The modern-day office needs to work efficiently and smoothly to keep a company on its legs. Customer experience is essential for a company, and with the advancement of technology, hearing responses and opinions or feedback from customers has become very simple.
Likewise, employees expectations from management is no surprise. These expectations, and whether or not they are met, will determine how motivated your employees are to continue working. Your employees are the core of your company, so making sure they work in optimum conditions is crucial. Employee expectations are manageable but the right management would make your employees keener to work for you productively.
So, how can you tell what each employee expects from the company, and how do you manage it? This article will discuss the expectations an employee can have from your company and how you can meet these modern-day expectations.
Employee Expectations:
Generally when onboarding a new employee, it’s good to ask what are your expectations from the company that hires you. Employees expect opportunities and space to evolve. Here are some common criteria an employee would expect your company to fulfill:
- Purpose:
Most employees are motivated when they can attach a purpose to the task given to them. Paychecks are simply not incentive enough to keep employees content. They must feel like the task you assign them means something to them in particular.
- Growth:
It should come as no surprise that your employee would want to grow and thrive in their work environment. The mindset that people who good at a particular skill are born talented should not be re-instated at the work-place, as it makes an employee put off trying to learn and grow. A mindset that supports individual growth and progress should be taken on, and the employee should be able to grow.
Job security:
This can be a tricky expectation to manage; however, every employee would want job security for a minimum time frame at least. This is where training and contracts come in, so you only recruit employees that would be fit for the job and eager to learn. Above all, you must be honest about the frame of the company and how secure your employee’s job is.
Employees expect opportunities and space to grow and evolve. Here are 5 things you could implement to fulfill your employee’s criteria while working under you:
- Define the Role of Each Employee:
From the get-go, you must make an employee feel like they are essential to a particular function in the company. From when they are first recruited to when they start in the field, they must feel like their job is crafted for them according to their qualifications.
One way this can be achieved is through autonomous motivation. Autonomy is something employees would want over their work, as it provides them with a feeling of personally owning or being responsible for their task, which motivates them to perform the task well. Autonomous motivation gives them a sense of purpose.
- Create Supervisor-Employee Boundaries:
An employee should be able to communicate and talk freely with their supervisors and should be able to ask for help when they need it. However, a supervisor must set clear boundaries with an employee. While the relationship established should be friendly, it should not be over-friendly.
The employee should feel like a supervisor is their work friend, not a “friend.” But a tight boundary would keep the employee from coming to you at all. That’s why this boundary must be set on fairness and accountability.
- Connect Employee With Company Culture:
Simply training your employees on the company’s vision is not enough to make them feel like they are an integral part of the team. Employees and recruiters these days give high value to company culture and how an employee can maintain a work-pleasure balance.
Apart from that, how your employee connects to the company culture also establishes how they socialize and communicate with others during work and even potential clients or partners outside work. This will determine how comfortable the employee is in the workspace.
- Employee Flexibility Is a Privilege:
A lot of companies these days offer remote or flexible employment opportunities. While this seems ideal, it more often is just the opposite in most examples.
Employee flexibility is a myth because the less disciplined employees or employees who are used to working whenever they want will struggle to work if they aren’t motivated or there is no autonomy. This will tarnish both employee and company productivity.
- Appreciate and Recognize your employees:
This is one expectation is that is the most important yet most companies fail to meet. An employee needs to feel like the work they put in has contributed to your company in some way or the other. If they have to constantly work without any incentives or praise; they will feel like they are being undermined.
You must appreciate your employees for doing a good job just as often as you call them out for doing a bad one. If you only complain about their abilities, they will feel like they could do better elsewhere, where their skills are recognized by the superiors.
You can achieve to manage these expectations in a few ways:
Transparency: You must be completely honest with your employees, in terms of what you expect, how they are working, and what the company will offer them for a job well done. If you mislead them, they will lose the motivation to work for you.
Purpose: You must make your employees feel like they have an important role to play and add meaning to their tasks. This will increase efficiency as they will want to perform, and not feel like they are being coerced.
Feedback: Constant feedback from both sides make the employee feel valued and also gives them an opportunity to feel like they can clear most of their questions and will know exactly what to look out for and what is expected of them.
If you pay attention to your employee expectations and put an effort, these expectations are manageable and will benefit you and your employee. You have to ask questions to your employees like, “what is your expectation from company?” and “what are your salary expectations?” When you know these details about an employee and strive to meet it, you motivate your employees to be better and work harder. Take care of your employee, who you trust to take care of your company.
