Work Happiness - the secret ingredient to talent retention and attraction
Working Wonder Ltd
Empowering everyone to find Work Happiness. Career coaching, training and employer brand consultancy.
There’s no denying it’s tough out there right now.? We are faced with some major threats to life as we know it (political, economic and social instability) which are having a huge impact on how we live our lives and how we do business.
Many business leaders are under intense pressure to reduce costs, to do more with less, to try and hit profitability targets or simply to make ends meet, all of which puts increasing pressure on our most valuable assets of all, our people. To make things even harder is the reality of the great attrition and us being in a period in which many people have reassessed how they want work to fit into their life, and what’s important to them.?
So what can we do to make things better? Understanding what’s going on for your team and what they need is a great starting point:
There’s a Work Happiness disconnect happening between employers and employees. Recent research from Microsoft and LinkedIn found that more than 80% of employees feel they are being productive at work, while at the same time, more than 80% of leaders disagree – a phenomenon they have labelled productivity paranoia. It results in leaders feeling frustrated and employees feeling undervalued. Working unhappy.? As a leader it’s important to create an open forum for discussion with your team, to identify clear goals, agree ways of working and appropriate deadlines so that everyone is on the same page.
When considering Work Happiness, a key factor to consider is diversity of thought as everyone finds happiness at work in different guises. This article about quiet people in meetings is a great reminder not to mislabel introverted behaviours such as quietness as ‘unhappiness’ or not being engaged at work.??
Work Happiness is good business sense. When people are happy at work research has proven that they are 3 x more creative, innovative and productive which in turn positively impacts profitability by 20%*. In addition, happy people stay at companies longer and champion where they work externally so it’s great for talent retention and attraction too.?
If your employees are unhappy they will leave and it is far more expensive to hire a new employee than invest in retaining them. According to estimates by the Undercover Recruiter, for an average salary of ￡27,600, you’ll actually need to budget for something closer to ￡50,000 in their first year for the full package as well as potentially spending 20-30% of their final salary on recruiter costs to hire them in the first place.
Compare this to instead committing to a personalised coaching and training programme for the original employee of ￡5,000 a year which will ensure their loyalty, productivity and commitment to your company and create that Work Happiness. What would you rather invest in?
领英推荐
Talk to us - We are more than happy to meet and speak with you and your leadership team to? share the latest learnings on how to create Work Happiness
* Gallup study 2013, American Psychological Society 2005 & McKinsey ‘Delivering through diversity’ 2018
Check out Working Wonder Ltd co-founders, Nichola Johnson-Marshall and Calli Louis sharing their workplace culture views in the media:
Four day working week trial - There’s been a lot of debate about the Four day working week trial so we chimed in to give our view in this Huffington Post article.
How to attract, support, motivate and retain working parents - Read our article on the IPA blog which explores how companies can best support working parents as they transition into the workplace.
How to create workplace inclusion in the fintech industry (and every other industry!) - Listen to our interview on the Women of FinTech podcast with Nadia Edwards-Dashti from Harrington Starr.