YOUR BEST EMPLOYEES DESERVE A STRATEGIC GRATITUDE

 

 

Generally, whenever employees work more progressively and enthusiastically in an organization, they inevitably expect to get noticed and appreciated by the top management and other related administrators. When organizational employees strive harder to meet the given targets and the set goals, they show a natural tendency to expect greater thankfulness and honor from their workplace in addition to the promised benefits and awards from the organizations. Therefore, organizations try to put great efforts into improving their relationships with their employees making the workplace more comfortable for them.

 

Appreciation and thankfulness can be given to workers in various forms. For instance, many organizations provide their gratitude to their best performers by offering them better growth opportunities, job rotations, promotions, and replacements. However, employees seek verbal appreciation and admiration even more in addition to rewards for good performance. 

 

So what should organizations do to satisfy the appreciation urge of their employees? How should they respond to their expectations?

 

In my opinion, which is largely based on knowledge bases and working experiences smart employers must always try to provide their employees, especially, the best performers with strategic gratitude. Strategic gratitude in my working experience as an employer consists of verbal appreciation being strategically aligned with organizational culture. It includes the involvement of organizational strategic authorities to carry out the process of appreciation in close collaboration with the employees. The process is needed to be carried out in both formal and informal ways. Since organizations are busy carrying out formal official procedures on daily basis, providing formal processes of appreciation on daily grounds may not be possible for many organizations. Therefore, I recommend organizations design and operate chunks of strategic employee gratitude programs periodically.

 

Now, what does this strategic employee’s gratitude program consist of? Here is a brief overview of what essential elements it should contain. Organizations may alter the elements as per their organizational needs. In addition to what an organization discusses about the goal of achieving perks with its employees, special appreciative measures must be taken by the authoritative personnel in this regard. For instance, conducting appreciative programs inviting the best performers to give a speech and have dinner, uploading their success stories as a part of an organizational social platform, and displaying the best performers’ records on billboards of various organizational departments, creating a moment of applause formally and informally for the achievers, giving a free short trip or vacations to the extra-ordinary performers, holding their special conversation sessions with the top management, allowing them to grasp more lucrative or luxurious offers by setting new strategic targets to be achieved by them, allowing them to write for the organizational newsletter or magazine, and so one.

 

One can think of new and better appreciative measures for the employees where they are being offered new opportunities to win in return for achieving new strategic goals. Organizations must try to make them feel splendid working for the organization where they get new chances to learn, improve and get better recognition for achieving more strategic targets. Employees who feel a sense of engagement with the organization tend to perform better. This raises their level of satisfaction and retention within the same workplace.  

A BRIEF REVIEW OF ROLES STRESSORS, WORK ENGAGEMENT, AND CAREER TRANSITION

In continuation of the previous articles on role stressors, work engagement, (role stressors), and career transition intentions (employee turnover), let us have a brief overview of them concerning their co-relationships.

Effect of Role Stressors on Work Engagement

In the world of research studies, the relationship between role stressors and engagement of employees at work has been analyzed from various perspectives. Role stresses such as role ambiguity and role conflict, along with job resources greatly impact employee engagement levels (Moura, 2014; Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004). Organizations have a strong causal link between various characteristics of job tasks and work engagement along with the mediating roles of role ambiguity and role conflict. One of the major causes of role ambiguity and role conflict is the level of poor inter-organizational and intra-organizational communications. Role stressors are found to be negatively related to work engagement.

Effect of Work Engagement on Career Transition Intentions

During a career transition, employees adopt a different job role and change their orientation within their organizations. These intentions of career change arise when the level of satisfaction is lowered. Job satisfaction is usually attained through higher levels of employee engagement, which ultimately lowers turnover intent. Employees’ level of satisfaction, enthusiasm about work, and level of involvement define the extent of both work engagement and turnover intentions. Rhodes and Doering (1993) proposed an inverse relationship of job satisfaction with thoughts of changing careers, which in turn positively relates to the intention to go for a job search. The subsequent intention to begin a job search on the other hand has been proven to trigger the intention to change careers. Hence, a negative co-relationship between job satisfaction and intention to change careers has been found to exist in organizations. With the inclusion of many internal and external factors, the relationship between engagement and turnover intentions has been widely researched (Takawira et al., 2014; Dane & Brummel, 2013; Juhdi et al., 2013; Klerk et al., 2014; Tims et al., 2014; Berry & Morris, 2008; Bal et al., 2011). Career transition involves a worker disengaging from his previous state of affairs and engaging in new circumstances. The mediating role of engagement in predicting turnover intentions has also been determined by several research studies predicting a negative relationship between engagement and turnover intentions (Memon et al., 2014; Alfes et al., 2012).

