Being an employer means that you have employees working for you. This also means that you are going to have a relationship with them. The employee-employer relationship could be a run-of-the-mill, hello, goodbye relationship, or you could nurture a real and meaningful relationship.
Let’s read on a little and understand why having a healthy employee-employer relationship is important.
Why Is Employee-employer Relationship Important?
When employers take the time and effort to get to know their employees and share real and personal moments, the relationship grows. The result of a healthy employee-employer relationship is happier, more loyal, devoted, and productive employees. To be straightforward, their healthy relationship helps the company grow.
10 Benefits of a Strong Employee-employer Relationship
1. Less Conflict
Knowing how to approach each of your employees and how they react to various situations makes it easier to understand the best way to broach a potentially difficult situation. A strong employee-employer relationship means that you have likely already been through enough conflict together to understand how either party reacts to different situations. It could also mean that you have learned enough about each other to know how to handle each other in these situations.
Ultimately this means a lot less conflict, and minimal conflict goes a long way in high-stress jobs.
2. Better Employee Engagement
Employees yearn for recognition, and they need to know that their efforts are being noticed. Building a strong employee-employer relationship requires the employer to know exactly what their employees are doing and how well they are doing it. This lets the employee know that the employer is aware of their contribution.
Even if employers aren’t always praising an employee for their work, something as simple as asking a question about how a specific part of the project is going can go a long way to make employees feel more engaged at the workplace.
3. Reduced Attrition
Happier employees feel that they have a personal connection with their employers, which means that they are likely to stay in the organizations longer.
A major benefit of cultivating a meaningful and strong employee-employer relationship is that employees learn to trust you, and you learn to trust them.
This kind of environment breeds healthier attitudes towards work and improves work ethics. Employees who feel trusted by their employer aren’t going to seek a change anytime soon.
4. Better Understanding of Skillset
Here is another great benefit of having a strong employee-employer relationship, you know your people, so you know what their skills are and what they are capable of. This means that you know how to put the team together for the project. You also know what kind of projects you can take on.
Understanding who is capable of what kind of work precisely, takes time. When you hire someone, you hope they always give their best. However, once you’ve built a good relationship with someone, you know how much effort they will actually put into their jobs.
5. Open Communication
While you don’t necessarily want your employees hugging you or jabbing you in your side with their elbows, you do want to have a pretty free atmosphere. It definitely shouldn’t be that the entire floor goes silent when the boss walks in.
Create a healthy employee-employer relationship so that your employees can talk freely to you. This could be about how they think the process can be improved or how they feel about the work they do.This also means that you can communicate openly with your employees and give them your honest feedback.
This leads to a much healthier work environment and ultimately creates a great feedback culture.
6. Equality
In many cases, employers only spend time with their immediate subordinates. This could mean that you are partial to their views and don’t necessarily take the time to listen to all your other employees.
A good employee-employer relationship means that you are linked to everyone who works for you. This means that no one gets special treatment, and everyone has access to you.
While this is surely possible in small and even some medium-sized organizations, it can be impossible in larger organizations. In this case, you have to create ways of representing yourself as an employer and still remain accessible to your workforce.
7. Loyalty
A strong employee-employer relationship fosters loyalty, employees who understand their employer and who feel understood are likely to be more loyal. Taking the time to network with your employees and understanding them helps them feel that they can always come to you for anything. This means that you always have their back. If you can make them feel that, then rest assured that they will always have your back.
8. Easier to Create Employee Development Plans
Creating development plans to improve your workforce is essential. However, creating effective development plans can be a nightmare. Different people in the team likely need different approaches and development plans.
This involves extremely impersonal surveys and questionnaires.
However, if you have a healthy employee-employer relationship, you already know what kind of development plans would work for specific employees. This could mean getting them trained in specific areas or just knowing which employees you are going to promote to positions of responsibility.
9. Flatten the Hierarchy
When employees feel like they have become a vital part of the organization and have become a part of a family, they naturally take on more responsibility and ownership.
This implies that they don’t necessarily feel like employees, but like stakeholders who are executing a particular task in order to further the interests of ‘THEIR’ organization.
Take the time to truly bond with your people and create a strong employee-employer relationship. The results are going to be phenomenal.
10. Increased Productivity
At the end of the day, a good employee-employer relationship produces all the above-mentioned. When you’ve checked all these boxes, it leads to a better work environment and ultimately higher rates of productivity.
We’ve all heard it before. ‘An inspired workforce is a productive workforce'.
Conclusion
A meaningful employee-employer relationship not only boosts the overall productivity but also increases employee engagement and satisfaction at the workplace. According to a study by Smarp, an employee communications platform, companies with high employee engagement are 22% more profitable. It is a full circle in that engagement improves productivity and productivity leads to satisfaction.
Take the time to bond with your employees. While you don’t have to be their best friend, being a good employer takes effort, and you must get to know your team. This also means that you have to drop a few walls and show your feelings every so often as well.
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