You want a positive work environment for your employees, but what are you doing to promote it?
That's the gist of a new survey by ExactHire that shows that while most HR managers believe they preside over a positive work culture, less than 40 percent report having made any significant changes aimed at making things better in the office.
When HR managers do come up with programs to improve employee engagement, many struggle to get workers to take part. Sixty-four percent say that getting employees to participate is a challenge. Nearly all admit that it's hard to come up with new ideas to promote a positive work culture.
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The sample size for the survey was relatively small — 152 HR managers and executives — but the concerns articulated by the respondents is a familiar story of the challenges that employers face in trying to make employees feel appreciated.
There is a strong link between positive work culture and employee engagement. People are much less likely to put 100 percent into their work when they don't like or respect their employer or colleagues.
In recent years, a robust debate has emerged over what employers can and should do to make employees happy and engaged.
While some have suggested that wellness programs that offer employees the opportunity to do group physical activities, for instance, can help foster a team mentality, others caution that such programs can have the opposite effect if they are viewed by workers as a Big Brother-style attempt to get employees to lose weight and reduce their health care costs.
Similarly, many employers have highlighted day-to-day perks, such as free food or snacks or other on-site amenities, as a means to make employees feel appreciated. It's hard to measure the effect that such perks can have on employee morale, although surveys suggest that few workers consider them a priority when deciding whether to take a job.
How to measure employee satisfaction and engagement is another important issue that has come under scrutiny. The traditional annual employee assessment has increasingly been discarded in favor of more frequent, smaller assessments, either formal or informal, that seek to respond to employee concerns as they occur.
In the end, however, whether a workplace has a positive culture is largely based on intangibles that cannot be dictated in an HR manual.
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