There’s no denying that an office environment is full of variables and obstacles. Workplace mentors strive to make your employees’ experience smooth and easy-going. Easier said than done right? Employees want to be treated with respect and care. When employees look for a job, they look for good, stable company culture. Emotional intelligence plays a huge part in creating a stable company culture for your organization’s employees. This blog will share tips and tricks for how emotional intelligence can improve your employee experience.
Defining Emotional Intelligence
According to the Economic Times, “Emotional intelligence refers to the capability of a person to manage and control his or her emotions and possess the ability to control the emotions of others as well. In other words, they can influence the emotions of other people also.” Emotional intelligence has five main elements – self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.
Why is Emotional Intelligence Important?
The five elements of emotional intelligence are powerful qualities for a strong leader in an organization. Having emotionally intelligent leaders is of high importance for a positive employee experience. Having a strong sense of emotional intelligence allows you, as a leader, to build a good reputation with your team. You want your employees to be open and honest with you as much as possible. Having emotional intelligence can help support this kind of culture and team environment.
Tips for Supporting Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace
Ask for Constructive Feedback
Constructive feedback can only help you improve your organization along with its products and services. As a leader, you should implement feedback from employees to enable your organization to stand out from its competitors. Your employees should have the freedom to freely express their thoughts and opinions and have their feedback taken seriously. Companies should get an honest opinion on where they stand. Feedback can help build a loyal and trustworthy relationship between managers and employees, as long as the feedback is genuine.
Practice Active Listening
Emotions are unpredictable. It’s important to remember that employees are human beings who deserve to feel and let out their emotions. The natural reaction to an emotional outburst is to make an attempt to make the other person feel better. However, sometimes you simply need to let the employee feel how they feel and actively listen.
Check-in with Each Other
“Read the room!” This is something heard a lot in both professional and personal situations. A team is a team irrespective of the team members’ locations. If we’ve learned anything over the past two years, it’s to build connections with people and maintain them to the fullest. Asking questions to catch up about each other’s lives, such as “How’s your day going?”, “How’s your family?”, or “How are you feeling about your current work and schedule?”, assures your employees that you care about their mental and physical health. There is always something to discuss at work, from work tasks to how teammates spend their free time. Casual hangouts like virtual or in-person coffee breaks can ease the tension and create a lighter and more fun atmosphere.
Keep a Flexible Mindset
Now that working from home has become the way of life, burnout looks and feels different for many employees. We all need to take time away from work. Change the mindset of “personal time is only for the weekends.” Employees desire time for their personal lives. This is one of the biggest struggles for younger tenure employees to understand. Some companies allow flexible schedules for employees so that they can complete their work in their own time. Flexible work hours can allow employees to work hard but also manage other day-to-day activities. It can also allow them to step away from the computer screen and rest their minds during the day, as long as they get their daily work done. A flexible work schedule can also help expand time for long and tedious assignments. Employees can split time for certain projects depending on their priority.
Combining Employee Experience with Emotional Intelligence
PxidaEX, our employee engagement feedback tool, is designed to gather feedback from your employees and give you actionable insights about how your business can improve the employee experience. PxidaEX is a wonderful tool to allow employees to freely express their thoughts and emotions so you and your business can implement their ideas and continue to improve their company. Sign up for a free trial today!