Developing Value for Employees

I commented and shared a post on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago on how to make employees feel valued. My viewpoint was that from the learning and development side (of course!) and it’s continued to mull over in my mind.

To make an employee feel valued takes very little. Provide them with a reason, aside from financial, for doing their work. Tell them how what they are doing adds value for their team/the company. Encourage them to learn new skills and discuss the value their acquired knowledge will add to the team/company.

When thinking about this, I recalled two very different team situations. The first team was in a company that set organisational goals but these weren’t then fed down into department goals, team objectives and individual activities. The individual members of the team had no idea what was required of them to help the company achieve their goals aside from ‘make more money, reach more markets’, as their manager didn’t work with them to break this down into how they would contribute or what they needed to do. They were told – ‘ The board are deciding what is needed…’, ‘work as usual as this will roll up’ but ‘set professional development goals to achieve the company goal’. Team members were subsequently directed individually with no understanding what others were doing nor how what they did was contributing.

Hmmm… how do you set professional development objectives if you aren’t given direction? How can you feel valued if you are just told to work as usual and not how that feeds in to meeting the company goals? Where is the transparency if the board are deciding what needs to be done and this is not being rolled down or even discussed with the teams that have greater understanding and knowledge of what is possible/needed?

The other team I worked with had a number of days of meetings and workshops where they drilled into the company objectives, worked together to ensure they were the right goals to focus on, refined them where necessary, discussed what needs there may be re technology, new hires and skills, and conducted numerous activities to break these down into objectives for the teams and then further again into individual tasks. Crucially, during these meetings dates were set for checking progress and actions were assigned.

Value – check! Ownership – Check! Motivation – Check! Leadership – Check!

So how do I provide value?

In my post I provided a very simple example of how to show your value to an employee when they or you identify they have time for some professional development in their downtime:

‘We could really do with someone with greater knowledge of (X) on the team. Would you be able to take that on with the view of being our SME? Let me know if there’s anything you need.’

I would like to expand that to show more clearly what I mean:

‘We could really do with someone with greater knowledge of (customer impact analysis) on the team. This will feed into our team’s objective of (informing the company of their progress towards creating greater engagement and sales in the Asian markets) which helps the (marketing team) understand how their (social media campaign) is meeting their goals (and where there are gaps). Would you be able to take that on with the view of being our team SME? Let me know if there’s anything you need.’

Now that is just a rough example, but I hope you can see how I am providing an activity that meets the team’s objective, and that highlights how it contributes to other teams to help them achieve the company goal. In addition, it provides the employee with a personal professional development goal – ‘become our team SME‘, and ensures the employee knows they are supported – ‘Let me know if there is anything you need’.

Provide a reason, provide support, provide time, provide space. All this combines to provide Value.

If you would like some ideas on how you can improve your employee engagement or team motivation, contact me for an obligation free chat!