If you’ve noticed a slump in employee engagement or your company’s performance, some factors in your work environment may be affecting your employees and your company. Stress can significantly affect how your staff feels about working for you and their job performance. Here are some of the top workplace environments that cause employee stress and decrease employee engagement performance:
Micromanagement
Many employees feel stressed at having a manager hover around them, watching them work and telling them what to do. A manager may think that their constant direction is increasing employee engagement performance, but it can produce a negative outcome. Employees may feel they are constantly being watched and fear making mistakes. They may also feel like they can’t be trusted or that they aren’t capable of doing their job.
Absent Managers
On the other hand, having a manager who doesn’t communicate or direct staff at all can also cause poor employee engagement performance. Without feedback and direction, your employees may not understand the positive impact their work has on the company.
Favoritism
Favoritism in the workplace can also hurt employee engagement performance. It’s essential that all employees, at all levels, are held to the same standards. Allowing managers, upper management, or a favourite coworker to be promoted or receive better projects can cause stress and dissatisfaction in other employees.
Lower Than Industry Standards
Whether for employee engagement performance, workplace culture or compensation, hitting below standard can make your employees feel less valued. Reduced perceived value may cause employees to look for other jobs within the organization or at a competitor’s. While you don’t always have to do what everyone else does, you must stay within your industry’s standard to ensure employee satisfaction and remain competitive in your market. No company is perfect, and if you’ve noticed some of these behaviors in your own company, it doesn’t mean you have failed. These workplace behaviours are common, but if you’ve noticed that they are creating stress for your employees and negatively impacting employee engagement performance and productivity, you may need to make a change sooner rather than later.
One way to do that is to introduce employee assistance programs to help reduce stress and create more of a work-life balance. Another solution is to conduct an employee engagement or satisfaction survey to see how your employees feel about your work culture and environment.
At Flex Surveys, we help you conduct your employee satisfaction survey and will work with you to create an action plan to improve your company and increase employee engagement, performance and happiness. We also have external benchmarking as part of our surveys. We use essential questions to see how you perform against your competitors. This way, you can see where you may be lacking and improve to increase employee engagement, performance, and retention.