The work environment includes work culture and job alignment. It impacts the entire employee experience. It is something that leaders should focus on. They set the context in which the supervisors and team members function.
On the other hand, dynamic events are what happens in the workplace on a daily basis and are largely influenced by direct managers. Motivated managers focus on minimizing the negatives while maximizing the positives for their teams.
Employees’ emotional reactions to the events and environment of the workplace is influenced by their attitude and emotional stability.
Numerous negative events and a bad work environment can quickly sap away the motivation levels to employees, leading to disengagement and reduced performance.
Fostering a Productive Work Culture
Understanding the inter-relations between work environment, work events and employee attitude is key to designing a positive work culture that motivates teams to outperform!
1. Hiring Right
Hiring right holds the key to engaging the employee in the long run. Each organization has a unique culture and hiring people best suited to that culture is critical to success in the long run.
Say you are a manager in an aggressive financial services organization that depends on the free-flow of information among teams.
But, you hire a lone ranger who is excellent at his core tasks but doesn’t believe in communicating with colleagues. It is a recipe for disaster! All the positive events won’t be able to get through to this employee.
2. Recognition as a habit
Among all the positive events that supervisors, managers, leaders, and peers can influence on a daily basis – recognition tops the list. Not rewards – recognition!
What’s the difference?
Recognition has a huge uplifting effect on employee emotions. Timely recognition for jobs well done, supported by peer acceptance of that recognition has a massive positive reinforcement effect on the workforce.
One aspect which is sometimes ignored by managers is the contagion effect of emotions. Since emotions are intense in nature, both the positive and negative are reflected in the individual’s behavior and can quickly spread within the team.
A boss snubs his team member, she gets angry. Seething with anger she responds with a nasty mail to her colleague who then gets angry and refuses to cooperate in a project initiated by another team member who then gets upset … and so it goes.
On the other hand,
A team member gets recognized for her effort in meeting a tough deadline on a difficult project. She is elated as her colleagues also join in commenting on the recognition she has received. The buoyant team member then helps out a colleague who was struggling with a task and takes upon herself to go out of her way to help solve a customer issue.
Did you know?
Peer-to-peer recognition has an incredible impact on employee emotions. Peers often have the strongest emotional ties and recognition can mean more coming from a peer than even a manager!
No prizes for guessing which event helps the company to perform better!
Conclusion
In order for employee recognition to be effective, it should be part of the company culture. Managers, fellow employees, and leaders should take part in recognition. Employees who are truly valued and know it are much more likely to be engaged and to spread positive emotions through your organization.
About Thanks
Thanks is a leading provider of a recognition-based platform that increases communication, builds teamwork, and makes recognition a part of company culture. Fast, easy and simple Thanks makes it easy to bring data-driven employee recognition to your entire organization. O.C. Tanner purchased the Thanks platform in 2019 to fulfill the recognition needs of smaller businesses.
Thanks customers benefit from the same decades of research in employee motivation and company culture that O.C. Tanner enterprise clients enjoy, but in a product that is geared for fast, easy and simple deployment. Whether you’re starting a recognition program or improving and expanding on what you already have, Thanks has everything you need to engage your people with effective, scalable recognition. Thanks is a subsidiary of OC Tanner.