 

HOW TO TREAT AN INCOMPETENT EMPLOYEE AT THE WORKPLACE

An incompetent employee, simply, is a worker who most of the time fails to comply with the given job responsibilities. An incompetent worker in the first place fails to understand the given tasks appropriately and, therefore, his proceeding plan of action goes against the demands of the job. Such a person has no idea that his perception of how to do a given job responsibility does not match the actual demands of the job. It means that incompetency occurs due to the difference between an actual task requirement and the perception of the workers about a particular job task.

 

Being an incompetent person is not by choice, rather it’s built up on common sense and analytical capabilities along with a behavioral mindset of a person.  The particular behavior of a person is dependent on the ways a person is being brought up. Moreover, it is also the mindset of an incompetent person that acts as a permanent and constant source of failure when any kind of job responsibility is given.  

Incompetency at Its Peak

An incompetent employee at the workplace creates awkward mistakes and embarrassing situations for himself and other colleagues. They sometimes become the main factor in creating bottleneck issues in accomplishing the combined job roles. At their extremes, they are capable of unintentionally making the organizational system stuck and liable to its stakeholders.  The bigger issue with them is their stubbornness towards adapting themselves to the work environment and the job requirements.

Retaining the Incompetent

Since incompetent employees are prone to make frequent blunders and sometimes irrecoverable errors, many organizations resist retaining them. They take such harsh decisions because most of the time retaining them costs them even more than losing them. Employers and mentors feel great resistance from them whenever they try to make the incompetent employees realize their mistakes. Incompetent workers are found to be good at making excuses for their faults. They are prone to make false accusations about their colleagues for their pending or spoiled work.

 

Developing the Distinct Ones

However, for the mutual economic benefit and bringing improvement to their incompetent employees, many employers give ample chances to them before demoting or terminating them. Many mentors try to keep them in their current job positions with the same job responsibilities for an uncertain period. Nevertheless, the incompetency of the employees ultimately leads them towards elimination from their workplace.

When organizations terminate working relations with such employees, they unintentionally mark a stamp of incompetency on them which makes an ending to their careers as well as any chances of improvement. Therefore, all organizations need to devise special strategies for the development and growth of incompetent employees rather than expelling them from their firms. They need to plan distinct job roles and responsibilities for them. As in schools and colleges, students who need special attention are given extraordinary attention for their improvement rather than preferring to expel them, the incompetent workers also deserve to be treated with a sense of responsibility to gradually develop an abundant competency set within them. When organizations provide massive-budgeted training and development sessions to all of their employees, why cannot they just make extra efforts and costs to cater to the developmental needs of their incompetent employees? We have to understand our social and ethical responsibilities to snub the indolent habits and attitudes of such employees and make them better working partners for the whole working community. hence, giving resourcefulness to incompetent workers is the best socio-economic solution.

WHAT TRIGGERS EMPLOYEE TURNOVER?

 

Employee turnover issues have always been a critical issue for management for long. An employee turnover gives greater loss to an organization than any other organizational factor. That is why companies are always striving hard to make employee retention one of their top priorities.

Career Transitions

Turnover can be categorized more precisely into the term “career transition”. This career transition is activated within employees when they feel their identity has been challenged, ignored, or treated undistinguishable. It is a process or period of the simultaneous ending of a previous relationship with certain role identities and the beginning of a working relationship with new work roles. Both the personal life and organizational factors are responsible for triggering the intention to transition a career in a worker.  

 

Kinds of Career Transitions

Latack (1984), proposed three forms of career transition:

(a) Intra-organizational transition (e.g., moving oneself from one division to another within the same organization),

(b) Inter-organizational transition (e.g., moving oneself from one organization to another), and

(c) Inter-professional transition (e.g., occupation change).

