Building happiness
What’s the secret to happy employees? Having no secrets. When it comes to your team’s happiness at the workplace, sharing really is caring. Sharing is one of the most effective ways to make your employees feel valued, motivated and fulfilled. It’s a simple way to turn an office into a vibrant community. What’s more, today’s tech tools make it easier than ever to share without taking up time and energy.
Here are 4 ways to share business intelligence to make your team happy, engaged and productive:
#1 Share Accomplishments
Sharing what everyone’s gotten done every day is the foundation of employee engagement. You can’t build a happy, engaged work community if nobody knows what anybody else does.
By sharing accomplishments, you build team cohesion around a daily rhythm of getting stuff done and making progress toward an ultimate goal. It shows how valuable each person’s contribution to the team is, day in and day out. For the individual employee, it’s incredibly motivating and gratifying to build a public record of their individual achievements.
Tools like iDoneThis make it simple to share progress and accomplishments regularly. iDoneThis is a dead-simple, email-based status report tool. Every evening, iDoneThis sends each person on the team an email asking, “What’d you get done today?” All they have to do it reply. The next morning, the team gets another email reporting everyone’s accomplishments from the previous day. It boosts team morale first thing in the morning because it shows everyone’s awesome progress toward a goal and kickstarts another productive day.
#2 Share Task Assignments and Objectives
Sharing task assignments keeps everyone posted on what everyone else is working on, from the CEO down through the whole organization. By making tasks and objectives public and social, rather than private and individual, sharing assignments creates a sense of communal purpose. It gives individual team members a clear understanding of how they will be contributing to the big picture and fires up their motivation.
Tools like Asana make it easy to share task assignments and objectives. Developed by Facebook’s Dustin Moskovitz, Asana helps employees break down business objectives into tasks and assign those tasks to themselves or others. By allowing everyone to see and add to each other’s workload, Asana creates a team that’s more of a nonhierarchical work-sharing community than a traditional hierarchical company.
Comments
This is a great post. In this day and age of competition for talent, knowing what to do to incentive and reward employees is important. That's also why today NeighborWorks America posted a new press release about how to retain and attract nonprofit young professionals.
http://nw.org/network/newsroom/NetNews08222012.asp
August 22 , 2012
Contacts: Doug Robinson, drobinson@nw.org, 202-220-2360, twitter: @neighborworkspr
Six Ways that Nonprofit Community Development Managers Could Attract and Retain Young Professionals
Hint: It’s not just salary, but that helps
WASHINGTON, DC — Nonprofit managers spoke candidly recently at a national symposium, Young Professionals: The Future of Community Development about the things they are doing that work to attract and retain young professionals in a highly competitive job market.
While providing a competitive salary is among the top items young professionals are looking for, managers and young professionals on various panels at the August NeighborWorks Training Institute symposium in Cincinnati also cited other important factors.
1. Provide professional development opportunities. A senior homeownership manager for one of the largest nonprofits in central Ohio stressed that young professionals are looking for opportunities to develop their skills and to stretch. A company that doesn’t provide that type of environment is not likely to keep young staff long. She added that it didn’t take a large professional development budget to demonstrate an organization’s commitment to skills building. Nonprofits could establish partnerships with community and four-year colleges that enable professional development budget dollars to go further.
2. Be clear with expectations. One young manager from a nonprofit in New York City explained how at his organization “a great deal of time” was spent on whether or not to include blue jeans as part of business casual. While being able to wear blue jeans to work might seem trivial, his point was not that nonprofits should allow blue jeans, but that policies need to be clear and aligned with the culture of the organization.
3. Think outside the hiring box. Nonprofits that hire people with talent and potential, and that are willing to train new staff for specific jobs, will have a better chance at retaining good young people who may not be wedded to a specific skills career path, but who are eager to take on new tasks that move the organization forward.
4. Provide access to board members and other senior leadership. Today’s young professionals live in an all-access world, and expect to have greater access to senior management than baby boomers. By enabling substantive interaction with Boards and other senior leadership, nonprofits realize dual benefits: young staff members obtain a broader look at the organization, and Board members and C-suite leaders may be infused with new ideas.
5. Stay competitive with salary. While nonprofits will not likely ever be able to compete with the Fortune 500, a reasonably competitive salary combined with other benefits may help nonprofits compete for the best and the brightest — who just happen to be mission-focused too.
6. Make work fun. One manager at nonprofit in central Florida explained that it was the occasional celebrations at her nonprofit, where achievements generated even small parties, that was one of the things that has kept her at her organization for more than 10 years.
About NeighborWorks America
NeighborWorks America creates opportunities for people to improve their lives and strengthen their communities by providing access to homeownership and to safe and affordable rental housing. In the last five years, NeighborWorks organizations have generated more than $19.5 billion in reinvestment in these communities. NeighborWorks America is the nation’s leading trainer of community development and affordable housing professionals.
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Thank you for this well written informative post. I am looking fwd to trying the tools you suggested.
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