Morale is at the core of every well-functioning workplace, with employee happiness linked to performance, which in turn is driven by effective workplace leadership.
A good leader should be versed in ways to maintain and build a healthy workplace culture and strive to make ongoing improvements to this in order to ensure the best environment for every generation of the workforce. Effective workplace leadership should consider a number of ways to continuously ensure their employees are motivated and feel valued, which can be maintained through a number of channels and activities.
Ongoing training is crucial
Workplace training is critical when it comes to building career plans for each employee. This then feeds into employee happiness which can be encouraged through ensuring that workplace learning and training is tailored to their individual requirements and involves activities and knowledge building that will compliment their deserved career trajectory. A bespoke training course, designed around the needs of your employees can ensure that your workforce builds on their strongest skills and results in a well-rounded team.
Personalised benefit system
Revealing the driving force behind what makes your staff tick, can be your way of ensuring they are rewarded in a way in which they value. The desire to work towards goals external to career progression should also be included when considering workplace learning and ongoing progress within their role, to ensure a well-rounded approach.
Collaborative targets tailored to the role
It isn’t beneficial for managers to set employee targets in isolation, as this fails to establish a real reason for the target and how they will establish a path to achieve it. For management, they will likely have a set of generic targets which particular teams will need to achieve, however, to embrace a collaborative approach to workplace leadership, management must work alongside their employees to set targets. Not only will this ensure a personalised approach to learning, but will also add value to an employee's role and improve their feeling of inclusion within the workplace, through being able to set and follow their own customised path.
Establish an ongoing relationship and build lines of communication
Successful workplace leadership should be built on open lines of communication and relationships between team and leader, beyond a day-to-day working life. Every workplace leadership style should embrace the opportunity to learn more about employees beyond their role within the team and the business. Leaders should encourage regular bonding activities for teams and the wider business, allowing staff to speak with managers in casual settings and allow them to build an established and well-rounded knowledge of each employees background and interests.
Ensure employees are rewarded and celebrated
Finally, its important for every workplace leadership style to include a rewarding phase once an employee has successfully undertaken a difficult task or for going above and beyond. All success should be celebrated as this has been shown to drive employees to strive for similar results or better in the future.