 

Career transitions or career changes triggered by factors within organizations include the transitions in task, position, and occupation (Heppner et al., 1998). A change in task is defined as a shift from one set of tasks to another within the same job type and same workplace, whereas a change in position is considered as a shift in job type with the same employer or to a different organization. Nevertheless, a change in occupation means transitioning from one profession to another or engaging in entrepreneurship.

 Career Transition Intentions

Any kind of career transition or turnover is used as a strategy to escape the existing situation. Perceptions are the depiction of human behavior and roles. Perceptions built upon the grounds of task significance in a workplace also determine career transition intentions. The turnover intention is associated with predictors like organizational culture, job demands, independence, identity threat, work effort, and attitudes. It is the extent to which an employee plans to leave his current workplace. The turnover intention just begins before the actual turnover takes place. Therefore, there is a strong need to identify those turnover intentions as soon as possible and devise appropriate strategies to counter those intentions.

 

My next articles are going to reveal in detail the impact of role stressors on career transition intentions and also the effect of work engagement on career transition intentions. 

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT OR WORK ENGAGEMENT? Identify Your Organizational Issue

Employers all around the world are struggling to devise effective strategies for their organizations to cope with the emerging issues of employee engagement. Employee engagement has always been the main concern of top management as the relationship between organizations and their employees revolves around it. In simple words, it encloses an organization's and its employees' mutual effort regarding a healthy and productive working environment.

Embracing Employee Engagement

Employers usually focus on building strong organizational culture, leadership, rewards and recognition, and professional growth of the employees. This is a vast category within human resource management and a tremendous amount of research work and theories about it have been established until today. Yet, employee engagement has eternally been the most challenging matter even for large multinational organizations.

Identifying the Real Obstacles

When organizations fail to identify problems of their employees accurately within the working environment, they cater to those issues which might not be the real causes of organizational problems. Because of this false identification of the impediments within the organizations, employers have to face both short-term and long-term complications in maintaining relations with their employees. Consequently, despite putting extravagance efforts into building up the employee engagement policies, organizations fail to meet their set goals in this regard. This mistake occurs due to many miscalculations and wrong evaluation procedures. However, one of the reasons is that organizations have started to consider every rising concern within the category of employee engagement. Without deeply analyzing the root causes of the organizational issues, the top authorities begin to devise plans and policies relating to employee engagement. The biggest dilemma is that employers being too much concerned to maintain high employee engagement, unintentionally overlook the underlying obstacles and misunderstood them. 

Misinterpreting Employee Engagement

A common mistake that many organizations make unconsciously is that they confuse work engagement issues with employee engagement issues. When work engagement problems are needed to be treated distinctively, organizations cater to all engagement problems under the same roof. They misinterpret employees’ concerns and overlook the fact that work engagement is somehow different from employee engagement. Several research studies have presented respected theories in this regard, yet, the difference is still unpopular and insignificant among the employers of various organizations for different reasons.

Knowing the Difference

Work Engagement is a set of as positive behavior with an optimistic mindset towards work. This kind of optimism is prone to yield positive work-related outcomes for an organization and the employees themselves. Work engagement is related to the behavior of employees specifically towards their work for the organization. The term work engagement was first used in the 1990s when organizations started to modernize their structure while bringing major functional transitions and structural changes within themselves.

Work engagement is found to be specifically related to the Burnout-Antithesis Approach. When employees feel a sense of engagement with their work or workplace, they are consequently more energetic and effectively connected with their work. Work engagement brings encouraging outcomes for the organization and its employees. However, when employees feel burned out and exhausted from their work routine, their engagement with their jobs gets negatively influenced. Several research studies show that work engagement directly affects job performance. Various dimensions of work engagement (vigor, absorption, and dedication) have a positive impact on the most critical dimensions of an employee’s job performance, for instance, task performance, contextual performance, and counter-productive performance.

In various research studies, employee engagement is explained as involvement, commitment, passion, enthusiasm, absorption, effort, dedication, and even satisfaction with the organization. Whereas, work engagement is related to an employee’s psychological devotion, particularly towards job responsibilities.

Reasoning

An employee may be happily engaged in his workplace/organization but may not necessarily be engaged in his work, consequently, might not be more productive. Whereas, an employee who is more engaged in his work, irrespective of how less he is attached to his organization, may be more productive and qualitative. Therefore, organizations need to conduct periodical internal surveys to identify whether their employees are dealing with either work engagement or comprehensive engagement issues with their organizations.

