Make working enjoyable

By Joseph Kabuye

Employers must treat their employees with respect and vice versa if they all want to succeed and achieve goals. 

Managers often complain about employees who have bad attitudes. While it is true the occasional employee may not be pleasant to work with, most people do not go to work each day with the intention of creating conflict.

Improving employee relations in the workplace is bound to impact your company’s bottom line in a positive way. When members of your staff cooperate with each other and with management, performance and morale improve as well as increasing output and quality of work.

As such, it is a wise investment to ensure that the workplace is conducive for positive employee relations. Management should encourage worker interactions to increase positive energy. Also, supervisors should be open to subordinates’ suggestions.

It’s a good idea to ensure that first-time managers have people-relations skills. Here are ways in which managers can improve on employee relations at the work place.

Sharing the work

A manager should encourage employees to share work with one another through team projects as a means of improving employee relations.

Comfort level and ease of communication between employees increase when employees must work together to achieve a common goal.

Decisions should be made through a collective effort, with a team leader intervening only in extreme cases where communication breaks down and the group is left without a clear direction.

On the other hand, managers should encourage team building events which require the attendance of upper, middle and lower management.

Group break times

Meals can be a community event in the workplace. This can be made possible when management encourages employees to have lunch breaks at the same time to create a sense of community and improve working relationships between employees.

By taking meals together, employees can openly discuss the events of the day in a lower-stress environment than being actively engaged in work. Employees should avoid talking about work so the low-stress environment is preserved.

Get all of your staff and managers involved in social events

Schedule time each month to celebrate birthdays, holidays, anniversaries and employee personal achievements.  This will create a feeling of involvement among your employees.

The best way to improve employee and management relations is to set an example that your workers will be inspired to follow.

The writer is an industrial and organizational psychologist