Employers know that great workforce management relies on understanding employees' morale, productivity and needs. However, the workplace's overall energy can have a significant impact on how workers feel about their performance and their level of loyalty to the organization.
Understand the roots of workplace energy issues
In a blog featured by The New York Times, Tony Shwartz, chief executive of consulting firm The Energy Project, and Christine Porath, an associate professor at Georgetown University, wrote about what aspects of the workplace truly hinder employee happiness and productivity. A 2013 survey of 12,115 employees by The Energy Project and Harvard Business Review uncovered what makes workers unhappy in their jobs, and Shwartz and Porath noted the survey showcased that if just four basic needs are met, employees tend to be happy. These four needs are physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.
According to the article, physical means being able to recharge in the workplace, whereas emotional means feeling valued by co-workers and management. Mental is similar to emotional but means being able to focus on tasks and, essentially, time management. Spiritual is more abstract because Shwartz and Porath wrote it means "feeling connected to a higher purpose at work."
These basic needs correlate to much of what has already been written and deduced by researchers and workforce management experts, but these four needs break down what has previously been identified by generic, overarching categories. For instance, an article in US News suggested improving workplace energy by acknowledging others and showing gratitude for support at work, which is essentially the emotional basic need.
However, simply identifying what is sapping the workplace of its energy isn't going to make issues go away. Effective workforce management means holding people accountable for how they negatively affect others, and putting resources in place to ensure everyone is doing their jobs efficiently. Yet employers know it's not all on them – employees do still need to understand that while the workforce is not perfect (and may never be), they can still control how they react to issues that pop up in the work environment. Even those problems that are running problems don't have to sap employees of their energy. According to an article in Forbes, professionals need to look internally and understand their own contributions to the workplace. Taking an individual approach to workplace problems can result in happier employees, even when things aren't going well at the business or there are few opportunities for a work-life balance. Employers and their HR professionals need to do the best they can to address workers' needs, and this means that they should implement the right solutions.
Because employers need to think holistically about what their workers need, they should start with their HR solutions to start building great energy right from the foundations of the business.