As work engagement is a positive and satisfying work-related condition characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption as described by Schaufeli and Salanova in 2002, the retention of such work-engaged employees seems to be the most desirable aspect. All these attributes relate to the affective-cognitive condition of employees. The High level of energy and mental resilience is related to Vigor along with a willingness to bring more efforts, Involvement towards work, a sense of importance, enthusiasm, inspiration, pride, and challenges related to Dedication. Absorption is referred to as being completely determined and happily absorbed in work.

The three different levels of employee engagement in a particular workplace verily exist in those situations where an employee perceives his autonomy and work attributes much desirable. Shuck, in 2011, conducted a meta-analysis of 213 studies and discovered four approaches relating to engagement: The Needs-Satisfying Approach, the Burnout-Antithesis Approach, the Satisfaction-Engagement Approach, and the Multidimensional Approach. The roles of engagement in the forms of independent, dependent, moderating, and mediating variables have been explored since the origin of engagement theory until recently (Soieb et al., 2013). The term engagement is found to be moderately and negatively correlated to turnover intention whereas work engagement mediates the relationship between job resources and turnover intention. This specifies that when the job becomes more resourceful, the levels of work engagement rise, and the intention to quit the job lowers (Schaufeli and Bakker, 2004).

HOW TO ELIMINATE EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT AND TURNOVER ISSUES.

 

In today’s corporate sector, employee absenteeism and turnover complaints have been on the rise once again after the outbreak of the pandemic COVID-19 and its consequential economic recessions in various zones around the globe. Organizational employees are relentlessly complaining about their rising burnout, stress, and dissatisfaction levels at their jobs. The stress at work can be a result of both the internal and external factors of the surrounding environment. 

ROLE STRESSORS

Different kinds of job stress have been the major issues for employers and an enormous amount of research work has been conducted until today for prescribing relevant solutions. Role stressors, specifically role conflict and role ambiguity, are significant predictors of job stress, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intentions. Role Ambiguity is the level of misunderstanding among working employees that raises confusion in their minds and perceptions regarding their responsibilities and performance (Mañas et al., 2018). Whereas, role conflict is an uncomfortable state in which an employee experiences contradictory, incompatible demands against his role expectations, compliance with both is difficult (Katz, & Kahn, 1978).

 

Role ambiguity and role conflict arise in organizations where the division of labor and task are either ill-defined or too complex, where organizational structure is either strictly centralized or too complex, where the internal structure is experiencing transformational changes or where human resource function is ignored. Role conflict and role ambiguity are the most referred role incompatibilities that arise in an organizational context. While performing various tasks in an organization, every worker is obliged to perform a specific role-set in his organization. However, workers, due to organizational imbalances in defining role sets, have to cope with role uncertainties and conflicts.

 RESEARCH REVIEW ON ROLE STRESSORS

The studies on these factors have been widely covered by Lambert and his associates in 2005. However, a vital contribution to the history of human resources was made by Rizzo and his associates in 1970 and later on by Katz and Kahn in 1978. For a long time, researchers have been trying to prove the direct relationship between role stressors and various employee outcomes. Several research findings suggest the detrimental effect of role conflict and role ambiguity on organizational citizenship behavior, work satisfaction, involvement, and job performance.

 

The role stressors are found to have a direct relationship with an employee’s intentions for turnover. It means that the higher the levels of role stressors in a working environment, the higher the chances of employees thinking of turnover. Role stressors always have a negative effect on employee engagement intensity. It means that to increase the level of employee engagement in a working environment, the extent of role stressors should be minimized. Similarly, to have control over employee absenteeism and to minimize turnover intentions, organizations must work on eliminating the adverse impact of role stressors. Immense analysis on employee engagement with various paradigms of leadership styles, organizational commitment, citizenship behavior, employee turnover, and satisfaction exists which shows the inverse relationship of role stressors with all of these variables.

 

Transition in an employee’s career also begins when a person is triggered by internal factors of discontentment or distress. It so happens because the work-related discontentment further triggers the need to explore different options for a career change. This issue was picked up by many researchers in the early years of the 21^st Century. In short, the employee’s perception builds the foundation for his transitions in career and turnover intentions.

