A healthy workplace depends on positive relationships. If you strive to build work relationships, you will notice an increase in productivity and job satisfaction. By taking a few steps, you can better understand your employees’ emotional strength and intelligence.
In addition, people will feel comfortable opening to you about their problems if you build trust and have good work relationships. Here is how you can successfully foster a happy workforce by establishing trust with everyone at the office.
Why Build Work Relationships?
Relationships in the workplace involve interacting with your colleagues. However, tensions and emotions can run high because you see these people all the time. Many may not want to be open and truthful to you if you are the one in charge.
Building good work relationships with employees requires offering guidance and encouragement to help them succeed in their roles. If you make your employees feel positive, they will have better satisfaction in their careers.
They will also deliver presentations with more confidence and engage enthusiastically in team meetings. Every employer should focus on building trust to improve productivity for all team members.
When employees have difficult timelines, their leader should be rushing to them with assistance and moral support. This will also ensure higher retention rates that will save you money from finding new people to employ each time someone quits.
Establish Trust
If you want your employees to trust you, you will need to show them that it is safe to do so. If they feel that you will criticize and judge them harshly, they will prefer to keep things to themselves.
At the same time, you should learn to trust your employees. Trust relies on mutual respect. Therefore, you should count on your employees to be truthful, and they should feel that you are approachable and caring enough to let their guard down and talk to.
Then you should accept and understand each other, especially your roles in the company. Even though you are being social and kind, it does not mean that you should cross boundaries by becoming an employee’s best friend when you are their boss.
However, you can still be an influential leader by fostering a team setting where individuals need to work together with you as part of the family. This way, everyone contributes their fair share of work with credit given where it is due.
The more trusting you become with your employees and vice versa, the stronger relationships will form.
Finally, encourage open communications. This is critical for any relationship, especially in the workplace. You need to motivate employees to ask questions and get to know everyone on the team.
Which Steps to Take?
Building work relationships positively can come naturally to some teams and their leaders. However, you may struggle to connect with your employees because they see you more as a boss than a peer.
To begin interacting more effectively with your employees as team members, you should start by understanding their strengths and weaknesses. This is essential because, on a resume, every employee is perfect. However, the reality is much different, and people make mistakes.
Therefore, you should let employees know that they can trust you and own up to their shortcomings by letting them know that they have your support.
You should also schedule a time to develop work relationships. Your responsibilities are different from an employee, so you may not always get the time to spend with your workforce. You should host team meetings to start interacting with employees.
Ensure that you ask questions and listen to what they have to say. Depending on their issues, you can offer assistance to be more involved in their daily tasks. To motivate them, show that you appreciate their role and notice the hard work they do.
The best way to create good work relationships is by being present and proving that you support your employees and want the best for them. Here is an employee feedback solution you should check out to help your employees.
Self-Awareness
Developing work relationships relies heavily on active listening, conflict resolution, and communication. You should celebrate the positive things that employees contribute while evaluating their emotional intelligence to know how to connect with them on a deeper level.
You should also be self-aware of how they perceive you and the type of support they expect. Do they want a good relationship with you? If so, why, or why not?
Regulate your emotions and thoughts by keeping the goal of improving work relationships. There will be times where you may get angry if an employee is not working hard enough because you have been too lenient.
Try not to let this affect your overall goal of fostering positive relationships. Instead, have a heart-to-heart with an employee if they are causing problems.
Let them know that they are still responsible for getting their work done on time and should not take your patience for granted.
Be Empathetic
Your employees will not always be perfect. They will have tons of personal and professional problems that you can support them with. By showing employees that you are empathetic, they will learn to trust you more.
If someone has lost a loved one, talk to them and show that you care deeply instead of only sanctioning some time off. Offer resources to help with mental health issues and reduce their workload for a few days until they heal and recover emotionally to be fit to work again.
Start Connecting With People
Employees are people with many responsibilities and requirements related to the workplace and their personal lives. You can build work relationships by being present and paying attention to those around you.
Start communicating with every employee and get to know them. This may seem simple, but even the smallest gesture of kindness and compassion can lead to good work relationships.
If you enjoyed reading these workplace relationship tips, check out some of our other articles for more information.
