‍Today’s business world is changing fast. New technologies are emerging and old ones are becoming obsolete at lightning speed. The impact of digital transformation on businesses is staggering. As a result, organisations need to make changes to their culture and processes to stay competitive in the market while making sure they hire the right people to do the job. Combining employee satisfaction and business needs can sometimes be challenging, but with careful planning and implementation, these two goals cannot just coexist, but in fact, drive each other.

What does it mean to balance business needs and employee satisfaction?

Generally, the term “balance” means that you try to find a good middle ground between two things that work together but may be opposing each other. Balance could mean that you want to make sure both business goals and employee satisfaction are given equal weight. In this case, you want to make sure you have the right amount of employee satisfaction and business needs, so that neither side is overburdened. You want your organisation to be profitable and successful, but you also want to make sure employees are happy, engaged, and feel like they’re making a difference, too. Of course, every company is different, but if you want to achieve a healthy balance between business needs and employee engagement and satisfaction, it’s not actually about viewing these as dependent variables that are opposites – it’s about beginning to think about one driving the other and spending the time to work out how to do this.

Build a culture of trust

One of the key factors to achieving a healthy business-employee relationship is to build a culture of trust. To do this, you need to be transparent with your employees. By being open about your business goals, you can start to build more trust with your employees. One way to do this is by creating a purpose-driven organisation that helps to drive your culture. By doing this, you can help show your employees the big picture. You can also use this as a way to help your managers create better relationships with their employees by answering questions they may have about the organisation’s goals and values. It’s also important to make your company’s vision, mission, and values clear to your employees. You can do this by sharing this information in employee handbooks, on your website, or even inside your intranet. By making this information easily accessible, you can help your employees to understand the organisation they are working for. This will allow you to start building a culture of trust, improving employee engagement and helping employees feel like they’re part of something bigger. This can be done through transparency, honesty, and appreciation. Don’t just stop there though, make sure you spend the time learning how to live and breathe your culture – and make sure your employees do as well – it is a number one task for a CEO. Culture is ever evolving, and you need to find ways to keep it alive.

Create a purpose driven organisation to drive culture

If a purpose driven culture is important – what exactly is it? A purpose-driven organisation is something that is used by many of the world’s most successful companies. It’s a way to help drive your company culture by making sure your employees know why they’re working for the organisation they are. By understanding your purpose as a leader of the organisation, and what the company is trying to achieve, you can create a purpose-driven organisation. You can then use this to create a mission, vision and values that help to drive your culture. You can use these statements as a checklist to make sure that your organisational decisions are in line with your values. This can be done by having a brainstorm session with your team, or even hiring a coach to help facilitate this process for you. By having a purpose-driven organisation, you can help to make sure your organisation is focused and engaged. You can help to drive productivity by making sure your employees know why they’re in the business of delivering products and services.

Allow your culture to help deliver business goals

After you’ve implemented a culture that encourages trust and a purpose-driven organisation, you culture will organically begin to deliver your business goals, utilising a team that is striving towards the same purpose. By using these factors to drive your culture, you can make sure your employees are happy, engaged and well. They will spend more time delivering results, and less time on HR issues. In order to facilitate this, make sure you communicate with your employees. Make sure you’re asking them questions to find out what they need to do their job well, and how they can achieve the objectives set (which map back to your purpose). You can also use your organisational values to help drive your culture. Make sure you’re using daily routines, like check-ins and recognition, to help reinforce these values.

Recruit fantastic employees to deliver goals by creating a fantastic culture

One of the best ways to help bring fantastic employees into your company is to create a fantastic culture. If your company has a culture that is desirable, engaging, and fulfilling for employees, you will attract the best people. By creating a culture that your employees enjoy, you are more likely to get better employees. As a result, you will have a higher retention rate and be more profitable as an organisation, because you are getting more from your employees than you could get from someone else. By creating a fantastic culture, you can help to drive employee satisfaction. This can help you to deliver your business goals and help to create an organisation that is successful.

Set clear expectations for employees, based on purpose and culture

When it comes to setting expectations for your employees, you want to make sure they are clear. However, there’s a fine line between setting clear expectations and over-managing. You want your employees to know what their job is, and how they are expected to do it. However, you also want to give them the freedom to be creative and find better ways to do their job. By setting clear expectations, you can help to drive employee satisfaction. You can also help to drive productivity. When you set clear expectations, you can help to set up behavioural standards for your employees. These standards can help them to understand what is expected of them at work, and what is required for them to continue working for your company. By setting clear, but flexible, expectations for your employees, you can help them to feel more secure in their job, and improve employee engagement to help drive productivity. Remember, focus on outcomes and not tasks, this will allow you to deliver results in a way the employee finds most effective.

Make the workplace easier for employees to work in

If your workplace is cluttered and disorganised, your employees may be spending more time cleaning up and sorting out issues than working. By making the workplace easier for your employees to work in, you can help to drive employee satisfaction. You can also help your employees to be more productive, which can help to drive your business goals. By making your workplace easier to work in, you can help to reduce stress, anxiety, and work on improving employee wellbeing overall. You can also help to reduce the risk of accidents, because employees may be spending less time cleaning up, and more time achieving their goals. By making the workplace easier to work in, you can help to drive employee satisfaction. This can help to drive productivity, because employees aren’t spending as much time dealing with distractions and can spend more time working. Don’t just stop at the environment as well. If you are goal focussed, then your employees will find the best way to achieve their objectives, so allow them to be flexible with work times or environment to support this – you will reap the rewards later – remember, ask your employees what they need to achieve their goals you’ve worked with them to set out, don’t focus on tasks and a way you would achieve that goal.

Invest in training

Employees should be given the opportunity to learn and grow with their job. As a business owner, you can make this happen by investing in your employees. You can do this by offering classes that help your employees to grow and learn something new. This can be anything from soft skills training, to helping employees learn new software or programs that make their job easier. This can also extend to helping employees learn new skills for their job. If you have a task that your employees need to learn to do, you can offer training to help them learn this new skill. As a business owner, investing in your employees can help to drive employee satisfaction. Your employees will feel like they are being challenged to do their best. It can also help to drive productivity, because employees will be more confident in their skills, and will likely be able to perform certain tasks more efficiently. It is also worth considering investment in soft skills as well as task related skills which can help employees achieve their goals faster through better use of soft skills.

Use technology to drive culture, employee wellbeing programs, employee engagement and therefore productivity

As we mentioned in the setting expectations section, you can use technology to help you drive culture and productivity. By using collaboration software, for example, you can help to create a sense of community among your employees. You can use messaging apps to help your employees communicate more efficiently and be more engaging (but just be aware of the lack of emotion and possible missed communication in these tools!). By using technology to drive your culture, you can help to create a more modern workplace with the latest technology. You can also help to drive productivity by helping employees to be more efficient with their time and feel like they have a modern workplace. By investing in technology that drives your culture and helps to push productivity, you can help your business to be more successful, and give your employees a modern workplace.

Conclusion

Businesses exist to serve customers, and employees are critical to that goal. In order to attract and retain the right talent you need a great culture. Get this right though, and set the right goals, and you’ll find you don’t even have to think about how you achieve the goals that are set, your employees will find a way to do this by themselves and thrive in the environment they’re in that has a great culture and achieves its aims – helping to create the critical balance between business goals and employee satisfaction.