Does your business struggle to maintain high levels of employee engagement and motivation? If so, it might be because you’ve not yet explored the world of employee success.
In this post, we’ll be looking at what employee success means and how you can work towards it for ultimate employee and business success.
What is Employee Success?
Employee Success is multifaceted, and encompasses both individual and organisational achievements. It's about creating a work environment where employees feel empowered, motivated, and supported to reach their full potential, both personally and professionally. This involves aligning individual goals with company objectives, fostering a sense of purpose, and recognising the value that each employee brings to the organisation.
To achieve employee success, you need to go beyond just measuring engagement and satisfaction. It’s vital to actively invest in your employees' growth and development by providing them with the necessary tools, resources, and opportunities to succeed. Likewise, celebrating and rewarding employees' achievements is crucial for fostering that culture of success. We’ll cover all of this – and more – throughout this article.
It’s also important to note that employee success extends beyond the workplace. It's about supporting employees' overall well-being and helping them achieve a healthy work-life balance.
Why is Employee Success Important?
We know that an employee who’s emotionally engaged with their company, and with their role in it, will perform better in their jobs – that’s a no-brainer. Add to that giving them what they need to do their jobs well, whether it’s mentorship, training, equipment or anything else, and you take their performance up a notch.
It’s not hard to see why employee success, and the productivity it brings about, impacts business performance. It also goes further than this, impacting your retention rates and even customer satisfaction (nobody likes dealing with a grumpy customer service representative!).
The Key Drivers of Employee Success
There are a number of factors that contribute to employee success.
Clear Expectations and Goals
Setting clear expectations and goals means everyone’s on the same page, giving the employee something defined and measurable to work towards. This removes any ambiguity and ensures both you and your employee understand their role in your business.
Effective Communication
There’s no walk of life where effective communication doesn’t improve things, and it’s especially important in the workplace. Good communication is critical to efficient collaboration, making sure everyone knows what they’re doing and preventing misunderstandings and resentments.
Training and Development
Any job can start to feel stagnant after a while, and that’s bad news for both employee engagement and the growth of your company in an evolving business landscape. Help employees keep learning by ensuring they have plenty of opportunities for training and development, whether that’s sending them on a course or pairing them up with an office mentor.
Recognition and Rewards
When they’ve done a great job, make sure they’re rewarded for it. This is part of what we meant when we talked about celebrating their achievements – although to really make them feel supported, you could also go further and celebrate personal things like birthdays, charity runs and so on. Incentives can work well at boosting their motivation.
Work-Life Balance
This is something that’s been in the spotlight a lot in the years since Covid forced us all to work from home. It’s no surprise that hybrid and flexible working have taken off, because as well as saving businesses money in overheads, they also support your employees’ wellbeing by giving them a better work/life balance, which translates to better retention rates and productivity.
Effective Leadership
Leadership style makes a big difference to employee success because of the impact it has on both working relationships and on wider workplace culture. The great communication we’ve already mentioned comes into this, but it’s also about leaders who can inspire and empower their employees to help them succeed.
Opportunities for Advancement
Having something to work towards helps achieve longer-term buy-in from employees, with a clearly defined path to progression giving them an incentive to engage and work on their personal and professional growth.
Inclusive and Diverse Culture
Fostering a culture of inclusivity and diversity makes sure everyone feels welcome, as well as creating a range of perspectives that supports creativity and innovation. Ensuring an employee feels valued and supported whatever their background is crucial to their engagement and success.
Feedback and Performance Management
Tying in with career advancements and clear expectations and goals, feedback and performance management in the form of regular appraisals helps employees continue their development and keep goals in sight.
Resource Allocation
Making sure employees have the right tools for their job seems basic, but it can be easily overlooked. Whether it’s a faster laptop, a standing desk or a company car, getting the fundamentals right, and then allocating budget to enhance the day-to-day employee experience, will help make sure your employees feel supported to do their roles to the best of their abilities.
Creating a Culture of Employee Success in Your Business
With these factors in mind, you’re ready to start building a culture of employee success that builds in each of them. Employee success should be a consideration throughout their time with you, so start at the beginning:
- Start with recruitment – making sure an employee’s skills and attributes are right for the role sets them up for success
- On-boarding – set clear goals and performance expectations from the outset, with a clear outline of career advancement opportunities that they can already start working towards
- Training and mentoring – whether it’s a new or long-standing employee, provide regular opportunities for continued learning and mentorship so that they can keep adding to their skills
- Flexible working – where possible, instigate flexible and/or hybrid working so that employees can achieve a work-life balance that works for them
- Recognition and incentives – recognising achievements is key to boosting employees’ experience and morale, and recognition programmes are one way to address this (see below)
These strategies will help you foster a supportive, growth-oriented working environment where employee success in turn supports company growth. And the good news is that there are tools available to help unlock employee success.
