues that could be resolved by management.

This is why a fantastic top tip for understanding employee needs is to promote large amounts of feedback, recognize high achievers and introduce an appropriate amount of workplace perks across the board.