 

CONCLUSION

Hence, there is a strong need globally to understand the factors within the working environment which are liable to raise the extent of role stressors in organizations. Employee turnover, absenteeism, dissatisfaction, and job stress variables can be controlled by managing the roles of role ambiguities and role conflicts within an organization. I have personally practiced reducing the levels of role stressors which yielded improved relative results. Organizations at their individual and distinctive capacities need to analyze the loopholes in their system and devise adequate strategies to cope with their role stressors to minimize all its negative impacts. 

3 BEST STRATEGIES TO ENHANCE EMPLOYEE’S MENTAL STABILITY

 

Organizations are struggling hard for improving the mental well-being of their workers. For the past few years, organizations have been compulsory embedding into their corporate rules and culture about bringing mental prosperity to their employees. Many companies including large multinational companies are practically making implications in this regard and are providing distinct opportunities to their employees. For instance, to bring about social, emotional, and psychological stability among employees for working in a shared environment, many organizations exercise tactics like carrying out a periodic survey and getting feedback, providing mental assistance to the needy, and giving professional advice as per requirements. Some organizations go to the extent of providing health insurance policies and rest terms to the most deserving employees. However, many loopholes in these processes are present and a continuous need for bringing better strategies still exists.

Now the question arises why do employees even require the need to have mental health care? The world of research literature, surveys, and various kinds of analytical reports portray the reasons for the mental sickness of the organization’s employees. Various research and case studies have publicized that organizations burden employees with work overload and develop excessive stress to attain the given targets. The pressure to perform best in comparison, and the anxiety to get promotions, bonuses, and compensation further affect the mental health of the workers. A disturbed mental state of an employee is prone to the development of discontentment and dissatisfaction in employees. It also negatively affects the overall performance of employees. The leading research theories state that all these factors lead to an increase in employee absenteeism, turnover, productivity loss, and costs to the organizations.

Although an enormous amount of research studies for the betterment have been conducted and the proposed solutions have been implied in many corporate cultures, yet, the need to devise new strategies for the emerging mental issues shall also continue. Organizations practice strategies like job rotation and enrichment where the work duties of the employees are shuffled and revised respectively. They also provide a more relaxed cultural and social environment. These strategies are no doubt fruitful and effective, however, introducing some more effective and practically proven strategies will contribute something positive for the benefit of both the employees and the organization.

The 3 most effective strategies to build mental stability are;

Ice-Breaking and Brainstorming Sessions:

The bitterest truth is that despite all the flexibilities that organizations provide to their employees and all the surveys and feedback processes that they carry out, misses out on the important element, and that is the ice-breaking session of the employees in a shared working environment. The ice-breaking session holds the purpose to create familiarity among the participants of an event. Hence, when ice-breaking sessions are carried out frequently at various intervals in organizations where the employees from various departments and staff level positions gather around to get more familiarity and a sense of belonging. These kinds of sessions allow the workers of an organization to bring up their problems that negatively affect their mental health and then brainstorm over those issues to proceed towards a healthy conclusion. When employees discuss their work issues in the form of groups, they feel more secure and hopeful. The management and the authoritative bodies jot down all the problems and try to come up with their best possible strategies.

 Psychological Sessions:

When we were in school and college, we used to practice doing little prayers and listening to some motivational speeches by the school staff during the morning assembly sessions on a daily basis. The inspiring speeches used to work as fuel for the whole day for the students. Similar practice within organizations where psychological sessions are conducted periodically in various departments of the organization allows employees to get their mental issues catered to along with having a sense of being important to the organization. In these kinds of sessions, the organization must bring up the psychological experts to hear employees’ issues in general and present to them unbiased and honest reviews for improving the intellectual well-being of the workers. The sessions must be interactive and refreshing.

Complaint Session:

Most of the time, employees hesitate to complain in private or open about something that mentally drains them at work.  When an organization practices a complaint session which is usually set as a complaint week in each month, then employees feel authoritative to confidentially launch their related complaints and sets themselves hopeful about the consequences. As a result, the authoritative persons dig into the real issues and bring about mental peace to the employees.

All these three strategies have worked like wonder when I, as an authoritative person, applied them in those organizations where I have been working. Although these strategies seem to be simple yet it creates an effective corresponding culture in an organization when implemented along with other common and traditional strategies for mental stability and hence, it gives a boost to employees’ overall mental status.