Updated: February 28, 2024
Employees play a huge role in a company’s success, and every employer must ensure they promote a good workplace environment by removing barriers that may negatively affect the employees. To achieve this, organizations need to consider barriers to success and find ways to remove them. This article shows some of the barriers an organization may experience and the ways it can effectively remove them.
Building a strong and effective workforce for your organization is crucial for the success of your business and your employees. Considering this, there are many benefits to promoting the success of your employees and keeping them on your team.
Identifying Issues with Employee Engagement
The Work Institute has identified the major limitations to employee engagement and the strategies to eliminate them. While these factors are certainly important to consider, there are many more possible variables that may affect the success of your employees, and in many cases, there may not be just one solution or strategy to solve potential barriers. Keep reading to learn more about possible barriers that are keeping your employees from reaching their full potential for your business.
Lack of Clarity
Employees cannot perform their jobs to their full potential if employers don’t provide clear objectives. It is disheartening that many supervisors and managers are inaccessible when employees need them most. The combination of an unapproachable manager and poor communication breeds a frustrated, confused, and demotivated workforce.
Solution
Redefine the hiring process. When new employees join the organization, ensure their job description is clearly defined. In addition, assign an approachable and helpful mentor to guide the newbie to understand the employer’s expectations.
Establishing communication channels between managers and staff is essential to prevent ambiguity. These channels allow employees to seek clarification or raise their issues within the organization; however, if you have many employees potentially facing this barrier, there could be more under the surface that needs to be evaluated and addressed.
Lack of Business Alignment
Some employers fail to communicate their mission, vision, and core values. Employees in such organizations lack direction considering there are no defined objectives they should strive to achieve. Additionally, employees like working in environments whose ethics and beliefs align with theirs.
Employees might develop certain perceptions if your organization’s principles and visions are not articulated. This is risky, as it can ruin a company’s culture, values, and mission, and causing problems for overall productivity. Clashing expectations can create chaos in an organization, disrupting the production process, so it’s crucial to address this problem as soon as possible.
Solution
Create a vision, mission, and core values to motivate your staff and provide them with a sense of belonging and purpose within the company. Communicate the organization’s vision, mission, and core values from the business executives to the employees and other stakeholders. Employers should also motivate their employees to promote and cement their organizational culture.
Lack of an Employee Engagement Strategy
The lack of a sound employee engagement strategy creates confusion, as employees lack direction. Poor employee engagement creates employee dissatisfaction, which has far-reaching consequences on the firm’s production capacity and longevity.
Solution
The first step to developing an employee engagement strategy is developing the engagement goals you want to achieve.
An employee engagement survey can help you create an effective employee engagement strategy, as it is founded on employee input. One of the essential components of the employee engagement strategy is an employee recognition program.
Employee recognition increases job satisfaction within an organization, which, in return, improves the organization’s production capacity as employees feel noticed, valued, and appreciated. The human resource department can collaborate with other organizational executives to develop an effective recognition program.
The following are some approaches to increase the level of employee engagement:
- Employees whose actions are proportionate to the fundamental values should be rewarded.
- Develop a real-time system that sends accolades to performing employees, especially those who hit their targets.
- Transform your data into actionable insights
- Have tangible prizes
Little Work-Life Balance
Most organizations aspire to achieve their goals within a short span. As a result, they tend to give employees more tasks without considering important factors needed for an organization to run smoothly. For instance, a company may increase work hours and reduce employees’ leisure and rest hours. Employees may also opt to come during weekends to work towards fulfilling the set deadline on some tasks, which may not be healthy for them or the employer.
How to fix it
For an organization to improve its productivity, it must ensure that its employees are not feeling drained or pressured at the workplace. Since little work-life balance is among the common barriers in the workplace, the employer needs to encourage their employees not to work too hard but instead work smart. It’s important to let employees know that the time spent at work does not necessarily prove their productivity; rather, it’s how they do things.
Employers can educate employees to work smart by comparing themselves with organizations where employees work for a few hours but produce excellent results. They can also call in other successful company leaders to advise them on how to work smart without draining themselves.
Poor Leadership
There are many barriers to success, but poor leadership is among the fatal ones. Usually, When an unqualified individual takes up the lead role in an organization, there are higher chances of it going in the wrong direction.
Typically, employees imitate their bosses or superiors, and if they are not working hard, they are most likely to feel discouraged and become lazy at the workplace. For instance, a leader reporting late at work may influence employees to see no reason for reporting early. This is just one example of many; examples of poor leadership can present in many different ways.
How to Fix it
An organization can tackle this problem by organizing seminars on different elements of leadership, including how to be a better leader. Additionally, it can implement policies that allow leaders to get scrutiny for bad behavior at the workplace. The employer may also devise ways of disciplining leaders who defy its policies, including demoting or suspending them for a certain period. It’s crucial to resolve this kind of problem swiftly and effectively, and unfortunately, there isn’t any one solution to this type of problem.
Lack of Recognition and Reward
Lack of recognition and reward is also among the most significant barriers to success. Naturally, employees require something to motivate them to work even harder. Every employee may have different expectations for recognition, so it’s important to consider the thoughts of all employees in order to build an effective solution.
How to Fix It
To fix this issue, the company can make every employee receive recognition for their excellent work. They can have an awards event where they pick and reward the best employee. For example, the employee of the month can receive a fully sponsored vacation, which may motivate other employees to work hard.
Recognition and rewards don’t need to be in the form of physical prizes or accommodations, as all employees value different forms of recognition (some may not need recognition at all). The only way to ensure that your employees feel recognized for their work is to start the conversation and learn what drives their workplace motivation.
How to Ensure the Success of Your Employees
For your company to overcome all the barriers to success, the organization must promote teamwork among all members. An effective engagement model can help specify how the employer is involved with workforce programs.
How to Achieve It
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to ensuring your employees’ success. Because of this, Work Institute works to collect data and anonymous surveys from employees to learn what goes on behind closed doors and away from the eyes of management. We review all the information collected and build the best strategy for the success of your employees and your organization overall.
Building the Best Team For Your Company
Running an organization of any size isn’t easy; it requires a lot of effort and discipline from every staff member on every level. For that reason, it’s important for employers to do what they can to address and possibly remove all the barriers they may face at work.
The strategies listed above can help alleviate some workplace problems to prevent any possible issues with its employees and overall productivity.
Contact Work Institute today for employee retention and engagement programs to help improve overall employee satisfaction while reducing costs for profitable growth.