How Psychometric Assessment Tools Can Support in Building a Culture of Employee Success
Psychometric assessment is a great way to gain the insights you need to make a success of employee success.
- Understand your employees’ strengths and interests – so that you can put together properly personalised development plans to help them develop and thrive in the workplace
- Spot future leaders – personality and emotional intelligence tests are particularly good at identifying when someone has traits that would make them a good leader, so you’ll know who to invest in helping them achieve their leadership potential
- Increase your employees’ confidence by giving them the self-awareness they need to grow
It’s also worth noting that psychometric testing reduces your reliance on subjective opinions, using science-backed tests that assess all employees on an equal basis and on their own merits.
What is Continuous Employee Success?
Investing in employee success isn’t something you do once and then forget about – it’s an ongoing process that should become embedded in your workplace culture and way of doing things. To bring this idea to life, here are some examples of continuous employee success practices that your business can adopt.
- Onboarding programmes – these help new employees quickly integrate into your business, providing them with everything they need to know to thrive during their time with you.
- Mentoring – a great way to support personal and professional growth, pairing an employee with a more experienced coworker supports employee success by assigning them someone they can turn to for advice and guidance.
- Performance tracking – often taking the form of one-to-ones, appraisals or performance reviews, performance tracking helps employees on the road to success by setting measurable goals that they can work towards and which you can regularly check in on with them.
- Recognition programmes – designed to acknowledge employees’ successes and boost morale, recognition programmes essentially formalise what you may already have been doing, and might include setting incentives for achieving certain goals.
- Wellness initiatives – whether it’s a free gym pass, support with mental health or the flexibility to achieve a good work-life balance, focus on employees’ health and wellbeing, to create a happier, more productive workforce.
- Career growth plans – as we’ve seen, having clear career advancement opportunities is key to employee success, so this is all about ensuring their personal development plans are helping them work towards future promotion.
How Do You Transition to Continuous Employee Success?
Thinking in terms of continuous employee success means switching from a reactive approach to a proactive one. Start by getting clear on the strategy – what does employee success look like to your business, and how will you measure it? Having clearly defined KPIs – such as employee engagement, job satisfaction and retention rates – will help you monitor your efforts, and align your employees’ personal goals with those of your overall business.
Another thing that will help you get into the ‘continuous’ mindset is to make check-ins with your employees much more regular. If you’ve been used to doing an annual performance review and leaving it at that, make time for monthly one-to-ones so that you can make sure employees are getting the on-going support and resources they need to thrive.
Setting aside time each week for employees to spend on continuous learning and development will support the goals you set in their personal development plans, while recognition schemes such as ‘employee of the month’ will keep employee success at the forefront of everyone’s minds.
Overcoming Common Roadblocks
So far, so positive – but what happens when you’ve got some big challenges to overcome in your focus on employee success? Here are some of the things to look out for and what you can do about them.
- Disengagement – there are numerous possible causes of disengagement, but often include things like employees not feeling valued or recognised, or not being clear on what’s expected of them. Continued learning is one way to re-engage employees who might have emotionally checked out, while recognition programmes and clear personal development plans help them feel they’re working towards something.
- Burnout – often the result of an overly demanding workload or poor work-life balance, it will take more than a few wellness initiatives to tackle burnout (though they won’t go amiss). Start by taking the time to listen to what’s causing it, and put concrete steps in place to address it, such as implementing flexible working, setting boundaries on answering emails outside working hours, or delegating, automating or outsourcing part of the employee’s workload where possible.
- Lack of leadership support – as we’ve seen, great leaders empower and inspire employees to succeed, and poor leadership can have the opposite effect. Getting your leaders back on track with management training is one way to approach this, as is putting in place a mentorship programme where employees can gain additional support from more experienced colleagues.
Above all, good communication is critical to overcoming all these roadblocks. Encourage open and honest feedback that goes both ways, so that you know what employees feel they need from you, and vice versa.
How to Ensure Employee Success
Building a culture of employee success doesn’t happen overnight, but the tips we’ve outlined here will help you take a proactive approach that keeps it front and centre.
From setting clear goals to implementing recognition programmes, the strategies we’ve covered here are all the more effective when they’re backed by insights from employee assessment platforms like ours, here at Thomas.
Get in touch with our experts or explore our assessments to create a thriving workforce.
