As part of today’s changing workforce, offering workers flexible work arrangements can help broaden your company’s access to talent, cut overhead costs and address your skills gap. They can also help improve employee retention.
I recently attended a seminar hosted by Suzanne Jacobs where she discussed various drivers creating Trust and Motivation in the work place and the impact it can have both on employees and employers!
Susanne is a specialist in change, employee engagement, leadership and the science of optimal performance. Her work and research draws on over 25 years of strategic business change experience and commercial knowledge working across industry sectors, leading many major successful people and business change and restructuring programmes, both nationally and internationally. She combines her experience alongside the latest approaches from neuroscience and her own research to deliver practical, sustainable learning, tools and advice for leaders to improve performance, motivation and trust. Susanne's work has seen her named as one of the top thought leaders for trust!
Trust - the True Performance Currency
Successful businesses are built on relationships. Relationships between employers and employees, staff and customers, internal stakeholders and external stakeholders. At the foundation of all relationships is trust. Without each party trusting one another the ability to come to an agreement or consensus on an issue is always going to be compromised.
If a workplace is able to foster a strong sense of trust within their organisation they can see a number of benefits including:
- Increased productivity amongst staff
- Improved morale amongst employees and staff
- The ability to work more effectively as a team, rather than individuals
- Reduce the time to make and discuss key issues as each individual trusts in the judgement and expertise of their colleagues.
As quoted by Suzanne Jacobs " How do we create workplaces that support and leverage our natural biological reward mechanism and mitigate psychological threat. What do our brains equate as trust? The answer is the DRIVERS – a trust check-list drawn from various fields of science and academic study. The research shows that if each are supported in the workplace, intrinsic motivation, engagement, improved wellbeing, and sustainable performance are the results."
One of the biggest drivers in the work place is "Voice and Choice".
"Voice" refers to mechanisms that provide workers with ‘meaningful inputs’ into organizational decision-making which therefore makes an employee feel valued and is proven to increase staff motivation and retention!
Manage your energy and not your time
How many breaks do you and your teams take during the day?
During the course of the day our bodies go through periods of rest and activity, we experience 90 minutes of activity followed by 20 minutes of rest, cycled over and over throughout the day.
The problem arises when we ignore these rhythms and try to maintain constant activity throughout the day, failing to heed our regular need for a break,
Our goal is to make the most of those 90 minutes of activity by making the most out of those 20 minutes of rest.
Identifying your individual patterns
Now that you have built yourself up to 90 minutes of uninterrupted work, and have experienced the 20-minute healing break, you can start to determine your optimal cycle lengths.
Maybe you run out of gas after 85 minutes, instead of 90. Maybe 15 minutes of rejuvenation is enough for you, and an additional 5 minutes of rest would be counterproductive.
A short break is better than no break, so even if you take only 5 minutes to chat with a co-worker, that is better than nothing!
When people are able to take more control of their emotions, they can improve the quality of their energy, regardless of the external pressures they’re facing. To do this, they first must become more aware of how they feel at various points during the workday and of the impact these emotions have on their effectiveness. Most people realize that they tend to perform best when they’re feeling positive energy. What they find surprising is that they’re not able to perform well or to lead effectively when they’re feeling any other way.
Unfortunately, without intermittent recovery, we’re not physiologically capable of sustaining highly positive emotions for long periods. Confronted with relentless demands and unexpected challenges, people tend to slip into negative emotions—the fight-or-flight mode—often multiple times in a day. They become irritable and impatient, or anxious and insecure.
So go ahead and take that 5 minute break as it is proven this will have a positive impact on your daily work mode!